How Lottery Tickets Give My Marriage Crucial Shared Dreams
How a few dollars a week can buy hours of happiness.
Twice a week, my husband buys lottery tickets.
It’s something we’ve been doing since we first got together, and it’s oddly important to our marriage.
We’re not counting on the money. We don’t think if we keep buying the tickets, we’ll eventually win. We’re not addicted to the thrill of gambling, it’s nothing like that.
We buy them for the hours of fantasizing and conversation they inspire.
We buy them for the time spent talking about how we’ll fix up the house, what we’ll do, the debt we’ll pay off, and how we’ll save. We buy them for our common daydream.
They create the secret garden we walk through together to take a breather from life.
Over the years, it’s evolved into something we always do together and make time for.
On Wednesday and Friday, my husband brings home a few tickets, and we ponder the possibilities.
It never gets old.
In our minds, we pay off debt, renovate the bathrooms, and move our daughter downstairs into space we currently use for my daycare to give her the teenage crashpad of her dreams.
But there’s another more practical side to this daydreaming.
It’s a form of manifestation because, as we dream about winning the means to our perfect life, we come up with do-able plans to get there anyway.
For years we wanted a hot tub, but there was no chance. Eventually, our fantasy sessions turned into problem-solving sessions and we came up with a plan we could eventually implement.
In the meantime, my husband built a fire pit area with an affordable water feature for our backyard. It was beautiful, and in our old house, we used it all the time.
This wouldn’t have happened without our lottery fantasy.
While dreaming about our fantasy money, we came up with a workable plan for our actual money.
As of this week, we’ve finalized a financial plan that’s taken our finances to a place of strength we never thought possible, even despite Covid-19.
When there are no boundaries, you can be creative in imagining what you really want, and in hashing out your best-case scenario, you can often cherry-pick doable actions.
We’ve solved many problems with practical solutions from our dream sessions. We’ve found real money for little luxuries, and made workable decisions for big purchases by reverse-engineering the fantasy into real life.
We’ve also found ways to make the money we have work better for us. In our wildest dreams, we find ways to make things better now.
We’ve learned to draft our plans from a perfect world standpoint and then take the things we can and implement them.
And it’s also a chance for us to sit down and just talk sh$t about nothing.
To dream out loud and have a moment without any unpleasant realities getting in the way.
When you have a family, everything is overshadowed with more responsibility, less time, more pressure, and less money for the things that you want. Taking time for that shared daydream can be more important than you think.
It’s a way to let some steam out of the pressure cooker and make space for something positive. A little conversation so sugar-coated it can, if only for a few moments, overshadow the bitterness of reality.
My husband and I have overcome some pretty nasty things in our marriage, things that would tear many relationships apart.
I’m convinced that one thing that’s helped us get through it all, is our bi-weekly lottery fantasy sessions.
Tonight when my husband comes home from work, we’re going to have a cocktail in the hot tub, which we figured out a way to afford during our lottery sessions, and then have a nice cheese plate while watching Anthony Bourdain, and imagining we’re on a French holiday.
Having a time out from reality can be good for a relationship and is the real reason we buy lottery tickets.
We buy them for the dream and the chance to dream together.
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