The Painful Tension Between Ambition And Love

“I want to run a sub-3-hour-marathon”, I told him. And he thanked me. He thanked for giving him relief — by proving that my ambition will never allow a relationship between us. There is no need to drown in false hope.

It’s decided.

It’s over.

Priorities… straight?

Until a couple of weeks ago I was dating a friend of mine. He couldn’t be a better match on a personal level. Same humor. Same emotional depth. Same love for philosopical discussion. Sounds perfect? Yes. But.

Our goals in life did not align.

While his idea of a good life is to spend as much time with good persons as possible, mine is to become the best athlete that I possibly can. He is also athletic and I also love to see my family and friends. But those things are of different priority for us.

While it’s great that we both know what we want from life, this produces a number of clashes.

The ick

All the time I was with him, I felt great — while also feeling that I cannot align this relationship with my personal targets.

All the time he was with me, he felt I did not truly prioritize him. And I felt like I shrinked my personality to match his needs.

There were countless situations that just subtly felt wrong. To me, it felt wrong to be on a run while he was waiting. It felt like ‘he probably doesn’t like that I am running right now’. I felt like my goals were burdening the relationship.

To him, it felt wrong not to be together for at least five evenings a week. To not be in touch digitally at least every couple of hours. He told me it felt like being deprioritized.

He craved more social connection. I craved more space.

Is ambition selfish?

Ambition vs. love appears to be a prominent topic. Just look around online. You’ll find a trillion opinions on it.

“Is your career wrecking your love life?”, asks ecosalon. “An ambitious person cannot love anyone with a true heart. Anyone who is ambitious is selfish”, writes the Yogamag quite radically.

An article on enotalone puts this more nuanced: “Some may perceive ambition as inherently selfish, but that’s an oversimplification. The real complexity emerges when your ambition requires you to sacrifice significant time or emotional availability to your partner.”

Reading all this left me asking: Why am I even so ambitious if this makes everything in love so hard? Is something inside me just saying ‘no’ to love?

There’s a persistent feeling that’s tearing me apart: The love for my goals and hobbies. As time-consuming as fulfilling. And the longing for personal love. Which also needs time and care (that I currently center on my friends).

My inner world is presenting me the two things I am longing for, shouting:

A or B. Not both!

The actual task: Finding your compromise

As this keeps me awake, I had to ask my therapist. She told me to sit down and go to the root cause of my ambition. Why am I actually… ambitious? It’s not like I always want it all. But I want a lot. Especially in sports.

And I am just giving in to that sense of drive and allocating a big (big!!!) chunk of my time and energy to it.

So while I did not really find out why I do this, it would also help to think about what happens if I don’t. And then seeing whether there is truly value in this for me. Or if I just blindly follow a drive that does not serve me.

It’s not that I should do this task to finally decide for A (ambition) or B (love). It will help to become aware of my motives. Having that view will hopefully help me define how a healthy balance between goals and guys looks like for my personal live.

And that’s what it’s all about. It’s not an A or B logic. It’s a question about how you combine two things that you really want with the best possible compromise.

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