The First Dance
Engagement = Marriage?
”Will you marry me?” It’s a question loaded with emotion. Immediately, it invokes joy and exhilaration, romance and optimism, nerves and trepidation. It’s a question that represents all of the good things in your relationship and is evidence that you are ready to make the total commitment to your partner to begin your lives together. Presumably, you’ll have friends and family join you for when you finally exchange vows and become husband and wife. Planning that moment is also when the initial “engagement bliss” that you feel begins to fade and other emotions take hold. As they say, the moment you get engaged, your marriage begins.
You now have an enormous task ahead of you; joining together two people and two families to plan a wedding that represent your vision and dreams. Working together with your partner to make the hundreds if not thousands of decisions during the next year would be hard enough for most couples. But when you add the opinions of parents, future in-laws, you have a difficult challenge to navigate.
It’s My Wedding So I Can Do What I Want
Not so much. The only way to have it truly your way is for you and your fiancé to elope. If you want to have more than just a legal ceremony, then weddings cannot be about just your preferences and desires. Weddings are as much about community and family traditions as it is just about the couple. Not only is planning a wedding a microcosm of the challenges that couples will face throughout their lives together (i.e. it’s an opportunity to practice communication, decision making, division of labor, finances, compromise with your partner). Planning a wedding forges new relationships between the members of each family and friends, for better or worse.
Love = Skills?
Getting engaged is the first of many major decisions that a couple makes during their lives together. While this decision is made out of the love that you feel towards each other, planning a wedding tests the relationship in new and different ways. Couples need skills to successfully navigate this challenge and learn how to effectively deal with the problems that surface while you plan your wedding. The First Dance — a workshop presented by The Relationship Center — will help you learn these skills.
We will show you how you can:
- Clarify expectations
- Negotiate differences up front
- Look deeper, when necessary, into what is behind disagreements
- Be comfortable with the decisions that you make
- Strengthen your relationship as you plan your wedding
Call The Relationship Center (732-345-1399) to register for The First Dance.
