Marriage Insights - Quotes on "Preparing for Marriage"

When you’re ready to pledge to love and serve the person you’re marrying as Christ washed the feet of His disciples, then you’re ready for marriage. The problem comes into our married lives when we marry out of “neediness.” We aren’t to marry out of neediness, but to serve one another and work to bring out the best in each other so that together you serve Christ in a manner that could never happen apart from the manner in which you complete one another in Christ. (Cindy Wright)

• Get yourself healthy before you get yourself married. Too often we bring our unexamined selves into our marriage relationship. Also, have a cultivating commitment to have a quality relationship with each other in your marriage. (Neil Clark Warren)

• When you’re marrying, you’re marrying all of the history of that person. (Unknown)

• This is a good time to identify your family differences and your personal expectations of marriage that result from your unique upbringing. We all have expectations, even if we aren’t aware of them. Most of our expectations are not voiced —or even recognized —until they have been broken. When a spouse doesn’t do or say something that we “expected,” we realize it and react —often not too positively. There’s no way you will be able to identify every expectation or discuss every situation you may face and consider how you would want to deal with it. However, the process of learning to identify and discuss expectations as you realize them creates a healthy building block for discussions when stressful situations arise in the future. (Dr Debbie L. Cherry, Child-Proofing Your Marriage)

• To have a great marriage each of you has to have some idea what kind of family you want to have —a lot of children, few children, or no children at all. You also might want to discuss where you’d like raise your children —what part of the country, what kind of community. It may depend on the kind of family you come from. If both of you are only children, that may be what you want for yourselves. If both of you came from a large family, you both may want to duplicate that experience. Or you may want the opposite.