How long should I date
before I get married? My name is Paul
Friedman, I founded The Marriage
Foundation
and we also started a second
organization dedicated to this kind of
question. It's called Premarital Academy
premaritalacademy.org
and we want to help you. The reason
why you're not sure is because
there's so little good information in
society,
isn't it true? Everything comes to us
through magazines and through
gossip but where's the professional help?
So let's take a look at marriage
objectively.
People get married for two reasons
primarily to let's say high level
reasons.
The first is that they want to be happy,
isn't it true? Isn't that why you want to
get married?
Now there are sub reasons, you want to
have children.
You want to be with your companion. You
want to fit into society
in that realm of married people.
You want to be happier. Those things
bring you happiness
but then there's a second reason that's
also extremely important
and that is that you want to experience
marital love, unconditional love.
Call it what you will but it's that love
where you're
safe and secure. You swim in this joyful
ocean of love and it is wonderful.
Okay, so those are your two primary
reasons for getting married then there's
all the sub
reasons. Well, you can't just get married.
First, you have to be engaged.
Well, you don't just get engaged. First
you have to
date and so that brings us to the
question,
how long should you date before
you consider engagement? Because these
are
steps that you're consciously taking
to lead you to these two wonderful
things a lifetime of happiness and a
lifetime of love.
So now, we've got to ask the question.
Who are you going to be with?
Who's going to help you have these two
things?
This becomes a garden of Eden but you
have to be with the right person.
Ah the right person,
how do you know who's the right person?
And this is where the answer to this
question
lies. How long does it take
to get to know somebody well enough
before you're sure because you don't
want to marry someone
who's for instance addicted to
substances
whose abusing drugs
or alcohol, right? So you want a list
of things that you know
you don't want them to have. You don't
want them to have
anger problems, out of control
or emotional instability.
You might be saying, "Well, everyone is
somewhat emotionally
unstable." Sure, so what you do is you
start
putting together a list for yourself
of things that are acceptable, things
that are desirable
and things that are not desirable. And
naturally because
we need to be self-protective, you're
going to be really on the lookout
for the things that are not desirable
and you don't want to be dating somebody
for a long time if they have these
undesirable qualities
so it brings up another important topic.
When do I start having sex?
And this is really tricky because if you
start
too soon, if you start before you have
vetted
them it's going to be very difficult to
break it off.
And then you might say, "But everybody is
having pre-marital sex,"
but you're not going to marry just
anybody. You want your marriage to last
a lifetime. Now there's a lot of
good topics covered by
sticking with this channel, subscribing
but it's even better
still to go to Premarital Academy
and start digging in. We've made it
intentionally very
inexpensive for you so that you can
really learn these things
and you don't become a negative
statistic.
Because remember there's two things
that you have the right to insist upon
when you do get married. Do you remember
what they are?
Number one is happiness, ever increasing
happiness
which means every day you're happier
than the day before.
The second thing is marital love
unconditional love
experiencing ever expanding love. There's
no limit
to how love can grow. It is
the infinite commodity
is love. There's not just so much love
and you can't have more. It keeps growing
every day of your life when you know how.
I hope this has helped you. We're here to
help you
so take advantage of us because all of
our studies are based on
principles, not opinion, not
even statistics but principles,
universal principles that apply
and we've been doing this a long time so
we know that it works. God bless!
Take care and thank you for spending
some time with me!