# Vision verses Ideas



## RDJ (Jun 8, 2011)

In order to create a mutually happy marriage, you have to have a concept of where you want your marriage to go in order to have a direction to move in. However, the concept of a vision can easily become confused with an idea. I would like to illustrate this with an example.

Suppose that I have a vision of having a happy, healthy, loving and intimate marriage relationship with my spouse. This is a good example of a vision statement. It does not describe specifics of what will happen and when it will happen. Rather, it describes a state of being. It describes how I want my marriage to feel and the basic vibe that I want to have in this relationship.

Of course, such fuzzy concepts might feel very good, but it does not give the mind much to work with in terms of what it should do to bring about this vision. This is where ideas come in. Ideas lay down the particulars of what you are going to do, when you are going to do it, and what results you expect to get. Ideas naturally flow out of a vision. You set the intention to go somewhere and your mind starts planning how to go about it.

This is where things can start to go wrong. Often the ideas do not work. They may have been predicated on assumptions that were not true, or perhaps they were just too ambitious or unrealistic. You start trying to put an idea into practice and right off the bat there are road blocks. The idea fails to deliver the results that you thought it would deliver.

The big mistake that many people make is to give up on the vision simply because their idea of how to accomplish it did not work. They decide that it is the vision that is faulty. They begin to knock down the vision to be something that is easier to achieve. This is commonly known as “settling”.

People who settle for mediocre visions lead mediocre lives and have mediocre marriages. If you want to have a marriage that is truly happy and fulfilling then you have to dare to dream big. Go ahead and envision what the ideal marriage would feel like. Be careful not to be too specific about details. The details can be worked out as you go. Stay focused on the quality of relationship that you want, and the rest will fall into place.

After that, you start experimenting. You start forming ideas about how to move toward your vision. When you think that you have a good idea, you go ahead and try it. If it fails, then you simply try something else. Perhaps you revise the original plan. Perhaps you scrap it and try something else altogether. The key here is to stay true to your vision, and allow the ideas about how to bring it about to change as required.

This is where social conditioning can be your worst enemy. Many of us have conditioning that tells us that the details are very important. This conditioning dictates that there are certain things that must be true in order for a marriage to be happy. It may tell us that there are right ways to build a marriage and convince us that anything else is wrong.

You should understand that social conditioning is nothing but a set of possible ideas that are available to you. You can take them or leave them as you please. Whether or not a marriage is happy and fulfilling has absolutely nothing to do with rules and conditions. It has to do with the attitudes that the two partners bring to the relationships, and the unique gifts that they offer. The beauty of a marriage is in the vision that it serves, not the mechanics of how it comes about.

If you allow it to, social conditioning will box you in. It will force you into very restrictive ideas about what is or is not acceptable in your marriage. You can become so wedded to a particular idea about how things should be done, that you stop following your vision and instead become lost in the idea.

Here is a common example:

When a man enters into a marriage he has a vision that this marriage will be loving and intimate, and he also has ideas about what it means to be loving and intimate. Suppose that his idea of intimate is sex three times a week. The vision (loving and intimate) is about quality. The idea (sex three times a week) is about details. He believes that sex three times a week will result in a marriage that is loving and intimate.

In the beginning his spouse may have no qualms with the idea that sex should happen three times a week. Then things change when they have a baby. I will not go into the specifics of exactly what life with a baby is like. Suffice it to say that sex three times a week is darn near impossible at this stage in life.

Now the man has a challenge. He still holds true to his vision of a marriage that is loving and intimate, but his idea of how to accomplish that is threatened. Will he choose to focus on the vision or the idea?

If he holds to the vision then he can accept that the idea now needs to change. For the foreseeable future he will have to derive the loving intimacy that he wants from more non-sexual affection and connection. He will enjoy sex when it happens, but will not force the issue. In the future they may return to his idea of sex three times a week.

However, if he is highly influenced by his social conditioning, or if he has an ego addiction for sex, then he may feel compelled to try and forge ahead with the idea of sex three times a week, even though circumstances no longer support it. This kind of fixation with the idea will almost always lead to friction. Friction leads to conflict, and conflict starts to erode the quality of the marriage. His vision is starting to fall apart because he is overly obsessed with a particular idea for how to accomplish it.

As has been said here, conflict can be a positive force in a relationship. Sooner or later all couples will end up in a situation where a particular idea for how to have a loving and healthy marriage comes under pressure, and yet one or the other spouse refuses to let it go. Some people may take this to an extreme and pursue that single idea all the way to divorce court. Most people will not.

Most people will eventually decide that the idea is not worth all the conflict and they will let go of it in order to try something else. This is growth in action. You are letting go of that which no longer serves your vision in order to make room for something else to take its place.

This is how you grow as a human being. This is how your marriage grows as a relationship. You react to changing circumstances by allowing old patterns to drop away and creating new patterns that are healthier and more supportive of the vision that you have for your marriage.

Of course, there is always room to improve your vision as well. Never knock it down, but never be afraid to make it better. 

Warmly,

RDJ


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## heartsbeating (May 2, 2011)

Great post. Thanks for taking the time to write this!


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