Don’t date someone who has different plans for the future than you do. Don’t keep procrastinating and promising yourself you’ll figure things out eventually. Don’t keep convincing yourself your future plans aren’t that big of a deal.
If you want completely different things than your person, then you should be having a conversation about your future sooner rather than later. You don’t want to end up falling deeply in love with someone and dedicating years of your life to someone, only to wake up one day and realize you have completely different ideas of happiness.
Love isn’t the only ingredient needed in order to make a relationship last. If you have your heart set on having children or working full-time or moving to another part of the country, and your person absolutely refuses to do any of those things, then you’re going to have a tough decision to make.
When the person you’re dating wants completely different things than you want, you have to be careful. You don’t want to stay with them out of love and then end up resenting them for taking away your dream life. You don’t want to make major sacrifices for them and then hold it over their head for the rest of their life either.
Sometimes, even though you love each other, you aren’t meant to spend the rest of your lives alongside each other. Sometimes, you have to think practically and use your head instead of blindly listening to your heart.
If you want completely different things than your partner, you shouldn’t stick it out in the hopes they’ll magically change their mind. People change, so there’s a chance your person will end up wanting kids after a lifetime of hating them or suddenly decide moving to the suburbs wouldn’t be the worst thing after all — but there’s a chance they’re going to want the same exact things ten years from now as they want right now. There’s a chance they mean what they’re saying.
If you want completely different things than your person, it might not feel like a big deal right now, but that doesn’t mean you should push the problem from your mind. It doesn’t mean you don’t have to deal with it until the time comes. If you’re planning on spending forever together, then you should talk about what forever means to you. You should see whether you’re on the same page, whether they’re even interested in the things you always assumed they wanted.
If you want completely different thing than your partner, it doesn’t always mean your relationship is doomed. You can talk things through. You can see if you can come to some sort of compromise. You can see if your futures aren’t that different after all.
But if they are, you picture yourself living completely different types of lives, if your ideas of happiness don’t overlap even a little, then you might want to think about moving on. You might want to think about finding someone else whose future aligns closer with your own. 
