The New Eve (14 page)

For instance, are both of you in sync with God's purposes for your marriage? That's certainly one of those deeper chords. When I ask this question, it often draws a blank stare from engaged couples. God's purposes?

Remember, in Genesis God called the man and woman together for three specific reasons: for deep companionship, for raising healthy children, and for advancing His kingdom. To be married before God means forging a covenant together for aggressively pursuing these priorities and ordering life around them.

Of course, to do this requires a certain level of spiritual maturity and spiritual compatibility between you and your fiancé. That being the case, let me ask another deeper-chord question essential to your relationship. Are you both Christians? If you are and he's not, the Bible warns you
not
to move forward in this relationship. “Do not be bound together with unbelievers,” 2 Corinthians 6:14 says. Why the hard line? Because the deepest language of marriage is spiritual language. Nothing draws a couple closer and keeps them closer than a shared spiritual life. Therefore, be careful not to overlook or whitewash this vital area during your engagement. Be honest and ask tough questions. A broken engagement now is far better than a broken marriage later. On the other hand, laying a common spiritual foundation will be the single most important thing you can do for your marriage. It will undergird every other season to come.

Be sure that you also take advantage of well-designed premarital preparation. See if a class or training program is offered at your church. If not, find one. And if all else fails, look for one you can work through on video or on the Internet. It would be wise to ask an older, successful married couple to join you in this video experience. Interact with them about the information presented.

The point is: don't enter marriage unprepared! Most marriages that fail today fail within the first five years. On the other hand, research has shown that good premarital training virtually guarantees that this will not be the case for you. Make sure your premarital preparation includes large amounts of discussion, interaction, and practical helps over such vital topics as
money, values, conflict resolution, marriage roles, marriage expectations, and sex. It would also be extremely helpful if this time included personality testing as well. Know this: personalities never change. You can rub off some of the rough spots, but basically, you are who you are. So the more you can know about each other's core personality—the strengths, the weaknesses, the pluses, the minuses, the needs of that personality, the language of that personality, and so on—the better.

Finally, read a few good-quality books on marriage. Two classics I highly recommend are Willard Harley's
His Needs, Her Needs
and Gary Chapman's
The Five Love Languages.

If all of this makes marriage sound like serious business, it is. The majority of the happiness you will experience in life as a woman will come from it. That's the wonderful upside. So don't ignore learning about marriage even as you enjoy this high-intensity season of love.

Now you've arrived, right? Actually, you've just begun. You've trained, studied, sought advice, and looked deeply into the vital issues of marriage, and now the first thing you need to do is
keep on
doing these things. Keep reading. Every year make it a point to take a class on an aspect of marriage. Go as a couple to a marriage conference. Seek wise counsel when conflicts arise. This is also a great time for your husband to go through one of my Men's Fraternity curricula, such as
Winning at Work and Home
or
The Quest for Authentic Manhood
(www.mensfraternity.com). Like professional athletes, keep up your training regimen at all times. Keep investing.

Today 43 percent of all first-time marriages end in divorce. That sobering statistic means you will have to take your marriage much more seriously than much of the world does.
Maybe even more seriously than your parents did. Seek third-party support for your young marriage. Find a couple who has been in the marriage game longer than you. Go to this husband and wife for advice. Open your life. Drain tension. Get wisdom. Make them your life coaches. Let them peer in through the windows to your soul. Let them ask hard questions. It will feel invasive at first, but windowless lives almost always have trouble. Don't close yourself off from the help available.

It's also vital to erect some firm financial disciplines early in your marriage to which both of you agree and adhere. You'll probably both be working. This season invites that. So develop your abilities and gain confidence and experience in a career path. Establish yourself. Remember, what you gain from work now can be leveraged in other seasons of life as something to fall back on or as something with which to open new doors. So make the most of it.

But be careful with the money you make as a couple. A double income is seductive. You can overbuy, overextend, and destabilize your marriage. You can quickly become enslaved to financial obligations and commitments (car payments, mortgages, and loans) that demand you work even during seasons when you long to be home. A radical and wise step would be to live on one income from the start. My wife and I did that. Every month we put her entire teacher's salary into savings.
We knew when kids came along, she would want to stay home with them while they were young. So we purposely lived a one-income lifestyle from the beginning. We bought used cars and limited our purchases.

