Marriage with Meaning

Marriage is a great transition. It is a time when, even if the couple has been living together prior to marriage, two separate lives merge together as one. It is a time of great excitement and great anxiety. Planning for a wedding and a marriage brings up many emotions that can be hard to deal with and many questions to which it is hard to find reliable answers. Meeting individually with the clergy who will be performing the ceremony is important. The officiant should get to know the couple that he/she will join in marriage and you should get to know your officiant and be comfortable with him/her. It is also important that you see that the Jewish community has something of substance to offer you at this point in your lives. It is my not-so-subtle hope that through the course of reading this manual and talking with your rabbi or cantor you will see the Jewish community as a place of comfort and strength and a place where you will choose to be involved. Engaging in a program of premarital preparation has clear benefits. One positive is that, “Life cycle crises are a time for great personal growth. The more people do to prepare for something the stronger the commitment. The same can be said for marriage preparation.” You might not think of your marriage as a “crisis,” but it does mean a radical intensification of your relationship and a change in the way you are seen by the outside world. Therefore, the more seriously you take marriage and the preparation for it, the more likely you are to work to create the meaning in marriage that we all wish for you as you stand under the chuppah. Premarital counseling can also defuse some issues that might have become bigger ones later in the relationship just by putting them on the table at such a formative moment your relationship. But, premarital counseling will not solve all the challenges you might encounter. There may still be a time that you face substantial difficulty and need to look for help. A good premarital counseling program will allow us to validate this statement from the 1950s, “In a sense, we may consider this premarital interview as a pre-counseling contract, which prepares the way for real counseling when it is needed.” If premarital counseling does nothing more than suggest that marriage counseling is not taboo at a time when it becomes necessary, then it has served an important purpose in helping you to succeed in marriage. With all this, it is important to note that this program of premarital counseling is not the ideal. Research has shown that the best time to have these conversations about the opportunities and challenges of marriage is six months after your wedding. In order to get the most benefit out of this manual then, it is best to come back to it several months after your wedding when you have an understanding of what your marriage’s strengths and weaknesses are. Premarital counseling lays the foundation for you to have important conversations and reflect on your counseling sessions as a way to deal with the difficult adjustment to marriage. Through the course of this book you will have the opportunity to learn more about yourself and your partner, you will continue to develop your identity as a couple, you will learn values that can guide you throughout your married life, and, in this book, you will have a resource to which you can refer in difficult times. Some may wonder why it is important to have a book written from a Jewish perspective. What can ancient texts offer that social science can not? Much of the social science literature on marriage, and certainly the articles and books that are still widely read, were published within the last 100 years. Studies are done constantly that reveal aspects of human relationships. This means that the field of social science as it relates to the study of relationships, is constantly evolving. Jewish tradition offers a different perspective—that of history. Jews have gotten married throughout 3000 year history of the Jewish people’s existence. Over this long span, Jewish authors have learned about love and marriage as well. They learn not by looking at the latest research, but by looking at the relationship between the two lovers. By merging social science with Jewish tradition, we have the best of both worlds; a theoretically sound counseling model rooted in the experience and wisdom of tradition.