Moving Deeper

I know my posts tend to focus on the wedding and usually not as much on the marriage. Sometimes thinking about our actual marriage is a little overwhelming. With the divorce rate as high as it is and the frequent stories about people we know giving up on their marriages, it can be a little scary.

We both understand that our marriage will not be easy. We've watched the marriages of the people closest to us struggle, and in some cases fall apart. I think a lot of people that don't know us as well think we're only making it harder on ourselves by getting married young. While I don't think it magically gets easier with age, I do acknowledge that many young couples end up divorced. David and I agree that it's important to learn from those with the life experience we're lacking to prepare ourselves as best we can for our future.

Over the weekend, we met with our friend's dad who is also a pastor at the church we're getting married at. The church requires that you meet with one of their pastors on staff even if he isn't officiating the ceremony. I had no idea how much knowledge we'd get in the hour we talked with him! He was totally open and honest with us about his own marriage and how hard it's been. He showed us two different diagram type things that he uses for the "nearly newlyweds" class he teaches, and I just loved one of them.

• The first function of a relationship is close proximity. As social beings, we long for a connection with another person. This is established through spending time together. A marriage functions as a way to form that connection and to be able to experience life together. 
• A relationship also functions as a safe haven. A marriage provides you with someone who will be there for you and is just as committed to you as you are to them. Pastor D said he likes to use the word covenant, which literally means a binding or sealed agreement. To establish a safe haven, however, you have to have trust, availability, love and commitment, responsiveness, and repair of disconnects. He talked about two kinds of trust - trusting your spouse's heart and trusting his/her character. Trusting his/her heart means you're able to be fully confident that he/she will be completely faithful to you emotionally and physically. Trusting his/her character means you're able to trust that his/her word means what it says. He gave the example that he'll tell his wife he'll be home by a certain time, but then gets caught up doing something. It's a little thing, but it makes it hard to trust his word. The other part that we focused on was the ability to repair disconnects. Pastor D brought up John Gottman, who wrote The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, which I read over the summer. Dr. Gottman says he's able to predict (with over 90% accuracy) whether a couple will last after 5 minutes of observing them interacting. One of the main things he looks for is whether couples are able to repair their relationship after disconnects.
• Another function of a marriage is as a secure base. Your spouse is the person that you'll always be able to go back to and find love. You can fail at work, in a friendship, whatever - Your spouse will still be on your side. Your spouse also provides a foundation for decision making and choosing a plan of action. 
• The fourth main function of a relationship is an alarm system. Your spouse will say, "Something's wrong here," even though that may mean he/she is met with denial or anger from you. Your spouse is the person who loves you enough to fix a problem, struggle, whatever even if fixing it is harder than ignoring/accepting it. 

I don't think any of that was something I'd never heard before, but the way it was laid out resonated with me for some reason. While I know it will be hard to be/provide all of those things, I know it'll be so rewarding! It made me even more excited for marriage and for the adventure it will be. I love that David enjoys "counseling" as much as I do - We love talking to people who have been in our situation and have had incredibly successful marriages. I can think of three different couples (all of which I've blogged about, actually! Pastor D and his wife, our officiant and his wife, and the couple I blogged about here - Hi Kathryn, if you're reading!) that we've met with that started out just like us - high school sweethearts, married right out of college - and are happier than ever! I know it's possible, and I know David and I can and will be just like them.

Have you taken a step back from wedding planning to focus on your marriage? Have you ever looked at a relationship the way the diagram does?

PS - He gave us 2 books to read, so I'll be posting them as soon as we find some time to read them! One of them is This Momentary Marriage by John Piper and the other is When Sinners Say 'I Do' by John Harvey. Have any of you heard of either of them?

Our Wonderful Officiant

David and I knew before we were engaged that we wanted our officiant to be a pastor who knew us and knew our relationship. One of my good friend's dad is a pastor at our church in Wichita, and he's known us both since we started high school (shortly before we started dating). He's gotten to watch us grow up, both as individuals and as a couple. He is SO incredibly sweet and caring - I LOVE that we chose him to do our ceremony.

We've met with him - we'll call him Pastor M - twice now. The first time we mainly talked about what we're thinking in terms of the ceremony and the second time we started our premarital counseling. Since I go to school out of town, we're spreading the 6 sessions out over the next 9 months. We'll probably do 1 or 2 over Christmas break, 1 over spring break, and 2 or 3 in the 4 weeks between when I move back and when we get married!

I loved the discussion we had in our first counseling session. We started with Pastor M asking us why people get married and specifically why we're choosing to. My answer was basically that marriage is biblical and that God tells us it's not good for man to be alone. David's was similar - He said he agreed with my answer and that he's always thought of it as you should marry the person with whom you can accomplish more for God's glory than you ever could alone. Pastor M said after hearing our answers he would guarantee our marriage will last. His reasoning was that if we always continue to make decisions and base our lives and reasoning on scripture, we'll be happily married forever. After that we looked at Genesis 2:18-24 which reads:

18The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.” 19Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. 20So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field.But for Adam no suitable helper was found. 21So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and closed up the place with flesh. 22Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. 23The man said,“This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man.” 24For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.

I just love that passage. I've always liked that it explicitly says that the bone was taken from Adam's rib. It wasn't taken from his foot so that he would rule over her or from his head so that Eve would be his overseer. It was taken from his side, which weakened him, and thus gave her the duty of being his helper. I also think it's neat that the bone was one closest to his heart.

We didn't specifically talk about that part of the passage, but focused more on the last verse about leaving our parents and uniting with each other. This was definitely a conversation that needed to happen. While neither of us still live at home, we're both very close to our moms. I view my mom as one of my best friends, but she still has always provided the instruction and discipline that's necessary from a parent. When I'm at school (and things aren't ridiculously crazy), I talk to my mom at least every other day. David's also very close to his mom. She relies on him for a lot of different things. He's incredibly compassionate and it kills him to not be there for the people he loves. We've both been through issues with our families in the 5 and a half years we've been dating, and we both have kind of become the go between for our moms. Pastor M made us realize that once we're married, we're our own team. While we definitely won't end our relationships with our moms by any means, they'll have to change. That's going to take a lot of getting used to, but I'm so glad we've talked about it and know that it's necessary for the success of our marriage.

After talking about this subject, David and I hung out with a married couple, K and R, that we're good friends with a few days later. She actually used to be one of our teachers (although she's only about 4 years older than us) and he and David love talking about sports and business. Anyway, I was telling K about what we'd talked about and she told us one of the things that has been incredibly helpful with their marriage is that before they got married, K's mom talked to R and told him that she promised to never speak poorly of him and wanted him to promise her the same thing. K says that they've both held up their end of the deal, and that it's been so good for them. So if K goes to her mom to complain about R or something he did, her mom refuses to feed into it by agreeing or talking poorly about R. And if K goes to R about her mom, he does the same thing. I think that's so important - The people who love you defend you and hurt for you when you're hurt, so if I go to my mom complaining about something David did, she'll remember it, likely even after we've solved the issue on our own.

If you're still reading, I applaud you! I'm hoping that last paragraph wasn't too confusing. Do you and your FI plan to do something like that? Was it/will it be an issue to "leave" your parents?