The Pre-Marriage CourseSample

Adventure

Marriage provides us with one of life’s greatest opportunities and one of its greatest challenges:

• the opportunity to build the most intimate of relationships, the benefits of which go way beyond ourselves
• the challenge to go on learning what it means to love another person, to look beyond our own needs and to go on finding out what is important to our partner, and then to make adjustments in our own behaviour

Agree on your priorities

We may have very different personalities, but having similar core values and an agreed set of priorities enable a couple to build a strong marriage. 

• share with each other your dreams, aspirations, hopes and longings
• make your relationship with God your top priority, followed by your marriage, then your children (if you have them), then everything and everybody else

Four areas that will be affected by your priorities:

1. Friendships

• don’t cut yourselves off as a couple; every marriage needs a network of support
• protect your marriage from any relationships that might threaten it
• set boundaries to guard yourselves from the risk of an affair

2. Children and family life

• discuss your expectations for having children
• keep making time for each other if and when you have the demands of small children

3. Work

• don’t compete with each other
• talk about how you would balance work and taking care of children

4. Spirituality

• exploring your core beliefs will draw you closer together (consider doing Alpha to explore the Christian faith and to give you language to talk more easily together about spiritual issues)
• talk about what beliefs and values you would want to pass on to your children, if and when you have them 

As we each look to God to receive and experience his love, forgiveness and a sense of his purpose for our lives, we are better able to love each other.

Adventurers and nurturers

Although we will all be a mixture, recognise whether one of you has a more ‘adventuring’ temperament and the other a more ‘nurturing’ temperament, 

Adventurers

• want to make the most of all the possibilities that life offers. They view marriage itself as a joint adventure. Adventurers bring energy and new experiences to the relationship.

Nurturers 

• see their marriage as a safe place to return to after whatever adventures or challenges life brings. Nurturers bring consistency and routine in the relationship.

Both adventuring and nurturing make an equally important contribution to the relationship

• too little adventure and your relationship can become stagnated
• too much adventure and you can be overstretched

As a couple, your responsibility is to value both the energy of adventure and the security of recovery. 

Every marriage needs to give enough space for both adventuring and nurturing. When these two forces are working well in your marriage, marriage itself becomes one of life’s great adventures.