A Pre-Marriage Checklist

According to Dr. Clyde M. Narramore, there are at least eight areas that can critically impact your marriage. Examining these eight areas can provide helpful guidance in determining whether you and your spouse are ready to make a lasting, lifetime commitment.

1. Personality Adjustment - Some people are well-adjusted, while others are not. Most serious marriage problems arise because one or both partners have some long-standing problematic personality characteristics. If, through discussion, you identify some personality traits that may be problematic, you may consider: slowing down the relationship, spending a lot of time working through the potential conflicts, seeking professional help, or terminating the relationship. But just remember: Marriage won't solve your problems and denial of those problems won't make them go away.

2. Life Goals - Goals affect every area of our lives. They involve having kids, our education, our careers, where we live, spiritual interests and on it goes. The better aligned a couple is on future goals, the more likely they are to run a straight course in their marriage.

3. Intellectual and Cultural Interests - Couples with different interests can enjoy and strenghten each other. But common interests help build togetherness. We need to share in our recreational, vocational, and spiritual lives.

4. Education - The impact of education on marriage goes far beyond jobs and finances. Couples that share a desire to learn and grow can challenge and enrich each other.

5. Vocation - There are endless ways that your career will affect your marriage. And what about two career marriages? Have you talked about the implications of a two-career marriage on your free time, your time together, your children, your roles at work and at home, and your level of family stress and pressure?

6. Family Involvement - Before marriage, be sure you get a reading on how you understand each other's families. Some prospective brides and grooms have faced neither the realities of family involvement before marriage nor the impact their childhood family experiences will have on their own marriage.

7. Friends - What our friends enjoy, we often tend to enjoy. What interests our friends tend to be what interests us. What our friends don't care for is most likely what we don't care for. And so on. Otherwise, why would we be spending time with them? Don't expect you or your potential mate's friends to change radically after you've said your vows.

8. Spiritual Interests - Our spirituality shapes our entire worldview. It influences the way choose to invest our time. It impacts our resilience in times of crises, the friends we choose, our work, and our leisure time. The guidance, comfort, and support God gives you through the years, including the difficult experiences of life is beyond comprehension.

No one can be a perfect mate and no one can choose a perfect mate. God created marriage to help us mature and grow and He knows that every couple will have its share of struggles. But it is tremendously important to be aware of as many of our areas of compatibility and incompatibility before marriage.


Married Life Prep goes into great depth to discuss these kinds of issues. Join us for our next series, beginning July 12th.

Money Tips For Newlyweds

This is a great article with helpful money tips from a cool new website: http://www.twoofus.org/ . Hope you enjoy it and the other resources available on this site!

New Married Life Prep series

Kellie and I will be leading an all-new Married Life Prep series in Houston during February 2009. We hope that you and your fiance will be able to join us for this free encouragement to your future marriage. Studies show that relationship-oriented classes like Married Life Prep can reduce the likelihood of divorce by as much as 50%. We like those odds and would love for you to be part of that series. For more information and quick registration click here. See you in February!

Find Out More About Your Relationship

For a limited time, Home Encouragement can provide a free online research-based relationship inventory to help engaged couples know more about one another. It's a very helpful tool that will complement premarital counseling and training. It's a wise move to invest as much as you can in your understanding of one another before you get married. Couples have responded overwhelmingly that this online inventory has given them needed insight to go deeper in their relationship with one another.

If interested, please contact us at thehursts@homeencouragement.org soon. We would be happy to provide you with this chance to connect better with the one you love.

What is Commitment?

Commitment between two couples is all about having a long-term view. It means that you are going to stay in this relationship permanently in all situations and at all costs--not just until a better option comes along. What commitment does for a marriage is to say that the two of us are going to be able to survive the inevitable ups and downs of a lifelong relationship--simply because we are committed to one another.

