Justin and Amber

I believe we have now been through 3 marriage counseling sessions. So far so good. I have to admit, these personality profiles they have us take do a pretty spot on job of matching us to the letter. So far I would agree with just about everything they’ve said, both good and bad.

For example: you would probably never have guess this (yeah right), but me and Amber are pretty much in sync when it comes to our religious beliefs. In fact, we scored liked a 90/100 on it, which is pretty dang tough to do (I’m not even sure 100 is possible, and everything seems to be rounded to the nearest 10). We also scored pretty strongly on our communication… which probably explains why we’ve been able to date for 5 years with little trouble.

Our weakest was finance, which to us wasn’t all that surprising. Amber and I have very different views on money, which has already caused some “fun” in our relationship while planning this wedding… And even more fun now that we are looking for a house/townhouse in Woodbury. Needless to say though, our communication skills have so far been able to overcome our views on money, and when they haven’t, prayer seems to have solved it for us :-). In any case, I’m hoping that we limit the fireworks in our 4th session (which will be almost the sole topic for the week).

In other news: we have started looking for a home. We’ve secured pre-approval on a loan, and have already got a house (or 2) in mind. Amber’s hoping that we are able to go look at it as early as tomorrow.

Still waiting for some music requests from people :-). Right now I’m leaning towards hits from 1992… Things like:  Achy Breaky Heart, Black or White, Baby Got Back, Life is a Highway, 2 Legit 2 Quit… Ah yes.. Back when I had my own radio show…

What? What did he just say? More on that at Rinsefirst at another time…

Amber and I had our first marriage counseling session with Pastor Dean last Wednesday (February 27th). All in all it went pretty well. We didn’t get to deep into anything, mostly just laying down the ground work for where we are going. If you’ve ever wondered what they do in these things, I’ll try to post about it here. So far we:

• Got worksheets for a personality profile that will be used to try to identify where we may have problems down the road (to be done alone at the moment)
• Got worksheets for long term goals to again help us see where we may be on “different roads” (to be done alone at the moment)
• Talked about how most wedding ceremonies are laid out.
• Talked about life a little
• Talked about some of the decisions we had already made for the wedding (like Joel doing music and Derek doing the message).

So far, no “blow out fights” although I’m not sure I will go into details of anything like that if it comes up… Just perhaps a brief overview of the process.

I did learn one thing though that I thought was rather interesting. In the state of Minnesota, if you go through 12 hours marriage counseling (as opposed to just getting married), you save $50.00 off your marriage license (that’s something like a %40 savings I believe). Seems like a pretty good way to help decrease the number of divorces (and the load they create on our legal system). So if you were thinking about skipping it, you might want to reconsider.

Well back to work I go, just felt this place needed a little love.

I can see why people do not recommend long engagements…

Not that a year is long… It’s not on the grand scale of things.

But I believe Joel said it once, at church:

• Long time dating
• Short Engagement
• Long Marriage

Being engaged is such a weird state in a relationship. It really is no different than dating, except for two very key things.

One: your anticipating being married. This anticipation can be both good and bad for a relationship. It causes you to think about what life will be like for the next 70 years. It causes you to think about how great it would be if you were married right now. I like to think of it like Christmas presents. Once you know Christmas is coming, you can’t wait for the gifts… You keep thinking about what you might get, and it continues to build. Eventually though, if Christmas gets delayed long enough, you lose some of that anticipation and joy. You might also get frustrated at whoever is with-holding the gift from you (I know always did when they made us wait until after dinner to open gifts when it would have been just as easy to open them before dinner).

Two: your relationship becomes very much about the wedding day. Every question is related to planning and preparing for married life. Personally,  I think having a short engagement would do wonders for many men’s sanity… Simply cramming all the wedding plans into like a 3 week window would be so much easier. You wouldn’t have to worry about who you forgot to invite, or whether or not everyone would come… It would be to short notice for you to even be able to care.

In any case, I can’t wait to be married… I’m counting down the hours as they say.