Nashville Marriage Studio

You know how on Cribs they always say “this is where the magic happens” when they show you the master bedroom and you kind of roll your eyes because “C’mon, Beiber, you’re, like, 12″.

Well, this is going to be like my personal episode of Cribs and I’m going to show you “where the magic is happening” at present.

This is my newly designed office (thank you, Blend!)

This is where you and your fiance can learn to love and grow and prepare for a marriage that excites you.

I had a table at a bridal show last year hoping to introduce brides to the idea of premarital counseling. I mean, most people think that premarital counseling is something only pastors do (so non-Christians don’t do it) or that it’s something that only couples who don’t like each other do (so couples with rose-colored glasses don’t do it).  I wanted to let couples know that premarital counseling is fun (I’m fun, I swear!) and important (you are promising forever, right?) and that they should seriously consider it in the midst of decisions about flowers and dresses and sparkly unicorns.

Oh, no one else had sparkly unicorns at their wedding? Interesting.

Anyways, one of the brides at the show stopped at my table, read my sign, barely acknowledged my presence and said (very snootily) “Premarital counseling? I don’t need that” and walked away.

On the outside I had no reaction and directed my attention to the next bride on her way to the table. Internally, however, I gave the girl a stern lecture on the importance of preparing for a huge commitment (like marriage) and that I felt sorry for her fiance having to marry someone with such a snotty attitude.

Needless to say, I was peeved. And it wasn’t so much because she was snotty (though that was probably 58% of the reason). It was because of the attitude that implied counseling was only for couples who had a bad relationship. That stereotype upsets me because the couples that I’ve seen in premarital counseling are often some of the happiest and most well-adjusted couples ever. Now, I have had couples who had serious issues to iron out, but for the most part my engaged couples are doing everything they can to keep their marriage healthy. These couples aren’t waiting for affairs or years of drifting apart to learn to deal with their issues. These couples are dealing with it now, while they have happiness and love and sparkly unicorns on their side.

And I would just like to applaud all couples who have decided to INVEST in premarital counseling whether they “needed” it or not.

The most common piece of advice I hear is for the couple to try and take it all in, that the day will be over before they know it. Remember to breathe, they say.

The same is true for the time that it takes for your relationship to grow from friendship, to dating, to engagement, and to marriage. It’s easy (especially for us females) to get caught up in getting to the next stage.

When you’re single you want a boyfriend.

When you have a boyfriend you want a fiance.

When you have a fiance you want a husband.

Just like you don’t want to rush through the hours leading up to your wedding day, don’t rush through the relationship leading up to your wedding day.

Remember celebrating Valentine’s Day with your single friends. Remember saying goodnight on the front porch at 3 in the morning. Remember the dreams you shared when you first started talking about building a life together.

Remember to breathe.

I don’t know about you, but images from the Gulf, like the one above, break my heart. I know there are so many humans affected by this, but my heart aches for the poor animals who called the Gulf their home. That poor bird, right?!?

The thing is, our problem with the oil spill started long before an explosion on an oil rig. There was our insatiable hunger for oil, companies more interested in profit than safety and a government willing to let an industry regulate itself. These problems have been here for years, but it isn’t until a beautiful bird is covered in oil that we take a closer look.

The same thing happens in our relationships, and it is why I believe that premarital counseling and/or education is so vital to the success of a marriage. The dynamics and issues that exist on your wedding day are the same ones that may eventually lead to your own “relationship oil spill”, such as infidelity, loss of intimacy, or simply drifting apart.

I’m sure that anyone affected by the oil spill would do anything to go back 5 years in order to prevent this catastrophe, so what are you doing today to prevent a similar catastrophe in your future marriage?

I had a high school math teacher that had an interesting way of forcing me to confront my fear of failure.

Every Friday we’d take a test covering whatever we’d learned that week. We’d get the test back on Monday and our homework would be to review our incorrect answers. And then correct them.

It didn’t matter how high your grade was, unless you got a 100, you had homework. The homework assignment forced me to deal with a couple of things: 1) I wasn’t perfect, even if I was doing really well in the class, and 2) Mistakes are our friends as long as you learn from them.

Even as a teenager I knew that Ms. Barbee was teaching me something that was much more valuable than just the Pythagorean Theorem. She was teaching me how to deal with failure.

She reframed failure from something to avoid to something to learn from. Seeing incorrect answers on a returned test no longer filled me with dread over how I screwed up, instead I was curious about how I screwed up and wondered if I’d be able to figure out where things went wrong. I was also able to get a clearer picture of the mathematical concepts I was truly getting and had simply made a silly mistake, and which concepts  were still way over my head.

Where has your relationship or marriage been tested?

How did you guys do?

How did you do things right? How did you fail?

Did you confront the failure?

How do you normally deal with failure? Your partner?

How is your normal failure approach different when it comes to your relationship?

What would you have liked to have done differently?

What makes your relationship still valuable, even in light of its weaknesses?

