Always Have Something to Look Forward to
Will you still love me tomorrow?
Always Have Something to Look Forward to
Close your eyes and imagine your relationship five years from now. What will your daily routine be like? What will you and your partner be doing during free time? How will you have grown together?
If you’re smiling and excited, that’s a great sign.
You’re doing something I call the 5-Year Test. This test is built around one of the best questions for predicting relationship success: not “Are you happy now?” but “Will you be happy in the future?”
Many people make decisions about their relationship based on how they are feeling in the present. According to groundbreaking research from Dr. Edward Lemay and his team at the University of Maryland, this is a mistake.1 Instead, your expectations about future happiness in your relationship are actually a stronger predictor of your commitment than how you feel about today.
The Power of Forecasting
Dr. Lemay and his team dug into this exact topic and discovered something fascinating: across four studies involving over 1,000 participants, people who anticipated being satisfied in their relationship in the future were more committed to the relationship and exhibited more pro-relationship behaviors, regardless of how they felt about the relationship in the moment. Not only that, forecasted satisfaction was a better predictor of relationship health than any other factor measured, including current relationship satisfaction, the quality of alternatives, or the amount of investment in the relationship.
In other words, if you want a healthy relationship, you should be focused on improving your future happiness, rather than fixating on your present. This may sound like a time travel science-fiction movie, but it makes intuitive sense when you consider what commitment really is: a promise to stick with someone through time. If you believe your relationship will be great in the future, you're more likely to stay committed, even during rough patches. Hope for tomorrow trumps frustration today, and it can even outweigh happiness today.
Commitment, which is vital for any relationship, is about the future, not the present. As research shows, people are powerfully motivated by rewards and costs they expect to encounter in the future.2 One couple I interviewed in my research was proof of this. They talked about how throughout the many ups and downs of their lives, they always had a future project lined up that they would collaborate on. They had, literally, one of the highest relationship satisfaction scores I have ever seen, and when I asked them the secret of their success, they said “we always have something we are looking forward to doing together.”
You might be wondering if this couple was just naturally happy, but here's the crucial insight: these forecasts can become self-fulfilling prophecies, just as setting an inspiring vision for a business today can lead to a great company in the future. If you work toward your positive forecasts, you will also improve the present from moment to moment.
Make Your Relationship Predictions Come True
There are practical things you can do to visualize a hopeful vision for your relationship and make it a reality:
Create "Future Us” Rituals: The possibilities for this are endless! A few options include weekly sharing of 1 thing that will be good about your relationship in the future, building a relationship vision board in a shared photo album that you revisit periodically, and scheduling a quarterly “dream date” where you have dinner together and talk about your hopes for the future.
Close Your Escape Routes: Don’t spend time thinking about your exit plan if the relationship goes south. Instead, create practices where you reinforce your commitment to each other through the ups and downs. Dr. Lemay found that couples who had fewer alternatives actually were more committed, and I saw happy couples in my interviews actively practice this by saying things like “we’re going the distance together.”
Keep Struggles in the Present: When facing a current challenge, identify at least one way that it is caused by a temporary circumstance and one external condition amplifying it (for example, “my partner is under an unusual amount of stress and the economy is really struggling”). Research shows that people who view current problems as temporary and external maintain stronger commitment.3
Have Something to Look Forward to: Like the couple I interviewed, having something in the future—a shared project, a vacation, friends visiting—can be a powerful way to project happiness in the future, thereby making the present better.
The Bottom Line
While today's happiness certainly matters, your relationship's trajectory hinges on tomorrow's anticipated happiness. The couples who consciously cultivate positive, realistic forecasts about their future together don't just predict relationship success—they create it.
The next time you're evaluating your relationship, ask yourself: "When I imagine us five years from now, what do I see?" If you like what you see, stay the course and build that reality together.
What are you looking forward to?
Lemay, E. P. (2016). The forecast model of relationship commitment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 111(1), 34–52. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000052
For example: Eccles, J. S., & Wigfield, A. (2002). Motivational beliefs, values, and goals. Annual Review of Psychology, 53(1), 109–132. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.53.100901.135153 and Strathman, A., Gleicher, F., Boninger, D. S., & Edwards, C. S. (1994). The consideration of future consequences: Weighing immediate and distant outcomes of behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66(4), 742–752. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.66.4.742
Finkel, E. J., Slotter, E. B., Luchies, L. B., Walton, G. M., & Gross, J. J. (2013). A brief intervention to promote conflict reappraisal preserves marital quality over time. Psychological Science, 24(8), 1595–1601. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612474938