Being engaged is hard, but there’s hope

What makes being engaged so tough? A couple are perfectly happy and starry-eyed in love — the epitome of compatibility. Then CRASH! They wipe out in the final turn just a few hundred yards from the checkered flag (OK, not the best analogy, but you get the idea).

I usually officiate at one or two weddings per year. For the most part I enjoy the job, but sometimes I am absolutely dumbfounded by what people say and do to each other in those months between getting engaged and actually getting married.

I’ve seen couples who’ve been dating for five years break apart with just five months to go, unable to take the pressure. So what’s going on? I can think of a number of factors that make this phase in a couple’s life so stressful.

1. Commitment. Engagement is both a private and public commitment to what is intended to be a lifetime relationship. No couple I’ve ever worked with went into their wedding thinking “Well, we can always just get divorced if this doesn’t work.” When people get married, they are planning to get married for good. This makes getting engaged and what follows incredibly stressful; we’ve just made one of the most important decisions in our lives!

2. Exposure. And everybody knows we’ve just made one of the most important decisions of our lives! Friends, family, the minister and even the wedding florist are watching us to see how we’re taking the strain. We’re also watching each other. Did they/we make the right decision? Are either of us having any second thoughts?

3. Family. During one particularly hot and heavy premarital counseling session, the groom-to-be finally blurted out “I didn’t propose to your mother!” “Well,” I interjected, “you kinda did.” Most people come with some sort of family. It may be a clan of 100 or just one. They may live on the other side of the block, the other side of town or the other side of the country. They may even live with our intended spouse — a child from a previous marriage or an aging parent, for example.

Families bring all sorts of heritage and tradition to the table. Race, religion, ethnicity, socio-economic class and even political affiliation all can become stressors that the engaged couple now have to take seriously.

Beyond that, falling in love with our spouse-to-be does not mean falling in love with his or her family. There are all kinds of people in this world. We try to choose the right one to marry, but that doesn’t mean he or she comes with a mother or great aunt we will particularly like. And the more important this disliked future in-law is, the harder that can be on our future marriage. In fact, if we can’t find a way to at least like our future stepchildren, we’d better not get married at all. We may have been able to conveniently overlook such family issues when we were just dating, but now we’re talking forever.

4. Event planning. Take a groom who may not care, a bride who wants the “perfect” wedding, sprinkle in two mothers-in-law who may have been dreaming of their children’s wedding for decades, add a dash of opinionated professionals — caterer, seamstress, minister, florist, musician — and you have a recipe for chaos, if not disaster. Even simple weddings aren’t. The bigger and more elaborate the production, the more opportunities for disagreement, misunderstanding, disappointment, conflict, anger and hurt feelings.

5. Getting to know you — really know you. Maybe it’s a combination of all of the above and the fact that stress doesn’t bring out the best in most of us, but engaged couples often find they learn more about each other after they get engaged than before. And some of what we learn may not be to our liking. Certainly any facade we may have put up during dating is sure to crumble when we are as intimately involved as we are in an engagement. If we haven’t already seen each other at our worst, getting engaged is bound to do it for us.

Well, that was cheerful. So what can we do if we’re one of those engaged couples who find the relationship is beginning to unravel?

I’d recommend reading this column out loud to each other. Talk about anything that sounds uncomfortably familiar. Maybe find a book or two about preparing for marriage, and discuss. I’d also recommend a premarital couples’ program if your church offers one, and premarital counseling.

That’s right, counseling. Many counselors have special training to help engaged couples get ready for marriage, especially those dealing with the issues mentioned above.

You might call this preventive medicine; it’s better to work through all this before you get married than have it come back to haunt you a month, a year or 10 years later. In the meantime, good luck.

Ÿ The Rev. Ken Potts’ book “Mix, Don’t Blend: A Guide to Dating, Engagement, and Remarriage with Children” is available through book retailers.