According to a NYT article of December 17th, you have to ask the tough questions before you get married. And they are quite right. I’m going to disagree with some of what they said. But, hey, they are only one of the best newspapers in the world!

The article is about the need to ask the right questions before getting married. You need to know each other well… something that most couples don’t actually do.

(It’s not really their fault, by the way. Love’s chemistry blinds us and Nature doesn’t care whether you have a great marriage. Just so long as you have children and get them to be old enough to have children of their own. That’s good enough for Mother Nature.)

The article gives some good examples. One couple went to a weekend premarriage retreat run by their church and were amazed that most of the couples had major differences of expectation. For example, most of the couples hadn’t discussed when they were going to have kids. When they the course forced them to address it, each partner had very different ideas.

I’ve personally met three couples (or rather the remnants of three couples) who split after marriage because one wanted children and one didn’t. As Adam Sandler says in The Wedding Singer, “This is information that would have been useful YESTERDAY!”

I clearly remember the first time I ever heard of marriage preparation. Friends were married in the Catholic Church and had to go through the Catholic program. They were just amazed by how out of synch most of the other couples seemed.

One of the exercises that they had to do was to draw a picture of how their future looked. The woman next to them had drawn a picture of the perfect nuclear family, house, dog, and picket fence. Her fiance’s focused on NASCAR racing. There was a wave of shock around the room as most of the couples did a variation of that.

Another example in the Times article was the poor guy who suddenly discovered his new bride had $230,000 in student loans!!!

Anyway, the little ones are stirring. So I’ll leave it there for now.

Happy Couples, Happy Planet!

- Dan