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    Getting Ready for Marriage Workbook: Knowing the Person You're Going to Marry
    Getting Ready for Marriage Workbook: Knowing the Person You're Going to Marry
    Getting Ready for Marriage Workbook: Knowing the Person You're Going to Marry
    Ebook210 pages2 hours

    Getting Ready for Marriage Workbook: Knowing the Person You're Going to Marry

    By Dianne C. Sloan and Jerry Hardin

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    About this ebook

    The saying goes "When you marry, you don't just marry an individual, you marry a whole family." But more specifically, you are marrying the influences that family has had on your spouse. Our families have shaped our views on everything from religion to finances to sex, and, whether helpful or harmful, these views are brought to our marriage and can unknowingly affect it.

     Getting Ready for Marriage Workbook helps engaged couples and newlyweds:
    • learn what "ghosts" they bring to marriage
    • examine their family backgrounds
    • determine guidelines for their own marriage
    Through interactive exercises, couples discover the roots of their beliefs, sight potential problem areas, and learn how to successfully work through problems. Couples are then encouraged to make their own covenants in specific areas such as financial matters, resolving conflict, religious orientation, and family planning & children—essential in building a strong marriage partnership.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThomas Nelson
    Release dateOct 11, 2016
    ISBN9780718035006
    Getting Ready for Marriage Workbook: Knowing the Person You're Going to Marry
    Author

    Dianne C. Sloan

    Dianne C. Sloan worked as a licensed clinical marriage and family therapist in private practice and as an educator for twenty-five years. She also served as a consultant and trainer for several agencies and churches in Wichita, was a former director at the Center on Family Living, and served as director of the Family Life Counseling Center at Central Community Church. Dianne and her husband, Jim, have been married more than forty-five years and have one son, Jason, and two grandchildren.  

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      Book preview

      Getting Ready for Marriage Workbook - Dianne C. Sloan

      images/img-3-1.jpg

      © 1992, 2016 by Jerry D. Hardin, MSMFT, and Dianne C. Sloan, MSMFT

      All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other — except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

      Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, Inc.

      Thomas Nelson titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fundraising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail SpecialMarkets@ThomasNelson.com.

      Scripture quotations are from the New King James Version of the Bible, © 1979, 1980, 1982, by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

      ISBN 978-0-7180-3497-9

      ISBN 978-0-7180-3500-6 (eBook)

      Cover design: Studio Gearbox

      Cover photo: © Stocksy Images

      Interior Design: Kait Lamphere

      First Printing August 2016

      To those who choose to marry with love, knowledge, and commitment.

      EBOOK INSTRUCTIONS

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      In this ebook edition, please use your device’s note-taking function to record your thoughts wherever you see the bracketed instructions [Your Notes] or [Your Response Here]. Use your device’s highlighting function to record your response whenever you are asked to checkmark, circle, underline, or otherwise indicate your answer(s).

      CONTENTS

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      Ebook Instructions

      Foreword by Frank Minirth

      Preface

      Acknowledgments

      1. Loving You

      2. Knowing You

      3. Knowing Your Families

      4. Communication

      5. Attitudes

      6. Resolving Conflicts

      7. Religious Orientation

      8. Money Matters

      9. Sexual Relationship

      10. Family Planning and Children

      About the Authors

      FOREWORD

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      Iremember when I first saw my wife, Mary Alice. She looked like the fairytale character Snow White. Our romance seemed just like a fairy tale to me. I wanted it to end the same way fairy tales do: happily ever after. When we decided to marry, the love we felt for each other seemed like all we would need to create a happily-ever-after ending.

      When two people fall in love and decide to get married, they begin one of the most rewarding relationships God designed. Many couples believe the powerful feelings that motivated their decision to get married are enough to secure a healthy marriage. Yet sometimes, even during the courtship period, couples begin to discover that their feelings of love fluctuate and change. The only way to maintain true love and find that happily-ever-after marriage is to realize how many times love is not a feeling but a choice.

      The decision to marry and maintain a monogamous, loving relationship requires understanding the dynamics of marriage and how your choices will affect your marriage. Couples will have much more fulfilling marriages when they begin to realize how many factors influence a happy marriage. These factors include family of origin, communication, conflict resolution, attitudes, religion, financial management, sexual relationship, and children. Each factor involves many issues that affect the well-being of any marriage. Each of the important factors that influence a marriage is examined in this workbook. Jerry and Dianne provide insight about how these areas will affect your marriage and provide worksheets to help you apply the information to your personal experience.

      Let me take this time to congratulate you on your decision to marry. I also want to congratulate you for making such an important decision to prepare not just for the wedding ceremony but also for the marriage that will follow. Getting Ready for Marriage is one of the most thorough workbooks for couples preparing for marriage. You will benefit in years of a happy marriage from the time you spend using this workbook.

      Frank Minirth (1947–2015)

      Minirth-Meier Clinic

      PREFACE

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      Getting Ready for Marriage is a workbook designed from a Christian perspective to help you look seriously at your decision to marry. The love, knowledge, and behavioral patterns you have developed in your relationships and the commitment you are about to make to each other are the primary issues of this book.

      Before the wedding is the time to talk about your expectations of marriage and the understanding you have of yourselves and each other in such areas as: family of origin, communication, conflict resolution, attitudes, religion, financial management, sexual relationships, and children.

      Everything you bring into your marriage has been influenced by your family of origin. You are who you are because of what you have experienced, inherited, been taught, and seen modeled for you throughout your life. Your attitudes, morals, values, beliefs, and priorities are all influenced by your family and are the building blocks for the expectations you bring to your marriage relationship. Over the past fifty years, marriage counselors have come to understand that one of the most significant factors in a marriage is the influence of the family of origin.

