After being sick for nearly a decade with the symptoms of Lyme disease, jewelry designer Cheryl Laughlin was inspired to start scribbling bucket list ideas in the back of her daily planner.
Little did her boyfriend, Caleb Porter, who also had the disease, know that her list included things he wanted to do as well.
In September, the couple, from Lodi, California, spent a weekend she called “Caleb’s Super Secret Big Birthday Bash Extravaganza Squared.”
Filled with things he had mentioned over the time they were together, the whirlwind trip included seeing Howard Hughes’ Spruce Goose airplane, visiting a volcano, walking Bridge of the Gods and other parts of the Pacific Crest Trail (as seen in the recent movie Wild) and visiting Portland, Oregon.
“I love my secret, scribbled bucket list for being so impromptu and informal as a kick-start to live in the now, with an eye on the possibilities on the horizon,” Laughlin says. “And it’s filled with surprises Caleb often forgets about.”
Laughlin says it also helps her and Porter outpace their fears of the debilitating disease symptoms returning and slowing their lives to a crawl again.
“It makes every random walkabout magical,” she says.
Bucket lists, in general, reflect a positive orientation to the future, says Scott Pytluk, a professor of clinical psychology at Argosy University in Chicago. Psychologists consider this healthy for couples as well as individuals.
“When individuals set specific goals, even when they seem out of reach, they demonstrate hopefulness,” Pytluk says. “When partners plan for the future together, as long as there’s flexibility in it, they’re expressing a joint sense of hope about their lives together. Couples flourish when there are mutually agreed-upon goals and dreams.”
In a 2000 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers looked at the connection between shared “novel and arousing” activities and the quality of a relationship. Predictably, the authors said, there was a correlation between sharing exciting activities and relationship satisfaction.
“This is because adventuring strengthens and deepens bonds and provides a kind of reservoir of common experience that can feed the relationship for years in the form of memory,” says Patricia Johnson, co-author of Designer Relationships: A Guide to Happy Monogamy, Positive Polyamory, and Optimistic Open Relationships.
“Composing a bucket list together can help to reinforce the sense that your relationship is collaborative and co-created.”
Marriage and family therapist Patty Behrens, of Fresno, California, says sharing a bucket list of dreams and desires also deepens communication and releases the brain chemical oxytocin. Commonly called the “love hormone,” it has many psychological effects, including the level of your emotional attachment to a partner.
Although relationship experts agree that your bucket list should be freewheeling and creative, having some guideposts will make it more helpful. Their suggestions are as varied as the things you would like to do [or be], but a good start is for each individual to have separate fantasizing or daydreaming sessions first.
Reach back to your childhood to recall anything you ever wanted to try, says Tina B. Tessina, a Southern California psychotherapist and author of Love Styles: How to Celebrate Your Differences. Then compare lists, and note what you have in common. The differences will offer opportunities to hone your ability to compromise as well as help each other achieve separate goals.
Behrens adds that couples don’t need to experience their bucket list items together to gain the benefits. Her husband, Kevin, realized one of his by travelling a long, rocky trail in his all-terrain vehicle with his buddies, getting out in the wilderness, sleeping on the ground and taking in some incredible scenery.
“I shared in his excitement as he planned the trip,” Behrens says. “Even though I wasn’t participating, a closeness developed as I supported him in his bucket list. [I was] genuinely thrilled for him and anticipated hearing about his adventures when he returned.”
But they did share an adventure that was on her list, something he hadn’t even thought of: diving with manta rays off the coast of Hawaii. “A new, exhilarating experience was shared, creating a stronger bond between us,” Behrens says.
Some couples start right away. Atlanta author Monique Honaman and her husband created a bucket list that was akin to their wedding vows. They review it a couple of times each year, she says, crossing off what they’ve done and adding to the list when a new idea pops up.
Honaman notes that they don’t erase what they’ve done from the list; they leave it there and date it so they can use it to review their relationship “progress” since that date and reminisce about an experience they don’t want to forget, large or small.
Larissa Lam, of Los Angeles, however, offers a cautionary aspect of couples’ bucket lists: Don’t spring an adventure on your partner when she’s out of town. Lam, a singer who also hosts an online advice call-in program, was on a business trip in Hong Kong when her new husband called to let her know he was about to take a class on training wild animals. As in, lions and tigers and bears.
“Oh, my. First off, my husband is a mechanical engineer. Why in the world would he do this?” Lam says. “He told me this was something on his bucket list, and he figured he’d do it while I was out of town. I was certainly questioning what else I didn’t know about him at that point.”
Lam, however, turned her misgivings into a chance to talk about their bucket lists, learn more about each other and use the experience to practise understanding and support.
Seven years into the marriage, she wants to head to Antarctica to see penguins. Her husband has no desire to freeze his tush off to see flightless birds, but does make a point to give her all the articles he finds on travel to the South Pole.
Need inspiration?
To get bucket list ideas and tips on how to set one up, to see how others are achieving a goal or to find out what the favorites are among nearly 290,000 members, go to www.bucketlist.org. The site includes 3.6 million ideas of things to do before you kick it. Right now, among the most popular: visiting New York at Christmas time, carving a pumpkin, swimming in a waterfall and eating haggis in Scotland. (For your sake, find out what haggis is first.)