Learning to love is just as much about learning to fail.

I’m so excited to announce that the Young Adult Community at Tusculum Cumberland Presbyterian Church is sponsoring a

FREE

Relationship Enrichment Weekend for the community on May 21-22.

We’ll spend the Friday evening (May 21; 7-9 pm) talking about how personality differences impact your relationship and learning to love one another better by identifying each other’s love languages.

Saturday morning (May 22; 9-11:30 am)we’ll get back together to learn skills that will lessen the destruction in future conflicts. We’ll end the morning with an important talk for all couples about the role that sex and intimacy plays in your marriage.

This is a great weekend for couples at all stages: married, engaged (counts as pre-marital education for your TN marriage license discount!), or thinking about getting married. The variety of topics will give you both a great starting point for talking about what areas of your relationship could use improvement.

Tusculum Cumberland Presbyterian Church
477 McMurray Dr
Nashville, TN 37211

To register: Contact Nathan Wheeler  – call (615) 833-0742 or email nathantyac@gmail.com

My Hubby: Why is the ketchup in the refrigerator?
Me: Um, because that’s where it goes?
My Hubby: Oh…

It wasn’t until I got married that I realized that not everyone puts ketchup in the refrigerator. Honestly? I had never even thought about where the ketchup was located until it was pointed out I may be wrong and/or weird.

That’s the funny thing about growing up in a family. We all think we’re doing it the right/normal way. If you grew up with a single parent you think it’s normal to come home to an empty house after school. If you grew up with 5 siblings you think it’s normal to shout so that someone, anyone, would hear you. If you grew up with a little Asian woman as a mom with a propensity to refrigerate things you think it’s normal to put ketchup in the refrigerator. The environment we grow up in defines normal.

And then we enter a relationship, like marriage, and learn that all our ideas about normal aren’t always so… normal.

The single parent kid marries a kid from the Brady Bunch who thinks normal is being around others all. the. time. Whose idea of normal wins there?

The one with 5 siblings starts living with someone whose family only yelled when they were upset. Who gets to decide what shouting normally means?

The one who puts ketchup in the refrigerator marries a ketchup in the pantry kind of guy. Where do the groceries normally go now?

The hardest part of the first couple of years of marriage is redefining normal. The problems come when one or both sides decide they can’t let go of their idea of normal. Even bigger problems come when what is considered normal is actually harmful (emotional and/or physical abuse, infidelity, dishonesty, etc).

In the third session of premarital counseling we look at the families both of you come from. We probably won’t talk about how you store your condiments but we will talk about topics like how your family handled conflict or how you knew you were loved. Getting to know each other on this level can help ease future tension about what is, or isn’t, normal.

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.

It all started with a tweet. A tweet from Joy Wilson about boudoir photography.

I became intrigued. I am a huge advocate of boudoir photography for ladies in committed and loving relationships with men that have earned the right to see your, um, goodies. There are so many ways boudoir photography can enrich your relationship, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

First, back to tweets and Joy. Our Twitter conversation led to email which led to a lunch date to talk about all things love, relationships and boudoir. Joy was an absolute delight. An ABSOLUTE delight. I immediately felt like we were old friends and it wasn’t long before we were planning a full-fledged Boudoir as Marriage Enrichment event.

We are now teaming up to present Beloved Boudoir Photography…

As you can see, Joy Wilson is a wonderful photographer whose gift is not simply her ability to capture beautiful photos that will allow you and your man to enjoy your unique sexiness. No, she also has the gift of a personality that allows you to feel comfortable and beautiful enough to truly enjoy something that many of us think we’d never have the guts to do. That, my friends, is talent.

Like I said earlier, I believe that boudoir photography can enrich your relationship in so many ways. Let me explain:

• Men experience sexuality through what they can see. Porn is not a billion-dollar industry for nothing, people. There is so much lost for a man’s sexual experience when we rush to cover our bodies or insist that the lights be turned off. Boudoir photography is a wonderfully creative way to let him see you in all your crazy sexy glory.
• This allows you to see yourself as a sexual being. Too often us women limit our definition of sexual attractiveness to Giselle Bundchen. It’s difficult to believe that our men enjoy the sight of our bodies because we’re so hung up on a roll here or some cellulite there. Boudoir is a wonderful way to fall in love with your body and see yourself in a whole new light.
• Vulnerability is what seals the bond between a couple. We can’t truly understand intimacy until we’ve taken a risk to share a part of ourselves that is typically hidden from others. This type of gift can be a wonderful way to symbolize the trust you have in your man, trusting that he will treasure and love, not only these photos, but you.
• I’m offering a discount on premarital counseling or education for anyone who partakes in this event. You can get $25 off of the Bound Together Workshop or 10% off of premarital counseling.

If you would like more details about Beloved Boudoir Portraits email Joy at joy@joywilsonphotography.com and be sure to check out all of her amazing work at Joy Wilson Photography.