Getting Ready for Marriage Workbook: Knowing the Person Youre Go

This premarital counseling workbook for Christians helps engaged couples and newlyweds:

• Know each other more deeply: Learn what baggage you're bringing to marriage by exploring your family backgrounds and pasts together.
• Communicate with each other more fully: Examine your communication styles and coping skills.
• Plan your future together: Determine guidelines for your marriage, from how to handle money to your sexual relationship.

Through interactive exercises, couples will uncover the roots of their beliefs, sight potential problem areas, and learn how to successfully work through problems. Couples will then be encouraged to make their own covenants in specific areas such as financial matters, resolving conflict, religious orientation, and family planning & children—essential in building a strong and lasting marriage partnership.

The saying goes "When you marry, you don't just marry an individual, you marry a whole family." But more specifically, you are marrying the influences that family has had on your spouse. Our families have shaped our views on everything from religion to finances to sex, and, whether helpful or harmful, these views are brought to our marriage and can unknowingly affect it.

That’s why it's essential to practice sharing early and deeply and to learn about each other and ourselves. The Getting Ready for Marriage Workbook is designed to help you do just that.

Dianne C. Sloan worked as a licensed clinical marriage and family therapist in private practice and as an educator for twenty-five years. She also served as a consultant and trainer for several agencies and churches in Wichita, was a former director at the Center on Family Living, and served as director of the Family Life Counseling Center at Central Community Church. Dianne and her husband, Jim, have been married more than forty-five years and have one son, Jason, and two grandchildren.

Jerry D. Hardin served as a pastor over marriage and family life at Central Community Church and was founder and director of the Family Life Counseling Center. He has served as a clinical marriage and family therapist, teacher, seminar speaker, and facilitator of marriage, family, and premarital workshops. Jerry and his wife, Marilynn, have been married for more than fifty years and have three sons—Steve, Scott, Paul—and seven grandchildren.