Wedding Souvenir

People who have never planned a wedding before often hire a wedding planner to help them plan their wedding. They hire a celebrant to help them construct a wedding ceremony that will move them in the most effective way from engaged to married. That same celebrant helps the couple craft the wedding vows that will be the foundation for their marriage.

Why is it, when you suggest that people find support and training to learn how to negotiate and resolve problems that so many people balk? No one feels inadequate if they hire a planner or a celebrant. Almost everyone feels inadequate (if not defective) if they look for a good counselor to train them to resolve issues in a healthy and productive fashion. Statistics show us that we’re not as good at marriage as we’d like to be. So why not develop skills ahead of time that will deliver the wedding vows and the marriage that we want to live into?

You’ve got a great training period: your wedding planning period. You’ve got a pile of decisions to make about family and finances. It’s the perfect time. And it may be the best investment you’ll make. Can’t afford it? Don’t order the favors. Your guests would far rather that you were successful in marriage than that they received a wedding souvenir!

Here are some things you might want to work on with your counselor:

1. Goals for your wedding planning: Do you want to just get through? Do you want to have fun with this process? Do you know what your partner wants? Do you want to plan your wedding together?
2. Setting Budgets: Unpack the entire financial issue and learn to talk easily about money.
3. Getting Clarity: what’s the issue being discussed? Is it the table decorations or not being heard?
4. Dealing with Family: So many areas here! Money, who gets invited, who makes decisions, how you set boundaries. You could work for years on these things!
5. Fighting Fairly: How accomplished are each of you individually and both of you together at conducting a great fight? Not a lot of people are, but marriages have issues to deal with. Get good at dealing with them!
6. Marriage Skills: What are you already accomplished at? What could use some buttressing?
7. Life Balance: Career, Romance, Home, Wedding, Health. There’s a lot to undertake and you want to be one another’s best ally and support.
8. Marriage Mission: What do you want to accomplish with your marriage? Thinking about children, world travel or world peace. It’s helpful to have a direction. You can always change directions, but you want to know which road to start down. Having this will make writing your wedding vows so much easier!

Invest in your marriage. You’ll get much a much better return on your investment in counseling than you will in your party planning, however much fun that will be. But even the party planning will be more fun if you’re both in it together, working toward your great wedding ceremony and reception and, of course, happily and healthily ever after marriage!