Are You A Past, Present, Or Future Thinker?

Good news: after six months of job searching, it looks like fiancé has gotten a job offer! “Looks like” because he still has to go through various background checks and bureaucratic hoop-jumping. But as far as we’ve been told, he can expect to start working at the new place at the beginning of May. Trying not to count our chickens before they hatch and all, but uh those sure do look like seven chickens over there, yup.

I say we are trying not to count our chickens but really what I mean is I am trying not to. Literally within ten seconds of fiancé telling me the news, the first thing that jumped into my mind was Oh boy, I should update the financial projection spreadsheets!

Here’s the thing: I’m a very future-oriented thinker. I have often joked (not really a joke) that my discount rate– for stress, satisfaction, whatever it may be– is negative. I feel future joys with as much or greater intensity than present ones. When things are actively falling apart around me, I’m as cool as a cucumber. But if I anticipate things falling apart in the distant future, then I’ll be a mess for days.

Because of this future-orientation, I really like to plan things. It is my coping strategy for anxiety, of which I have a lot. It is also my coping strategy for everything going just fine and my brain just having some spare capacity to throw around. And sometimes I can get a little intense.

I remember one time, when we were going through a financially tumultuous period after buying and remodeling the condo, breaking out for fiancé The Life Spreadsheet. As in, the spreadsheet that summarized our entire lives for the next ten years. Our jobs, our salaries, when we’d have kids, what daycare the kids would go to, when fiancé would become a stay at home parent and the tax implications thereof. We’d talked about most of these things more or less, but he was still understandably intimidated by this gesture. It doesn’t help that fiancé is 100% a present-oriented thinker.  I don’t know what I’m having for lunch today let alone what I want my career to look like in a decade! 

Because you see– and I didn’t come to understand this until much later– when present-thinker fiancé read this grand plan he understood it to mean Here is what YAPFB is ordering you to do for the rest of your life. Whereas I understood it to mean Here is what I think will happen based on our current model, which is flexible but we need a starting point. Oh look we’ll probably do okay, let’s not worry about it too much then.

Taking a step back, his interpretation and therefore his trepidation makes a lot of sense. But it definitely took him pointing out his perspective for my deep-in-the-Excel brain to even process that one could feel intimidated and even constrained by the concept of a plan. This has resulted in many a long, heartfelt, sometimes heated conversation that involves a lot of listening and empathy and maybe also some Let’s maybe not show fiancé my annual meal planning spreadsheet.

I need to tweak it anyway.

Are you a past, present, or future-thinker? Is your partner the same? How do your orientations commingle?