I have watched a great many couples fall in love, and I have never once tried to talk them out of it. Love is a beautiful beginning. But I have also watched enough marriages to know that a beginning is all it is. What lasts is built later, out of honest conversations, shared values, and a spiritual foundation strong enough to carry weight.
So when an engaged couple asks me for advice, I do not hand them a list of rules. I hand them a list of conversations. Here are the five I believe every couple should have before saying “I do.”
Two Conversations About the Life You Are Building
1. Expectations. Each of you is carrying a picture of what marriage should look like, and you did not draw those pictures together. One of you grew up with Sunday dinners and the other with a quiet house. One assumes children soon, the other assumes travel first. None of that is a problem until it is a surprise. Talk openly about what you believe marriage is for and what kind of life you want to build. Put the pictures side by side now, while the differences are still conversations and not arguments.
2. Family boundaries. You are not only marrying a person. You are joining a family, and so is your spouse. Healthy boundaries with parents, siblings, and in-laws create unity between the two of you and protect the new thing God is making. Decide together how holidays will work, how much say relatives will have in your decisions, and where the line sits between honoring your parents and being run by them. A couple that settles this early spares itself years of quiet resentment.
Two Conversations About What You Will Lean On
3. Money. Money has a way of exposing what a couple has not said out loud. Financial transparency builds trust. Shared goals give that trust a direction. And wise stewardship reminds you both that what you have belongs to God before it belongs to either of you. Talk about debt, about giving, about saving, and about how each of you was taught to think about money. Nothing you learn in that conversation will hurt as much as learning it after the wedding.
4. Prayer life. This is the conversation that is easiest to postpone and the one that matters most. A marriage centered on God grows stronger through prayer, faith, and spiritual unity. Ask each other plainly: Will we pray together? Where will we worship? What does it look like for God to be at the center of our home rather than a guest in it? If you can kneel together before you stand together at the altar, you have already begun well.
One Conversation About the Hard Days
5. Conflict habits. You will disagree. That is not a sign of a bad match. It is a sign of two real people. The question is how you disagree. Do you go silent, or do you raise your voice? Do you need an hour alone, or do you need to settle it before bed? The way you handle disagreements today is a preview of how you will handle them in year ten. Learn each other’s habits now, name the ones that need to change, and agree on how you will fight fairly, forgive quickly, and come back to the table.
Preparation Is Not Perfection
I will be honest with you. These five conversations will not make your relationship perfect. Nothing will. But they can prepare you for a marriage that is stronger, healthier, and more centered on Christ than the one you would have stumbled into without them.
I wrote The Malgrave Letters About Couples for exactly this season of life. It is fiction, letters in which a senior tempter coaches his apprentices on the subject of couples, but it is built around the practical, faith-based habits that keep a relationship from unraveling. If you are engaged or newly married, I hope it gives you language for conversations you did not know how to start. It is available on Amazon and at major bookstores.
Plan the wedding. Enjoy every minute of it. But spend at least as much time preparing the marriage, because the wedding lasts a day and the marriage is meant to last the rest of your life.
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