Besides, what we really desired in this opening season of our marriage was not stuff but rich experiences together.
Fun.
Some of the money we saved during this time gave us this opportunity in a big way. After a year of disciplined living, we made a memory most couples only dream about for their retirement. We packed our bags and took off to Europe and the Middle East. We rode camels to the pyramids, sailed down the Nile under moonlight, scampered up the Eiffel Tower like teenagers, stood on the Mount of Olives overlooking Jerusalem, and walked the shores of Galilee. That was nearly forty years ago, and we haven't stopped talking about it yet. It created in both of us a love of travel that has now become our common fun. As for the new car we didn't buy in those early days, well, we haven't missed it once.

Finally, get involved together in a local church. Build a Christian community around you. Research shows that couples who attend church together on a regular basis are between 35 and 50 percent less likely than all other Americans, including infrequent churchgoers, to get a divorce.
⁵

I once saw a bumper sticker that said, “My children saved me from toxic self-absorption.” There's a lot of truth in that. If ever there was a season of life that is not about you, this is it. Your little ones require major-league attention. They are desperate for face time with you. Lots of it.

I once read a story about a young third-grader named Timmy who was having trouble at school. Timmy's mother was called in to discuss his poor performance. She heard about his reading
problems and his struggles with math. Then the teacher asked, “Why does Timmy always say, ‘Love is slow?’” Timmy's mother suddenly began to sob. She knew. She then explained about her demanding job and the long hours she had to give to it. To get to work on time in the morning, she had to constantly push Timmy along. Then at night after a long day, she had to rush back home to cook dinner, clean up, and get to bed. The whole time she was pressing Timmy to finish his homework, pick up his toys, take a bath, and so on. “I find myself constantly saying to him, ‘Timmy, you are so slow!’”

For any child, love is slow. You simply cannot properly nurture the next generation without large amounts of time and focused attention. That's particularly true for children five years of age and younger. But for whatever reasons, today it's very hard for many young mothers to hear that.

In a recent landmark study conducted by Dartmouth Medical School, researchers discovered that the way a child's brain wires itself, neurologically speaking, is determined
after
birth by the care and attention he or she receives.
Love
shapes a child's brain! Love helps a child's brain connect itself together in a healthy way. The Dartmouth study also found that if a child is neglected and the love he or she needs falls short, these same neurological connectors actually
mis-connect
, creating emotional and intellectual deficits in the brain that can last a lifetime.
⁶

New sociological data backs up these findings. It shows that as the economy and standard of living in America has skyrocketed in the past thirty years, so has the rate of mental disorders and emotional problems among children.
⁷
Busy, career-minded parents, absent emotionally or physically, breed troubled kids. It's an epidemic money doesn't fix. That's the short of it. Nothing is more indispensable to a young child than large amounts of time and attention from a loving mother and father. Nothing.

Your spouse needs you too in this season of life. Frankly, a lot of the things that were fun when you first married—spontaneity, freedom, and extra money—are simply gone now, banished by a teetering pile of diapers, sleepless nights, calls for “Watch me,” and growing pains. This is a major marriage adjustment time.

That being said, you
must keep
time for your spouse. This will not be easy. Early-childhood parenting is exhausting, but you cannot allow it to eclipse your marriage. The best survival remedy I know is the one Sherard and I practiced for years in this season of our lives: we took quarterly getaways together. These can do what the frenzy of everyday life at this stage cannot do: provide you with some much-needed downtime when you can rest and focus on one another. You may not have a lot of money for this, but a special overnighter (or more) once every three months will serve as an oasis of refreshment for you and your husband to talk, reflect, plan, play, and romance. And don't call home either. Make it a clean break. The kids will be OK. Trust me.

You'll also need to be careful with your finances. Yes, this is a theme for every season of life. But here it raises a huge question: Will you continue to work? Full-time? Part-time? What about scaling back? Is that possible? Or will you be transitioning at this point from two incomes to one? This can be a time of courageous faith or real tension, especially if you're conflicted about whether you should or can stay at home while the kids
are young. But no matter what you decide, it needs to be a
team
decision between you and your husband that's made after careful consideration of God's Word, your unique situation, and what's best for your children.

This is an odd time for you as a woman. In some ways you feel you're able to ratchet down your commitment level. No more diapers. You're sleeping again. The kids can bathe and dress themselves just fine. You breathe a little easier.

Or do you?

The fact is, you might find yourself ramping up your efforts as never before. You run the kids from school to soccer to baseball to tutoring to the overnighter at the Joneses' place. You do parties, graduations, and school plays. If you're like my wife when our kids were in school, all this adds up to twenty-five thousand miles a year on the minivan. That's enough to circle the earth!