The Premarital Counselling: Session 1

We started our 1st Pre Marital Counselling session and realised there was a whole lot of truth in the Bible's instructions applicable to marriage. We wondered why we didn't start the counselling before planning out the whole wedding, it could have saved us a lot of arguments from all the disagreements between us two.

Ps. Nick gave us the illustration of ropes, that the husband and wife forms two ropes that are tied together. However, without a third rope that is Jesus Christ, the two ropes can be pulled apart. Hence Jesus is the third rope that binds us together.

In the marriage our first priority would be to obey God.
Then we both would have to constantly put in effort to maintain the marriage.

While the equation of 1 + 1 = 2, however in God's eye, 1 man + 1 woman = 1 body in marriage

We would have to grow together in the marriage either by getting the same hobbies or getting the same group of friends to hang out with (beside single nights).

There's the part where most woman would disagree, that in decision making, woman is the advisor and that man is the decision maker.
The right way to mutually agree upon a decision would be for the woman to provide the choices and advise on which one she would agree on and that the man would have to weight all the choices based on wisdom and ultimately decide which would be the best.

In future counselling sessions, Ps Nick would be teaching Dave on making decisions and how to assure the wife that it is the best choice, while respecting her. While Bianca would be teaching Agnes on how to make the man agree on what the woman wants, how to make the man feel that he's in power by making decisions while it is the woman who's pulling the strings discreetly. Tricks they have picked up from their own marriage.

We were told that in accordance to the Bible, a man must leave his father and mother after marriage.
Pondering upon this, I had to look through the Bible to see where this is written and found it first stated in Genesis 2:24 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife (New International Version). Now the problems of most marriages where bickering with in-laws has already been forseen as early as when God created the first man and woman, Adam and Eve. God has provided advise (from dunno what century BC) that after getting married best to stay away from parents and in-laws.
It was emphasised again in the New Testament: Mat 19:5; Mark 10:7-8; Eph 5:31.

Therefore after getting married, our priorities are with each other and not with the parents. Halfway through the marriage preparations I found this to be so very true, while designing the invitation cards we considered it appropriate to get approval from parents of both sides if they'd like our design. Now because of this we had spent almost 4 months designing and redesigning the invitation cards again and again, when we finally got a design where the parents liked both the colour and the layout, we didn't like it at all. We had decided to drop the previous vendor who's doing our invitation cards and get charged a cancellation fee, in search for another vendor to start a fresh design from scratch. It's not that the first vendor's design or work wasn't good, its just that we had them change designs so many times that if we had continued with it, the ones doing the design would be more likely to just want to get it done and over, with less regard of what we want.
Therefore our new approach is to start a design from scratch and as long as we both like it, we'll get it printed regardless of what our parents would say, they couldn't complain much as we'll almost out of time to get the invitation cards ready to be handed out.

From this particular example, we've learnt that in the marriage no matter how good our parents are to us, we wouldn't be satisfied if they were to make decisions for us. Which is why the Bible stated: be separate from our parents and that our priorities would be to each other and for our own family which we would ultimately have.
Also the other things concerning the wedding, we both decided that it is our wedding and we should do our own planning, eventhough our parents paid for it, we'll still have to treat them as guests with as little interference from them, they'd just have to accept and enjoy whatever turns out to be on the wedding day.
Now I wondered why I didn't read the Bible more often, I guess all the answers to my problems can be found in there.