RELATIONWISE · MARRIAGE PREPARATION · ◷ 5 conversations – take one at a time

Beyond the Wedding Day:
5 Conversations About the Marriage
You Are Building

You’re preparing for a wedding. But you’re also building a relationship that will carry on long after it. Here are five conversations worth having along the way.

When you’re preparing to get married, there is plenty to think about. The venue. The guest list. What everyone is going to eat. Where people will sit. What you’re going to wear. But while you’re preparing for a wedding, you’re already building something much bigger. Your life together.

You don’t need to have marriage figured out before you get there. Part of marriage is figuring things out together as you go. But you can start noticing now: What’s already good between us? What do we want to carry with us? And what kind of marriage do we want to keep building? Perhaps having a laugh together comes easily. You talk for hours. You’re curious about each other’s lives. You enjoy simply being together. You notice when something is wrong. You encourage one another. You pray together. You make each other feel valued.

Those things matter. And these conversations aren’t a test of whether you’re ready for marriage. They’re a chance to discover more about the person you’ve chosen to marry – and about the life you’re already building together. Some of what you love about your relationship may come almost effortlessly now. Life will change. There will be different seasons, different pressures and things you can’t possibly plan for yet.

So make five dates of these conversations. Go for coffee. Take a walk. Have dinner somewhere you like. Find somewhere beautiful to sit. Give yourselves one conversation at a time. Put your phones away, be curious, and see where the conversation takes you. There are no right answers to find.

1. Imagine your life together

Imagine you’ve been married for five years. Not your anniversary or a holiday. Just an ordinary day.

Picture it in as much detail as you can. Where are you living? What happens in the morning? What does coming home to each other feel like? How do you spend the evening? Who else is part of your life? What place do work, church, friends and family have?

And don’t just picture what you’re doing.

How does it feel to be married to each other?

What does affection look like? What makes you feel close, wanted or known? What makes you laugh? What makes you feel like a team?

Imagining your future isn’t about predicting it. Life will almost certainly surprise you. It’s a way of discovering what matters to you now.

Then look at the relationship you already have. Which pieces of that imagined future are already there?

For us, some of the things that make our marriage ours are remarkably ordinary: a cuppa before the kids get up, walking the dog, a proper conversation, picking each other up from the train station platform. Your things will be different.

What do you love about the two of you now that you’d love still to recognise five years from now?

2. Imagine following Jesus together

You both follow Jesus. But have you ever talked about what you hope that will actually look like in your marriage?

Imagine Scripture and prayer woven into your life together.

When might you read the Bible together? What might praying together look like in an ordinary week, when you have a big decision to make, or when one of you is struggling?

And how do you hope Scripture will shape more than your devotional life?

Colossians 3 describes a life marked by compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, forgiveness and, above all, love.

What might it look like to live those things towards each other?

You may also discover that you connect with God in different ways.

We do. Roman often connects with God while he’s outside in nature. For Bella, it often happens through conversation – talking something through, hearing someone else’s story and discovering something about God in the process.

What about you? What helps each of you draw close to God? What would you love to share? Where might you learn to appreciate the ways you’re different? What place do you hope church, worship, hospitality and serving others will have in the life you’re building?

Now imagine an ordinary week of married life together. Where do Scripture and prayer fit? What would you love to do together? What might look different for each of you? And perhaps the biggest question:

How do you hope following Jesus will shape the way you love each other?

3. Stay interested in each other

One of the lovely things about falling in love is how interesting the other person is. You want to know what they think. You notice little things. You ask questions. You find reasons to spend time together. And knowing someone isn’t only about how much they naturally tell you. Some people give you the full story from one question. Others need a little more help to explore what they’re thinking and feeling.

So start with right now. Choose one thing that’s part of your world at the moment – something you’re excited about, worried about, dreaming about, working towards or simply thinking about a lot. One of you goes first. The other gets curious.

• What’s important about that to you?
• What are you hoping for?
• How does that feel?
• Tell me more about that.

Don’t work through the questions like a list. Listen to the answer and let that answer give you your next question. Then swap.

Relationship researchers John and Julie Gottman have long emphasised continuing to know one another’s inner world as part of the friendship at the heart of a strong relationship. We never really finish getting to know the person we love.

Now turn towards your relationship.

When do you feel particularly close to me? What do I do that makes you feel loved or chosen? What feels romantic to you? What do we do together now that you hope we never stop doing?

And then look ahead. What would you love to grow between you? Perhaps more adventure, deeper conversation, greater openness, more playfulness or more romance. What would you love to experience together that you haven’t yet?

You’re also preparing for a new kind of intimacy as husband and wife. What are you looking forward to about being physically and sexually close in marriage? What would you love to discover together? How do you hope that part of your relationship will grow as you know and trust each other more deeply?

You won’t be the same people five, ten or twenty years from now. There will always be more to discover. Don’t stop being curious about the person your partner is becoming.

4. When things get hard

Loving each other doesn’t mean you’ll always understand each other. Sometimes the difficult part isn’t even what you disagree about. It’s what starts happening between you once things get difficult.

In our work coaching couples, we often slow those moments down. What happened first? What did you feel? What did you do next? How did your partner respond? And what happened then?

We recognise this in our own marriage. Bella often wants to talk something through. Roman is more likely to need some space first. Neither is wrong. But without understanding that difference, space can feel like withdrawal to one person, while wanting to keep talking can feel like pressure to the other.

What happens for you? When something is difficult, do you want to talk, get reassurance, solve it quickly, go quiet or have some space? What do you wish your partner understood about you in those moments?

Our reactions don’t come from nowhere. We all arrive in a relationship with experiences of what people do when they’re upset, disappointed or angry. What was that like in the families you grew up in? What happened when somebody was hurt? And how did people find their way back to each other?

But don’t only look at what goes wrong. Remember a difficult moment you’ve handled well together. What did you do that helped? What did your partner do? How did you find your way back to each other?There will be seasons when one of you is tired, disappointed, under pressure or simply not at your best.

When that happens, how would you like to be able to treat each other?

Understanding your patterns won’t mean getting every difficult moment right. But it can give you more choices about what happens next.

5. Make room for what matters

By now, you’ve talked about quite a lot. For this final conversation, look back at what you’ve discovered.

What already happens between you that you want to keep making room for in married life?

Perhaps it’s praying together. Proper conversations. Dates. Affection. Asking about each other’s world. Having fun. Showing appreciation. Talking about a small hurt rather than letting it grow. Is there something you keep saying you’d like to do more of? And when life gets busy, what do you not want to get squeezed out? Choose one or two things rather than ten.

Small things, repeated over time, can become part of the way you relate to one another. And some of the ways you hope to love each other in marriage are things you can begin practising now. But habits aren’t there to make marriage boring. There should be room for spontaneity, surprise, new experiences and discovering things about each other that neither of you could have planned.

Our own marriage looks very different now, parenting a teenager and a preteen, from when we were newly married. Different seasons bring different rhythms, joys and pressures. Some things have stayed with us. Others have changed. And some of the things we now treasure weren’t even on our radar then.

Enjoy the season you’re in. And as the seasons change, keep asking:

What matters to us now, and how can we make room for it?