Helping Save a Marriage Before it Starts

Recommended E-book: "1,000 Questions for Couples"

These questions are both fun and healthy for new couples approaching marriage. They are fun because they help you open up and draw closer to your loved one. They are healthy because they help you get to know each other better and prepare in advance for issues you will face in marriage so you can face them with confidence and security and skill.

Scared?

Did you ever have the experience of having your doctor bring out some syringe or some medical device and tell you, "Don't worry, this won't hurt"? Or, "You might feel a little pressure when I do this"? If you're like me, that is the time to get really scared.

Ok. So I might as well admit it. Eileen and I went through these questions and they were absolute torture--sheer pain. Joking. We survived it easily. It was fun. And if we had to do it all over again, I would have to recommend it heartily. I'm serious.

There is nothing magic about the questions. It is not like the old Newlywed Game where Bob Fairbanks asked questions of the couples that made you wonder if he was setting them up for a divorce. If that was the case, I would urge people to say away. Far away. What these questions did was help us to give us really easy but fun questions that would help us to know what to expect, and we went into marriage confident and comfortable. We did not have a lot of fighting the way many couples do, and it was not because we were clamming up. We just knew each other better. We were aware of what we liked, what we believed, what was important to us, and such.

Some people feel insecure and worry premarital questions and counseling will ruin their chances of getting married. They might prefer rushing to the alter before their partners have a chance to change their minds. But, these questions should never stop a good marriage from taking place.

One value I see in going through these questions is that they give you and your loved one a chance to discuss typical marriage breakers and gain the skills to overcome them while it is still fun to talk about them.

I think if more couples got this book before marriage there would be fewer divorces and more happy marriages, happy families, and happy children. If I were a pastor asked to marry a couple, I would encourage them strongly and probably buy them the book and have them go through at least part of it for preparation and pre-marital counseling. It's that good.