Prep for Marriage

This week we discussed a little bit of everything leading up to marriage. There was a model we used throughout this week and the last. Imagine 4 stairs, at the top is dating, the next is courtship, then engagement, and finally marriage. The main focus these past few days was the last two steps of the model.

There are a lot of things we can do to help prepare ourselves for marriage! Some of these preparations should be taking place before we are engaged in the courtship stage. Something that I believe was really important was the connection and merging of the husband and wife. We discussed different things that come along with each step. Some of the things that I had written down under the engagement step were, planning the wedding, learning to plan, founding a family, and preparing to make and keep covenants. I want to talk a little bit about what I meant by the merging of the husband and wife. The way it was depicted was that there were two families, two sets of parents, one set of parents had the son, and the other had the daughter. Now imagine that there was a circle around each set of parents, and then a bigger circle that surrounds the son and the parents, and the same thing with the other set of parents and their daughter. The act of getting married, planning the wedding together, and making decisions will all help that couple leave their current family circle and create their own. So what we talked about then was they way weddings are typically planned. Normally the wedding is planned by the "to be wife" and her mother, with the occasional input from the "to be husband." This is where we begin to see our first problems! The wedding should be planned by both the bride and the groom! A story was told of a young couple that was to be married. The total of the wedding was 1.3 million dollars, the whole wedding was paid by the brides parents who were easily able to afford it. A week before the wedding all of the bridesmaids, bride, and mothers went to a spa somewhere in the Bahamas. All of the men went somewhere to golf for 3 days, and then spend the other 2 somewhere else expensive. This couple is starting their marriage off completely separate! They aren't preparing to separate from their parents and become their own family by doing this. Now they owe a huge debt to that set of parents. The parents may not ask for money but they will hang it over their head and use it as a way to get them to do what they want to possibly for their whole marriage. This actually creates a barrier between the husband and wife making it harder for them to start their own family circle.

We have discussed many times that the way to a happy marriage is by working together and creating it. There are many opportunities for young married couples to do that! One of those ways is simply working through the struggles of having little money. It is often times hard at first but those memories are always looked back upon with fondness. Couples are building both a life and a family together! We should do all that we can to make it so that we understand that, and what it really means so we are better prepared when the time comes! The couple from the story was also gifted a 900,000 dollar starter home in California. When you are given everything you might be missing out on the joys of overcoming little difficulties together. These experiences help us to develop communication skills, a deeper bond of trust and love. The couple from the story sadly got divorced 4 months after the wedding. We can just assume and believe that all things will work without effort! We should do all we can to make sure we are preparing ourselves!