Marriage is scary.
It’s a big decision. A decision that ties you to another person (and that person’s family) forever.
Forever.
Marriage is promising forever to someone. Not “until things get hard”. Not “as long as I feel butterflies in my stomach”. Not “as long as this is right for me”.
Marriage is a decision to promise to one person forever.
Before you decide to marry, before you say “I do”, look at this person. Look at all of this person. Not just the cute, feel good parts of this person. Look at all of the person.
Because you aren’t just promising to love the good parts of this person forever. You’re committing to their tendency to hoard. You’re committing to their laziness. You’re committing to their selfishness. You’re committing to their nagging requests for “quality time”.
Once we decide to marry someone it is easy to want to focus on how this person completes you and makes you happy. It helps lessen our anxiety about making such a big decision. If we let ourselves think about all the reasons marriage is scary, we might talk ourselves out of it, right?
Maybe. Or we just might save our marriage before it begins.
I think one of the biggest reasons marriages fail is because we desperately want to believe that we’re marrying some perfect being who is going to fulfill every need and desire we will ever have. And the first time we are confronted with the truth, that we’ve married an imperfect human, we’re shattered and convinced that we’ve made the wrong decision or the person we promised forever to has changed. Many decide this is the time to bail.
What if we went into this very serious promise seeing the entire person? Seeing the good and the bad. Promising to love the good and the bad. Would our desire to run be as strong if we were able to see it coming? Would we be able to remind ourselves, and each other, that we both knew what we were getting into when we made this promise?
The second session of premarital counseling is the “Anxiety Session”. We talk about all the things that make you anxious about marriage. Not to test you and see if you’re making a bad choice, but to make sure that you’re going into this with eyes wide open. This session is a way to give you a safe place to say “I’m scared…” and not have someone question if you’re really ready to get married, but instead to simply listen.
Marriage is scary, but don’t close your eyes.
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Yes! I SO wish we would have taken “eye-opening” classes/seminars before we got married. Even though we’re blissful now it was a long time coming and a lot of faltering along the way! lol
Love your blog!