Letting Go of the Ideal to Love What Is: What Team Hoyt Teaches Us About Real Love

Statue of the Hoyts located near the start of the Boston Marathon in Hopkinton, Massachusetts

Most couples begin their relationship with a dream.A dream of how love will look and feel — ease, laughter, understanding, and a deep sense of being known. But real life often interrupts those dreams. Illness, stress, disappointment, or simply the daily wear of life can turn that dream upside down.

When that happens, many couples feel something must be wrong. Yet, sometimes what’s “wrong” isn’t the relationship — it’s the dream itself.

The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his classic book Life Together, wrote that our “wish-dream” of community must die for true fellowship to be born. He said that people who cling to an idealized picture of others will destroy real community, while those who learn to love others as they are will discover grace and joy in the present.

That truth is lived out powerfully in the story of Team Hoyt.

A Family Who Reimagined Love

When Rick Hoyt was born with cerebral palsy, his parents, Dick and Judy Hoyt, were told to institutionalize him — that he would never walk, talk, or participate in a “normal” life. But the Hoyts refused to let that dream of normalcy define their love. Judy spent years teaching Rick to read and communicate; Dick became his arms and legs, pushing Rick in more than 1,000 races, including marathons and triathlons.

Their family didn’t get the dream they once imagined — but they found something deeper: a love that runs together through pain, perseverance, and hope.

They traded the dream of perfection for the miracle of presence.

What This Means for Couples

Many couples reach a moment where they realize their marriage or partnership doesn’t look the way they imagined. Maybe emotional connection feels harder, or life’s stress has revealed painful differences. Perhaps a diagnosis, a trauma, a life experience has been heartbreaking. Happily ever after hasn't happened. In those moments, couples can either cling to disappointment or embrace reality with compassion — just as the Hoyts did.

The HOPE-Focused Approach helps couples do exactly that. By letting go of “what should be,” partners can begin to heal what is. Real love grows when we stop trying to perfect our partner and instead start seeing them with gentleness and gratitude.

A Simple Practice: Letting Go of the Wish-Dream

1. Reflect – What did you once imagine your relationship would be like?

2. Release – Which expectations might be keeping you from seeing your partner clearly?

3. Recognize – What unexpected gifts have emerged in the reality you share?

4. Recommit – Say aloud to one another:

   “I choose to love you not as I imagined you, but as you are.”

This small act of surrender can renew a relationship.

The HOPE Perspective

When we release our idealized dreams, we make space for healing to begin, optimism to return, perspective to deepen, and empowerment to grow.That’s the kind of hope that lasts — not the hope of perfection, but the hope of faithful love in real life.

Because as Bonhoeffer reminds us, “God’s grace begins where our dreams end.”