Commitment also means that we are going to give up some rights or choices because of our love and devotion for this person. This idea is not a very prized value in our culture today. (What? You mean I'm going to have to give something up?) Our society today says that you should hang on to everything. Or as they say in Texas, don't sell your mineral rights! After all, none of us willingly want to give up what we think is "ours".

But that's what successful and truly satisfying marriage is all about--denying yourself. Sacrifice. And more specifically, it's about all the unforseen joy there is to be found in life by willingly giving yourself completely to another person. Couples that don't get this concept of a deeper trust deny themselves something extraordinarily beautiful. There truly is nothing else like it.

Why Marriage Matters

According to the Administration for Children and Families, Health and Human Services, Washington D.C., (and many other resources), there are multiple reasons why healthy marriages increase social health. Here are some of the primary advantages: Statistically, married couples have better overall physical health and mental health--which only increases with happy marriages. Married couples suffer less injuries, less illness, and less disability. They typically live longer, and have children who are physically healthier, as well as are more emotionally stable. With marriage also comes a lower infant mortality rate, a lower rate of child abuse, and lower rates of STDs.

Whew! That's quite a list of incentives for marriage, in general. And, again, healthier marriages just increase all of those statistics further. But for couples to have healthier marriages, it requires intentionality and prioritization within that marriage--to make the marriage stronger, better. Kellie and I recommend that couples become students of marriage. Before and after you're married, read at least one good book on marriage enrichment each year. Also, attend a retreat or pro-marriage weekend once each year. Take a few minutes to take a good online relationship inventory annually. And make sure that you are always dating, playing, and having fun--muy importante!!

If you have any questions or comments about any of these suggestions and want more details or information, please contact us at thehursts@homeencouragement.org . We'd be glad to help you and your fiance move forward with a more intentional (and more satisfying) marriage. That's why we're here.

Givers and Takers

There are two kinds of people in the world, basically--givers and takers. In marriage, this becomes an extremely important factor to the health of a young relationship.

There is nothing more fantastic than a marriage with two givers. Givers spend their time trying to cook up ways to be creatively loving and generous to the one they love--rather than keeping a scorecard of how much they have done (and how much their spouse "needs" to do). Givers are really taking to heart that God created marriage to grow through loving sacrifice.

However, in marriage, when one person is a giver, and the other is a taker, this can start out appearing beautiful (since there are ample opportunities for a giver to "accommodate" a taker--for a short while, everyone seems happy). But, this arrangement inevitably ends up in great conflict. This slowly creates an environment for an unhealthy relationship with a potential for passive aggressive behavior.

When both people are takers, simply put, this is a recipe for rapid disaster. Two takers can destroy each other in marriage very quickly with their selfishness. In fact, I would never counsel two obvious unyielding takers to get married. What would be the point?

So, what if you are a taker? Are there no options for a successful future marriage? Fortunately, there are. Unlike other factors in a relationship like natural temperament or some aspects of physical appearance, selfishness is something that can be changed in a person. I won't say that it's always easy. It also probably won't be an overnight change either--but it can happen. It's all about yielding that selfishness--confessing it, acknowledging it, and then asking the One who made you to give you healing from it. I'm living proof myself that God can give a person a dramatic night-and-day difference in the ability to move away from self-centeredness. Doing this effectively might require the help of another party--a pastor, a counselor, a professional, a friend. It certainly requires much prayer. But it can be done!

An extremely healthy exercise as you are moving into marriage is to evaluate yourself and your own level of selfishness (all of us have selfish moments, by the way). If you find yourself through honest self-evaluation to be a taker, get some help to move away from that identity. The second step would be to honestly evaluate your fiance in the same way. If either or both of you feel that one or both of you are takers, then move quickly to get some third-party help. Your future relationship is too important to not be honest about this.

A successful lifelong marriage is rooted in sacrifice. And ironically, that's where many of the thrilling joys of marriage lie--in the often new found ability to love someone else in a way that you never have before. Get over selfishness as quickly as you can. In fact, I pray that your future marriage is an example to the world of how selfless people can become. The overwhelming evidence will be your happiness and joy together.