Does Marriage Need Preparation?
Most things in life you prepare for. You prepare for your exams, you prepare for your interviews, you prepare for your career, you prepare for your presentations. But ask anyone if they prepare for marriage which is such an important part of life and you’ll probably get a blank stare like you’re talking through your hat.
The thing to remember and accept is that preparation just makes things easier after those wedding rings have been slipped on. If one were to look at the many marriages falling apart, may be there is something to doing a little bit of spade work and putting in soil that will make the flowers of marital happiness bloom in your lives.
Now the best way would be to think of wedded life like a garden. You can have a spot of earth that has the most wonderful view but if you don’t toil on the soil, nothing of beauty is going to grow. So you dig, you buy good seeds or cuttings, you plant, you nurture, you weed and you then have the satisfaction of seeing buds grow and blossoms bloom.
The thing to keep in mind is that without this preparation, there will be no roots and without roots, it’s very easy to grow apart. Good roots help anchor a marriage and help it withstand the storms of life. Never mind what ill winds might blow, a good marriage stands firm against all odds.
This need for preparation before marriage seems to be coming into everyone’s notice what with the high rate of divorces today. In fact, the Church of England has taken cognizance of this fact and has come up with a guide to marriage – ‘Growing Together’. With so many different tensions assailing the togetherness of modern marriages, the time was right to make couples aware that marriage wasn’t easy and needed preparation and working on. This guide talks about all the aspects of marriage including children, sports and even sex. It advocates an openness in marriage to make it work. It also advises both the man and the woman as to what to expect from marriage and what to give to it in order to make it a success. This guide coincidentally was the result of a survey done by the Church two years ago where nearly 45% of the population in the UK felt that the Church should be involved in putting some kind of a guide together, at least for the ones who wish to get married in church.
