Aspiration is a combination of the skill of curiosity with the trait of having eyes on goals. Curiosity, you may remember, is largely composed of the core psychological skill of Observing Ego, paired with an educated eye, full of "left brain" ability for detail, history, and organization. Goals, you may recall, pertain to actual accomplishments that we do not yet attain, own or control, which makes the attaining of goals, the only mature, legitimate way of actually gaining more real control over our world. We think of them as "what we want to become,"which is the same as aspiration, only if we really do care about them and have curiosity about their nature and how we might gather our resources to attain them. They, then, also emerge as a function of our very identity. Aspiration has bearing on our performance in phase three - intellectual attraction - step eight, where we seek to amplify the best virtues toward our goals.
One can't get to a goal without actually caring for that goal, through curiosity, the master trait of identity as well as partnership. Without it, we can't grow, and don't care to, because we don't have Observing Ego to guide us.
It is one thing to know what a goal is in general, but a bit of a higher bar to reach to define one’s specific goals. We all know what that is like from the experience of a New Year’s resolution. Some goals are just wishes or dreams, not real objectives that one has drive for (from the reptilian brain), an emotionally felt reward of happiness attached (from the mammalian brain), nor real intention from the higher brain - that actual work of preparation for action on the goal.
It yet an even higher bar to reach to know what one’s goals are, but then to forget them for a time in favor of turning a curious eye to them, to wonder if they are really worthwhile, and if they are realistic, what the probability is of reaching them, and if there is a very low probability, to persist toward them anyway because they are worth it. It is a rare and wise person - one with a cultivated Observing Ego - who is willing to consider other options when their original goals were held near and dear for all of life so far. Marriage and commitment have a way of forcing us to reconsider our long-held goals, sometimes to align them better to the needs of a partner, but sometimes to a fault, forsaking them for the wrong person.
From Aristotle's Golden Mean, we learn that every Virtue such as this also has two Vices. In the case of aspiration, the vice of excess is ambition that has Hubris, and the deficit is one of Faineance, or the "mental laziness" of just wondering around aimlessly with no goals, no curiosity of true interest in actually reaching a goal, like "wishful thinking" without intention. Hubris of course is filled with pathological narcissism causing relationships to fail by doing harm to the other partner, and Faineance carries a passive narcissism that harms the life of the partner who has it, and therefore harms the relationship indirectly, by non-contribution.
Many couples have fallen apart in partnership and intellectual attraction, simply because one or the other partner did not have aspirations. We commonly say that we had a falling out, because they "just didn't have any goals." Or because the "wishful thinking" in their goals were so aggressive that we found ourselves "steamrolled" by that partner's excessive aspirations, which made us feel as if we were not really partners, but just being dragged along behind their narcissistic wagon.
Stop all this, with mature, legitimate, shared, aspiration.