No, no, it’s not about buying each other expensive gifts, or spending money on a 5 star holiday; it is merely a Marriage Course that David and I started going to this week to help us to build a healthy marriage that lasts a lifetime.

this is the part where we go “yaaaaam seng!”

A course spread over 2 months, the Marriage Course is an Alpha International program, it is for any couple who wants to invest in their relationship, whether you have been together 1 or 61 years and whether you have a strong relationship or are struggling. It is designed to help couples grow closer through commitment, through time together, through greater understanding of each other and through development of good habits.

So we started to attend one which is run in Subang Jaya by a couple from DUMC. It’s a small group of 3 couples. We start with a nice sit down dinner together and then we move to the couch and watch a video, take breaks in between to work on tasks in the manual and discuss the answers amongst ourselves to see where we need to re-align our differences. It’s also very private because we discuss only among ourselves—we don’t share anything with the other couples or the course facilitator. We work on it on our own!

How is it like? Very much like the pre-marital counseling we had with our Pastor 6 months before we got married—all the questions and discussions were designed to evaluate our expectations and differences. We did not regret one bit having gone through months of preparation with our Pastor as it had given us a realistic view of what marriage really is, and the truth is it really isn’t a walk in the park.

Finding out about the Marriage Course just last weekend, we knew immediately it is something we wanted to do, AND do quickly before Muffin arrives. And how perfect God’s timing was as we found out a class is due to begin on Tuesday this week!

The first thing we “revised” was on building strong foundations. We covered areas like how marriage has four seasons—sometimes full of anticipation and excitement, sometimes busy and tiring, sometimes changeable and stormy and sometimes quite and gloomy. When you think of it in this way, its surprisingly true! I can’t believe it having only been married for under 2 years I do feel the seasons changing every now and then. Imagine what kinda “weathers” our parents have braved through after 30 years of marriage?

We then did this exercise where we had to take stock of our marriage—what it really was is we tried to score points on 4 areas:

• Building our friendship
• Building our communication
• Building our physical relationship
• Building our future together

We then compared our scores to see how similar we were, the idea is to be understood by and to understand each other better. Amazingly our scores weren’t extremely off-tangent, and we took some time to discuss where we scored differently, and closed by sharing what we would like seen changed in each other. Really deep stuff *ahem*. We also covered stuff like making time for each other i.e. setting aside “marriage time” (time to pak tor, or just have 2 hours to talk to each other or do stuff together), and nurturing one another.

From the completion of part 1, I would highly recommend this course to anyone who wants to invest in their marriage. It isn’t rocket science, think of it like how we maintain our cars in good working condition, we should also maintain our relationship throughout the years. If you want to know more about the course leave me a comment!