Questions to ask your partner before
you finally decide to get married. Hi, my
name is Paul Friedman. I founded The
Marriage Foundation
and we also founded a sister
organization called Premarital Academy
which can probably help you a lot. And it
sounds like you're starting to get
serious about somebody and now you want
to know am I missing anything.
Let's talk about what it is that
you're getting married for.
You're getting married so that you could
be happier
every single day of your life. You should
be happier than the day before when
you're married.
It's one of the promises of marriage and
it's legitimate.
It should be a demand also of your
marriage
and the other thing that you're looking
for when you get married is
the feeling of love, unconditional love,
marital love. Again
should be an expectation that way these
two things
you could move towards having them in
ever
increasing volume every day of your
lives when you know how.
So the questions that you're going to
ask your potential
have to do with this. You want to make
sure
that for instance, there's nothing to
block
these things from happening like drug
abuse.
so in today's world, a very common good
question is, do you smoke pot?
If you smoke pot. "Well yeah,
a couple times last year I did." No big
deal.
"Oh yeah, every day." Big deal because we
already know what
pot does to the mind. Do you use heroin?
Just kidding obviously, you wouldn't even
be looking at these kind of videos
if you were involved with someone who's
using hard drugs.
But then there's deeper questions that
are really very personal,
you want to be on the same page
in terms of your values. Many years ago, I
had a good friend
still a good friend who was a
professional basketball player
and he used to bring by
his potentials
for me to evaluate them for him
and he was pretty well known, pretty
famous guy.
So he was even dating at one point
an ex-girlfriend of Stings who
you may be too young to remember but a
very very famous
singer and musician and very famous.
And she and I got talking, and my friend
believes in God very deeply and we
talked for a while.
And I said to him afterwards,
"You know she doesn't believe in God." And
he goes, "You're kidding."
He never bothered to ask. Well, this is
important
because if they have children eventually
married someone
who -- they were very compatible
with each other but when you have
children, you want them to be
raised with certain values.
So for some people
it happens now that we're going through
a period of an election
so people are thinking in terms of what
party to identify
myself with -- not so important.
Politics comes and goes but it may be
you need to have a list of things that
are important to you and ask
those questions. Don't be afraid because
if you don't ask those questions
problems are for sure going to come up.
Now maybe you're a little timid about it
so what you could do for instance is you
could create a list.
Things that are important to me and have
your partner write
things that are important to me and then
switch
and then you could go home
afterwards and you could
say, "Look, I don't think it's going to
work out," or, "Wow,
I had no idea. You believe the same way." I
do about this very important topic.
Big topic for instance for most people is
abortion.
Some people, "I'm completely anti-abortion,"
but some people are not. Some people
think it's okay
as long as it's done within a certain
period of time.
You should know about how each of you
feels.
How many children do you want to have?
What are your ambitions in life? How much
money are we going to make?
Are you going to work? Am I going to work?
Should we work together? Do you want to
start a business?
These could be important questions but
you need to ask those questions that are
important
to you. So the first step is to put
a list down of important questions
maybe even Google, what are important
questions to ask?
And you need to then put a value on
those.
I mean obviously, if you believe in God
and you pray
maybe you even meditate. That's a big
deal for you.
You certainly don't want to be with
someone who is
an activist atheist or vice versa.
So I'm very glad you're asking this
question
and you need to approach it very
personally because it's a very
personal question for you.
Okay. I hope that helps.
Please visit the other site
Premarital Academy, maybe we have some
things for you that would be helpful.
God bless and take care! Thank you for
taking the time!