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Latest News Preparing for Marriage and Understanding the Nature of Commitment

3rd April 2017

Preparing for Marriage and Understanding the Nature of Commitment

You are perhaps now in the home stretch and busily preparing for your dream wedding day. All the to-do lists have been checked and rechecked, but yet a little anxiety remains that you may have overlooked or forgotten something important. Have you both reflected on the nature of your commitment together, or have you considered how important it is to take a marriage preparation course? After all, marriage is one of the most significant steps you will ever take in your lives.

By this stage you are consciously aware marriage is for life. This isn’t something you have chosen because you feel good in the moment. In other words, marriage isn’t an emotional feeling of goodwill that can be revisited next year or the year after. The commitment you make in marriage will be just as real on the day you are not feeling so good about each other, or yourself. Emotional feelings – though vitally important within your shared life of love – come and go. Commitment is for life. It’s a conscious decision to support one another through thick and thin, through good times and bad.

Through the strength of commitment within marriage you learn to feel safe and secure within your relationship. You are no longer a lone soldier; you are now part of a team. Together you are prepared for life’s joys and hardships in equal measure. Commitment in marriage is a conscious choice to forsake other choices in order to live in love as one.

So as you both go forward to your special day, have you reflected on how you look at commitment within your relationship? How did you get to where you now are? Is it just a natural extension of how you are together, and how you’ve grown in deepening friendship and trust? Or is your sense of commitment a practical and contractual statement of where you are in life? Or is it all of these, and perhaps something deeper yet? Is it an expression of your loving emotional bond – a real commitment of love? Love is an all-encompassing entity, embracing all your faculties including emotion and spirituality.

Have you considered the spiritual aspect of love and commitment? How would you like to see this expressed within your wedding day? As you are considering a Christian marriage, you may need to ask one another what place does religion and spirituality play within your lives? Indeed many couples, whose lives lack an outward expression of spirituality, or involvement with Church, choose to make this connection when they decide to get married. They wish to see their union blessed by God. Within Sacramental Marriage in the Catholic Church, through mutual giving of consent, you become ministers of the sacrament in that you confer marriage on yourselves. The role of the priest is to assist in the ceremony and to bless your marriage. This is made manifest in that your declaration of love is made before the entire church community.

Exercise: Discuss with each other what you mean by commitment. How has your commitment grown together? How do you see your public declaration of commitment being fulfilled on your wedding day?

For Your Information:

The Accord marriage preparation course, “Marriage – A Journey Not a Destination” offers couples the opportunity to reflect on their unique relationship and discuss topics which are important in their lives.  Taking time to explore such topics, in private, can result in couples gaining a better understanding of themselves and their fiancé and this can have a very positive impact both on their relationship and future together.

For further information visit: http://www.accord.ie

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