A Date Night with Your Future Selves
What our connection with our future means for our relationship today
When I interviewed a hundred couples about their relationships in 2024, I heard the wildest stories about how couples approach life.
One of my favorite stories came from Mike and Jackie, a couple from Canada. They shared that they’d commissioned a painting depicting them 20 years in the future. It hangs in the hallway outside their bedroom as a constant reminder of how they want to end up.
The painting serves as an especially poignant reminder of what matters for them. For example, Mike previously struggled with workaholism, causing him to neglect his relationship and lose touch with what really mattered in life. Seeing the painting every day was a physical cue guiding Mike to stay focused on the relationship at the heart of his life, rather than slipping into bad habits.
This is one example of many of the importance of building a relationship with our future self (or selves, in a couple). Are these just moving platitudes, or does our relationship with our future self actually dictate our behavior today?
The short answer is it does. And we can change that impact for our benefit.
The Science of Our Relationship with Ourself
Our relationship with ourself is one of the most important connections in life. And one of the most fascinating facets of this relationship is our conception of our future self.
There is an intriguing line of research dedicated to examining our relationship to our future self, and researchers have found the quality of that relationship impacts our behavior today.1 For example, one clever study had participants look at computer-generated image approximating what they’d look like in the future before deciding how much to save for retirement. Savings rates increased for people who saw images of their future self compared to a control group.2
This reveals the importance of having a healthy relationship to our future self: it guides us to make better choices today.
The three key factors in a healthy relationship to our future self are:
How similar it feels to us now.
How vivid and realistic it is.
How positively we regard it.3
When these are strong, we tend to make wiser decisions for our long-term happiness.
So our relationship with ourself is clearly important. Now, how might that relationship with ourself improve our relationship with our partner, and vice versa?
Relating to the self, relating to others
You don’t have to get a custom painting made of each other in the future to benefit from the science of your future self (though I fully support you going that route as well).
Here are 3 fun ideas for a future self date night that will help you to strengthen your relationship to your future selves and each other:
#1) Share a one-page letter to your future self with your partner
There are two main approaches to take to this:
Write a letter from your future self to you today about a challenge you are facing right now
Write a letter from yourself today to your future self explaining what you’re trying to protect or build in your life right now.
#2) Ask your future selves for advice
Think of this date night as a conversation with yourselves. Ask each other: what do you think future-us will thank present-us for doing to protect and enhance in our relationship?
#3) Make altered photos of yourselves in the future
Upload a photo of yourself into an AI tool like ChatGPT and ask it to make a version that is 20 years older. You might have to tell it to make the aging more obvious if the first pass doesn’t look very different (AI tools are generally designed to flatter and validate us).
Look at your photos together. Discuss how they make you feel, what you may want to change, and what things you might want to double down on to preserve.
Here’s to supporting each other to build a better relationship with yourself so that your relationship to each other can be even better. Cheers!
Rutchick, A. M., Slepian, M. L., Reyes, M. O., Pleskus, L. N., & Hershfield, H. E. (2018). Future self-continuity is associated with improved health and increases exercise behavior. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 24(1), 72–80.
Hershfield, H. E., Goldstein, D. G., Sharpe, W. F., Fox, J., Yeykelis, L., Carstensen, L. L., & Bailenson, J. N. (2019). Increasing Saving Behavior Through Age-Progressed Renderings of the Future Self. Journal of Marketing Research, 48(SPL), S23-S37.
Hershfield, H. E. (2011). Future self-continuity: How conceptions of the future self transform intertemporal choice. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1235, 30–43.
I remember once seeing a speaker tell a room full of extremely motivated personal growth folks that they should be careful that their growth does end up leading them on a journey away from their partner, and that it is more important to grow together than to grow at the maximum speed.
what happens to a relationship when both people are willing to meet not just who their partner is today but who their partner is becoming? that is the real risk of long-term intimacy. not boredom, not routine - but the possibility that the person across from you is evolving into someone you have not yet learned to love. psychological flexibility is the capacity to hold that uncertainty without collapsing into control. a date night with your future selves is not a romantic exercise. it is a rehearsal for the version of the relationship that has not arrived yet.