The Marriage Course: Building Strong Foundations

This is the first in a series of posts about The Marriage Course–a course that is aimed at helping married couples strengthen their relationship.

Pei Chyi and I recently started attending The Marriage Course on the recommendation of my parents. Despite feeling a little weird about it in the beginning, I decided that I would do it with Pei Chyi to invest in our marriage.

Best friends investing in our marriage

Best friends investing in our marriage

The 1st session in this course is Building Strong Foundations. The most important thing that I learnt out of this session is that Marriage is a skill. It’s not something that comes naturally to all of us and if couples want to be good at your marriage, it’s something they have to learn and keep working at. Also, couples tend to take each other for granted after getting married. The dull routine of work, weekends with in-laws sprinkled in between compared to the excitement and giddy breathlessness of courtship is evidence enough.

Session 1 of The Marriage Course teaches couples to take stock of their current marriage and then do 2 very important things:

  1. Schedule Marriage Time into the calendar, just like how you might schedule meetings with your clients. After all, your spouse is more important than your client no? If yes, you must Plan, Prioritise and Protect this very important time together.
  2. Make conscious effort to Nurture Each Another. If you’ve ever given or received a performance review at work, I’m sure you felt great when Boss said, “Good work!”. We need to do the same for our spouses.

For the next 7 weeks, our Marriage Time will be the sessions we attend at The Marriage Course. After the course is over, we’re going to keep that timeslot to nurture our relationship (in addition to every opportunity in between). I’m planning to start making a list of things we can do during this Marriage Time and am already looking forward to it.

The Bible says that a man shall leave his father and mother to be united with his wife (Gen 2:24). Husband and wife must realise that they are not individuals anymore, but one flesh. Therefore, couples have to stop being inward-looking and work to maintain their marriage.

See Pei Chyi’s account of Session 1: Investing in your marriage

This post contains learnings from my sessions at The Marriage Course, a programme designed to help couples strengthen their relationships at any stage in their marriage. The Marriage Course is run by volunteers from Malaysian churches.

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