      Your family includes your father and mother, brothers and sisters, and all relatives, peers, friends, and others who have been significant in your life. All of these people have influenced you in what have become your ways. Their influence has molded your perspective on life, and you probably see their way of relating as the way to conduct yourself in a relationship.

      As you grow in your understanding of your beliefs, attitudes, expectations, values, and priorities, and those of your spouse-to-be, you can be more tolerant, patient, and loving in building a better marital relationship. By knowing more about yourselves and your families, and by developing better communication skills, you will become able to choose to incorporate into your marriage the good and healthy practices of each of your families and leave behind those ways that will hinder the growth of your new marriage. This is the first step in the creation of your new family.

      As you work through this book, you can expect to make new discoveries about yourself and your spouse-to-be. You will learn how you are different from and similar to one another. Just remember that different doesn’t mean bad, nor does it mean wrong. It just means different. Don’t expect to see everything the same way; that would be impossible. You come from different families with different sets of rights and wrongs — different ways of living life.

      Good communication is the key that opens the door to a healthy, happy, and more stable marriage. Remember to share your differences openly and honestly, and begin seeking a solution to your problems.

      This book is designed to help you expand your communication with one another and understand the commitment you are making when you marry. At the end of some sessions you will find a covenant. A covenant is a promise, a commitment. Like the covenant our Lord made with us, you will make a covenant with each other when you enter into marriage. The covenant you find at the end of some sessions is really just an expansion of the marriage vows. Make these covenants yours. Feel free to add to or adjust the statements as they apply to you and your spouse-to-be. If either of you has difficulty signing the covenants, it may be a sign that you need to talk more about the issues in that section or that you are just not ready to make a lifetime commitment.

      While Getting Ready for Marriage is designed for you to work through together as a couple, we suggest you enlist the help of your pastor or a counselor for two reasons:

      First, for accountability. As your wedding day draws near, a mountain of details will require your attention. It is easy to put off this important time for your relationship because, after all, you will be spending the rest of your lives together — right? Unfortunately, you probably won’t take time for building your relationship after you marry if you don’t make time now before you marry. Something will always be waiting to claim your time.

      Second, you’ll need help with the tough spots. When we encounter issues that are difficult for us to deal with, we have a tendency to think that love will take care of the problems for us, or it will be different after we get married, or we can change the other person. That usually doesn’t happen. You have to deal with the tough issues, and it is better to deal with them before you get married rather than find out after you are married you cannot resolve the problems. Your pastor or a counselor can help you work on your communication skills as well as help you to step back from the issues you are working on to focus on finding the solution rather than focusing on just the problem.

      We wish you well as you begin your journey, learning and loving and growing together.

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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      We want to gratefully acknowledge Angie Millslagle, our administrative assistant/secretary, for her many hours of work devoted to this book.

      We are also grateful to the professors and staff at Friends University, Wichita, Kansas, for their support, educational resource materials, and guidance. We would like to especially thank Dr. Dan Lord, our clinical supervisor, and the clinical family education/therapy staff: Dr. Dottie Schultz, Dr. Phil Stanberry, Dr. Bill Dorman, Professor Bill Allen, and Professor Mark Hicks, for the knowledge and wisdom you have shared with us.

      We extend our thanks to the pastors and staff of Central Community Church, Wichita, Kansas, especially Senior Pastor Ray Cotton and Pastor Mark Deffenbacher, for their support of the Family Life Counseling Center. To the hundreds of couples who have participated in our Exploring Family Ties Workshops, we thank you for sharing your lives with us and for your critical evaluation of each section of this workbook.

      And most importantly, we are grateful to Marilynn Hardin and Jim Sloan, our respective spouses for more than forty years, for their support, love, and interest in our lives.

      Jerry D. Hardin

      Dianne C. Sloan

      SESSION 1

      LOVING YOU

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      Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.

      1 Corinthians 13:4–8

      Love is one of the most meaningful, yet confusing, words in the English language. When spoken, shared, or received, love creates joy in the hearts of us all. Yet defining the word love or explaining it fully seems to be a task with which we all struggle.

      Webster defines love as affection, an emotion, a sharing, a commitment—even as a definition of itself. We can love our God, our spouse, our car, our golf game, our friends; we can be in love or out of love. You and your spouse-to-be have experienced part of this entity called love or you would not be reading this book.

      Because the English language has so many definitions for the one word love, we have distinguished three types: emotional-love, friendship-love, and commitment-love.

      EMOTIONAL-LOVE

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      The feelings of being in love, which at times predominate over rational thought.

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      Our feelings of love are conditional, and feelings can change.

      For as long as humankind has existed, we have experienced emotional-love. We have dreamed about it, talked about it, sung about it, written poetry to express it, and, in recent years, acted it out in the movies and on television. Emotional-love, or being in love, can best be described as passion and is like no other feeling we know. In fact, the feeling of being in love is probably what has brought you and your spouse-to-be to engagement.

      We communicate emotional-love through our senses: sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing. The couples we see in premarital counseling frequently hold hands, kiss, and hug. They talk of music, words, and moments that belong only to them. Their looks and touches send a clear message: I am in love with you!

      Being in love is a God-given emotion that belongs in a marriage relationship, but many couples consider this feeling of love as the only basis for their marriage. The reality is that feelings come and go. Emotions can be lighted, like a fire. The more you fan the fire, the more it grows. But a fire quickly flickers and goes out if not attended. A fire needs fuel, care, attention, and air so it may breathe and continue to burn. This feeling of love

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