Our marriage is important to us and we invest in it. We continue to keep it as our number 2 focus after our individual relationships with Christ. We invest in it because of what we learned in pre-engagement counseling. Before we got engaged we went through pre-engagement counseling to make sure we knew not only what marriage would entail and have the tools and resources we would use but to have the option to back out of the relationship before it got to engagement and any doubt crossed our minds or if through counseling we realized this wasn’t going to work.
It seems as though once you’re engaged people find it hard to back out if they don’t think they’re making the right decision. They either go through with the marriage and get divorced shortly after, cancel the wedding right before it happens or stay married and remain miserable. Our counselor recommended we start with pre-engagement counseling to peel everything back, take a look at our family histories, try to understand them and see what tools we should use for any disagreement that may arise.
It was eye opening to do our family history, go back 4 generations and see:
- What was going on in our families
- Why marriages didn’t work
- Issues we didn’t know about and never heard of
We received tools from our counselor on how to manage the things we saw in our families as generational cycles are real but how you deal with issues determines how your marriage will either grow and flourish or diminish and die. By going through counseling we were confident and sure of moving to the next stage – engagement and then marriage. The best decision we made while dating was pre-engagement counseling.
After we got married we continued counseling once a month which was so beneficial during our first year that we didn’t drive each other crazy, we didn’t feel like we were catching each other off guard or that we were married to a stranger. This was great because we both lived at home with our parents/grandparents until we got married.
Going to counseling has made marriage such a blessing to us. We understand how to love each other the way we need to be loved and not how we think we should be. We moved away from our families 10 months after being married and we believe it was the best thing that could have happened for us. We truly left and cleft, cleaved? lol We only had each other to rely on out here in the Midwest.
To continue sowing into our marriage we looked into doing a Marriage Vision Retreat. What did that entail? We didn’t know lol so we googled it. It meant going away for 3-4 days and doing activities that covered a wide range of topics – finances, health, sex, communication, children, affection and more. We found one we liked by Jimmy Evans and decided to go for it. It’s recommended to do the Vision Retreat at the end of the year to prepare for the next year.
We prayed on it, cash flowed it, and found a nice little cabin not far from where we live. To save money while on our debt free journey we purchased groceries to cook while there so we wouldn’t eat out. This vision retreat was challenging because it forced us to dig deeper in our marriage and really think about topics that weren’t at the forefront of our minds. It was both life changing and marriage strengthening and such a great thing to do during this debt free journey. It also pushed us to talk about our vision for our relationship, where we saw ourselves in 1 year, 5 years, 10 years, 15 years. If we had kids, what was our vision for them? What was our vision for our family? What was our family motto? What impact did we as couple want to have on others, what was our ministry to others? Our gifts? It brought us closer than even we thought was possible.
After the retreat we decided that we would do this every year and have until this year when Baby HutchLife was born. We will at some point get to the Vision Retreat but are enjoying being new parents right now.
What do you do to keep your marriage a priority? What do you do to keep yourself a priority?
