We’ve hit on a tradition that we think we are going to stick with: celebrate the New Year with friends in a different time zone.

Between the 6-month old and the two-year old, we don’t get near enough sleep. So staying up to midnight sounds more like an ordeal than a good time.

Instead, we’ve just called my brother’s family on the East Coast, four hours ahead of us. We cheered and celebrated long distance. And we get to go to bed at a reasonable time, which will make the first day of the New Year much happier than it otherwise would have been!

Happy Couples, Happy Planet!

Plenty. You see, religious differences are one of the key predictors of marital breakdown. And our little family has had to navigate these waters.

Heather is Catholic, her family are active in the Church, and her uncle is a priest. I am d) none of the above. In fact, my mother is a confirmed atheist. (One of my favourite lines from a movie is in The Emerald Forest: “Oh, they are confirming atheists now?!”)

Heather and I came to an explicit agreement on the subject before we got married:

• We would be married by a Unitarian minister.
• I would never attend Church; Heather and the kids would.
• The children would be baptised Catholic and able to make up their own minds later.
• I would attend key events such as baptisms.

Your own agreement on about how you will handle religion in your marriage will likely look quite different from ours. But one word in ours should apply to yours: “explicit”.

Even if one of you is converting to the other’s religion, you still need to agree on how often, where and when you will attend services. AND the convert deserves some thanks, in this world not the next. Moving away from a lifetime of belief is not done lightly.

If you are of different religions or if one is religious and the other isn’t, then you need to spell things out all the more clearly. It is very easy to make assumptions and end up feeling betrayed when your partner turns out not to share those assumptions. For example, the more devout you are, the harder it is to believe that your bride or groom-to-be won’t see the light. (This, in my experience, applies equally to atheists and to believers.)

In addition, you may well face pressures from your family or from your spouse’s family. It is much better to have an agreed upon line ahead of time. If you are making decisions on the fly, you will often find yourselves tripping over them.

Ultimately, our agreement has worked very well for us. But there were hiccups…

which will be the topic of another post. Tomorrow, my inlaws will be thankful for my spirit of compromise and I will be thankful for having such great inlaws.

Happy Couples, Happy Planet!

- Dan

Not much else to say, really.

I love Christmas. It is by far my favourite holiday, though we make an effort not to go overboard.

Heather and I make a pact not to get gifts for each other, each year. And every year, I cheat and get her something. She has cottoned on, though, and bought me something this year.

To my mind, gift-giving is mostly about kids. And we had a great time watching Millie open her presents (and everyone else’s). She was quite spoiled this year and — at two years old — she if finally understanding what the gifts are. The last two Christmases were all about eating wrapping paper.
For us, Christmas is more about family. We live close to our parents (by design, after years of living and traveling far from home). My parents usually host a Christmas Eve get together, then we host Christmas morning for brunch and a Secret Santa gift exchange, then my in-laws host a dinner with all the trimmings.

The Secret Santa works well for us. We set a $50 limit. Each person contributes one gift and we each get a chance to unwrap a present or to steal an already unwrapped one from someone who has already opened. It’s fun, some of the gifts are really creative, and I always look forward to it. It makes Christmas shopping a breeze and really removes much of the stress. And, as we have all been adults for some time, we all have more than we need already. We still get the joy of giving, but without collecting piles of stuff that we don’t really need.

How you handle holidays is something you should discuss with your spouse. Ideally, before you get married, of course. Do you want to start your own traditions? Do you like the way your family handled things? Will you spend a given holiday with your parents or your spouse’s? Do you want to start celebrating on your own?

Remember, too, that holidays can be stressful. In fact, many people do not have happy associations with, for example, Christmas. Starting a married life together can give you the opportunity to change that with traditions or approaches that work better for you.

All the best for the holidays, to you and yours.

-Dan

Happy Couples, Happy Planet!

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

No doubt about it, weddings are big business.

The average wedding in the US is over $22,000. In Canada, it is over $18,000, in the UK over 17,000 pounds and in Australia over $28,000! Our own wedding cost us about $6,000 or $7,000. As relatively cheap as that is, we were amazed at how fast the price tag grew beyond our original budget.

The good news is that there are plenty of ways to save money on your Big Day.

So we approached a couple of ‘frugality and wedding experts’ for some tips.

The result is the third article in our budding library of marriage articles on CouplesQuestions (the site, that is, rather than the blog).

Saving Money on Your Wedding was written by Darsi at Frugal Bride. The site is one of Canada’s best-known wedding websites, so we are pleased to have their expert contribution.

The figures for cost-of-wedding come from another great site, the Bargain Queen blog from downunder.

We get a fair amount of interest in how to save on wedding costs, so more on this topic soon. We promise!

Happy Couples, Happy Planet!

As the Festival of Lights gets set to begin, we would like to wish all of you who are celebrating Hanukkah the very best of the season and for the coming New Year!

Not being Jewish myself, my in depth knowledge of this festival is limited - You can learn more here. But I know that at heart it is a celebration of being free from religious persecution - and that, as far as I am concerned, is definitely worth acknowledgment and cerebration in this sometimes troubled world. I find the traditions surrounding Hanukkah are warm and wonderful. The prayers are beautiful (I love the sound of them, even if I don’t understand them) and the food is GORGEOUS!! So fabulous it could make a gal convert! Oy vey!

Happy Hanukkah! Hope these “8 Crazy Nights” are terrific!

Heather

Happy Couples, Happy Planet!

We’ve been moving the blog over to our own domain (for a month now — it has been a bit of a saga).

This should have no effect for you, who read the blog by e-mail via Feedblitz. The only change should be that the blog will look different when you click through to a story.

However, we thought you should know, in the interests of full disclosure. If you wish to unsubscribe, it can be done from the e-mail you get. If you have problems, e-mail us and we can do it for you.

Happy Couples, Happy Planet!

Now here’s an interesting case for premarital counseling.

If you are at all geeky or web-marketingy (to coin a really ugly term), then you’ve probably used the Overture keyword selector. It lets you find out how often a given topic is searched on Yahoo in the last month.

Search for “premarital counseling” and related terms like marriage preparation, marriage education, or premarriage counselling. You will come up with about 2,000 searches for the month.

If you search for “marriage counseling” (and no other related terms), you come up with 35,000 searches!

Over 17 times as many people “repenting at leisure” as there are prepared to look beyond “love will conquer all”! (Sorry, that was a bit cheeky when we are talking about people who are in difficulty, pain, and even crisis.)

Now that is very telling to us. We are sure that most people involved in marriage preparation will agree. No offense to the Marriage and Family Therapists out there, but it would be a much better world if those two numbers were reversed! We are guessing that most therapists would really rather that people came to them before they had problems, too.

These numbers, by the way, are a fraction of the total number of people looking. Given that Google and other search engines have a much larger reach than Yahoo alone, there are probably 150,000 searches for marriage counseling each month, compared to maybe 10,000 for premarital counseling.

That’s a lot of people dealing with pain that they might have avoided by being better prepared.

Happy Couples, Happy Planet!

So we sent him a note and the result is the second article in our budding library: Tom’s Top Ten Toasting Tips.

Both of us have done our share of public speaking in our time and we can tell you, these are good. (We still think it is worthwhile buying his bundle of books though! And, no, we still don’t get paid for promoting them.)

Happy Couples, Happy Planet!

As author John Ince notes, kissing is one of the most intimate and important things a couple does. But the frequency and passion tends to decline as the relationship matures.

Find out how to reignite the passion in John’s article on kissing for couples. You can even take a class, if you happen to be in Vancouver!

Happy Couples, Happy Planet!