Don’t Forget to Plan Your Marriage
August 29, 2009 by weddings
Filed under wedding planning
Comments Off
Wedding planning can take months or a year before the bride walks down the aisle to begin her life with her fiancé. There are hundreds of details to tend to for your special day in the spotlight. With all that intense planning, booking and scheduling, most engaged couples don’t give one thought to planning their marriage.
To start with, make sure you know why you are getting married. Always wanting to get married is a poor reason to do it. Both of you should write an honest list of the good and bad elements of your relationship and then talk about them with each other to see if changes or adjustments need to be made. Just make sure that list stays focused on the dynamics of your relationship with each other and doesn’t become a personal attack on the person.
One mistake a lot of people make when they agree to marry is to use it to run away from problems or unpleasant surroundings or employment. Marriage shouldn’t be an escape from anything, but a promise of a loving and future life together. Both of you have to be excited and anticipating a wonderful life together. If either one of you has to be talked into getting married, call it off.
It’s not easy to predict what your future together will be, but a careful consideration of your partner’s parents, including how they treat each other and their attitudes, will tell you a lot about how your partner might treat you later. If you know your fiance’s past relationships were stormy and less than loving, that might be a predictor of future behavior.
Why do you need to do all this discussing about matters that don’t have anything to do with your wedding day and reception? One day in your live, as beautiful as it might be, will not define the next 50 years or whether or not you will be happy together. Take some time before you get too buried in wedding details to discuss the rest of your life with your partner. If you have to, get away from everybody for a weekend, or several weekends if necessary.
Your topics of discussion will be how you both plan on handling life’s events as you live out your life. When you are finished, you should have a working agreement on whether or not you want children, methods of discipline and a fair division of labor. Gone are the days when the husband was the sole breadwinner for the family and the working wife took care of everything else.
Many married couples both work fulltime jobs and a husband expecting his wife to come home from work and take care of everything else in their life is just not going to work. Actually it only worked in TV sitcoms from the 1950s.
Clear agreements have to be defined about money, who will spend it and how. Any wide gap in financial focus will derail a marriage in a heartbeat. Saving for the future, children’s education and family vacations has to be a joint venture in a successful marriage.
Other possible points of disagreement can be religion, career changes, retirement, where you are going to live and your relationships with both sets of in-laws. If you both cannot agree on the importance of planning these major events in your future life, you might need to think about your marriage. If there’s no middle ground, no give and take, you won’t get along or be happy.
One thing that sneaks up on engaged couples is the actual cost of being married. If your marriage means giving up your career you’ve spent years developing or moving far away from your friends and family, your future with your partner might not be that happy. If this is your situation, think very carefully about it.
These recommended discussions before you get married are not meant to discourage you from getting married. They are meant, however, to get you to think beyond the excitement of your wedding and to think about planning your future.