7 ways to prepare for marriage while you’re still single
Tunde
THERE
is no better time than while you’re single to prepare for an amazing,
God-honoring marriage. Here are seven great things you can do while you’re
still single (or while you’re single again) to prepare for a successful
marriage:
1. Address your unresolved
childhood issues.
You’ve
got to take care of the baggage that you’re carrying from childhood. When I do
premarital counseling, this is the first topic we always talk about. Your
unresolved childhood issues can absolutely sink a marriage. Here is a great
quote from nationally respected and recognized marriage experts Les and Leslie
Parrot: “If you attempt to build intimacy with a person before you’ve done the
handwork of becoming a whole and healthy person, every relationship will be an
attempt to complete the hole in your heart.”
Think
of it like trying to fill a five-gallon bucket full of water when you’ve got
holes in the bottom and on the sides, it’s never going to stay full. Your
unresolved childhood issues are some of those issues you need to resolve. And I
know that some of you will say, “I don’t have unresolved issues. I talk with my
mom, I send her a Mother’s Day card every year.” If you have a parent that is
still alive but you don’t have a healthy functioning relationship with them,
there may be some issues you need to resolve. For many people, it comes down to
your father, or your lack of a father, or an absent father. That’s a real
thing.
Even if it means
counseling, take care of all of your unresolved childhood issues so you don’t
bring that baggage into your future marriage. If you’re divorced, you need to
unpack not only the baggage from your childhood, but the baggage from your
previous marriage or marriages.
2. Get out of debt.
In
premarital counseling I do with couples, I spend an entire session simply on
finances, because 85% (that’s not a scientific number but my experience with
couples) of all fights stem from money, or specifically a lack thereof. If you
do the hard work to prepare before marriage to take care of your money, you’ll
bring less baggage into your marriage and you’ll be less likely to marry
someone who can’t take care of their money. Ladies, if your boyfriend or
fiancee has thousands of dollars of debt and kind-of-a-job, RUN! And some of
you may be thinking, “I’ll just get out of debt once I’m married!” Ha! Married
people, can I get an “Amen!” on how hard it is to get out of debt once you’re
married? If you want to prepare successfully for marriage, get out of and stay
out of debt. I guarantee you, you’ll thank me later.
3. Ladies: Don’t dress like a
commodity and refuse to be treated like one
Ladies,
I know that the cultural mindset in America is to use your body as bait to get
a man, but as followers of Jesus and more importantly as daughters of the King,
you’re called to live differently. Don’t dress like a commodity. Don’t dress in a way that uses your body as
bait. Do you know how fisherman know what kind of bait to use? By what kind of
fish they’re trying to catch. You don’t fish for crappie the same way you fish
for largemouth bass. So ladies, if you dress in a way that uses your body as
bait, you’re going to attract guys that view women as a commodity. And some of
you might say, “All guys are the same.” No, all the guys you date are the same.
There are better guys out there, but you can’t use your body as bait. Because
whatever you catch them with, you’ve got to keep them with. And ladies, I hate
to break it to you, but if the only thing keeping your man is your body, you
realize that as you get older . . . If your man treats you like a commodity,
kick him to the curb and drop him like a bad habit. You can do so much better
than that.
4. Men: Quit looking at images and
listening to music that turn women into a commodity.
Or
more specifically, quit looking at porn and quit listening to rap music. Now,
women can struggle with porn too. When you look at pornography, it turns people
into a commodity. When you listen to music that degrades women, it turns them
into a commodity. And if you think you can engage in that stuff without it
affecting you, you’re absolutely wrong. Guys, I guarantee you that will wreck
your future marriage. So get help, stop it.
5. Break your bad habits.
Whatever
other bad habit you’ve got that you know you need to take care of, take care of
it. Maybe it’s drinking, maybe it’s prescription pills, maybe it’s gambling,
maybe it’s self-harm or cutting. Getting married and making a promise won’t
make those things magically go away. They’ll just make your single person
problems a marriage problem.
6. Postpone the physical
components of the relationship as long as possible.
I’m
not just talking about sex, I’m talking about everything. When I talk with
couples, they never wish they would have gotten physical sooner, they always
wish they would have waited.
If
you rush in too quick, it’s the third date, we got hot and heavy, she spent the
night, that’s changing the fundamentals of the relationship. When you get
physical, you’ve stopped building a relationship and now you’re building
chemistry. Chemistry is a really lousy thing to build a marriage on.
And
this point includes living together. I never, ever recommend that single people
move in together. In fact, research has documented time and time again that
moving in together before marriage actually decreases likelihood that your
marriage will work. This is because you move into together for totally
different reasons. Women move in because they see it as a step towards
marriage. Men move in to test things out and see if they want to stay in the
relationship. As the old saying goes, “Why buy the cow when you can get the
milk for free?”
7. Get involved in your local
church.
Now,
you would expect me to say this as a pastor, but this is incredibly important.
When you get involved in a local church, wherever you live, when you grow in
your faith, when you serve, you’re focusing on becoming the right people,
alongside other people who are focusing on becoming right people, which only
increases your odds of finding the right person for you.
This
worked for me. I met my wife while serving at a Christian youth camp back in
the summer of 2001. That’s the first thing I fell in love with about her: her
heart for God and her heart for serving others.
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