10 Steps to Prepare for Marriage

Do this before you meet the love of your life.

As you may know, I’m getting married in less than a month to the love of my life, an amazing, beautiful, faithful woman. I know this is a huge blessing that I probably do not deserve, and I know this is something that many men long for and yet something that many men consider to be an impossible desire in our postmodern landscape.

Looking back, I realize that I have been —almost involuntarily— preparing for marriage for years, even before I met my wife-to-be. A close friend of mine who also recognized this approached me recently to ask if I could give him some guidance as to how he should prepare for marriage, since he’s considering proposing and wants to take his vocation to marriage seriously.

For that reason, I decided to write this article, giving all of you who feel called to the vocation of marriage a structured, step-by-step plan to follow. Keep in mind two things as you read:

1. This “protocol” is intended to be followed both by those men who have a girlfriend and those who don’t. It’s possible that you’ll already have completed some steps, but keep reading because I assure you there are some that you haven’t.

2. The decision to send you a good woman to marry is up to God and God alone. You can and should be prepared to receive her, but I cannot guarantee that you ever will. In my experience, however, following the steps below makes it highly likely that you do.

With that being said, here are 10 steps to prepare for marriage (even if you don’t know your wife yet).

Step 1: Put it to Prayer

The very first thing you need to do is to make sure you invite God into this process of preparation. This is important for two reasons: one, it ensures that you are being intentional about preparing for marriage, not merely going through the motions and hoping without a plan. Two, it keeps you centered on the Lord and ensures that this whole process is done out of love for Him, trusting Him and humbly accepting His will for you. It’s different to try and brute force your way into finding and marrying a good woman than it is to lay it at the foot of the Cross and asking God humbly to lead you, help you, and direct you.

Tell Him that you want to prepare for marriage and that you want His help with it. Tell Him that you’re going to start making an effort and that you want Him to purify and strengthen you. Tell Him that you accept His will no matter what and that you will do everything you can so that He can be assured that you’ll care for the woman He decides to send you. Tell Him that you accept His timing and that you won’t force your own.

Step 2: Make a List

Not a list of the qualities that you want in your future wife, but a list of all the things that are wrong with you. You are in no position to demand anything from God, and you surely have a lot of things to fix. So, take the time to identify them so you can then proceed to fix them.

List toxic behaviors that you need to cut out, vices that you need to get rid of, sins that you still persist in. Be honest and strict with yourself. Set high standards and list even those behaviors that you think you couldn’t possibly change. Remember that it’s God who changes you, and He absolutely can.

Step 3: Start with Chastity

I’m going to go ahead and bet that somewhere in your list there is something about quitting sexual immorality. If there isn’t, that’s great. But chances are there is, because most men nowadays struggle with addictions to pornography and other forms of sexual immorality.

If that’s you, I suggest you start your process of preparation by focusing your energy on trying to free yourself from those behaviors. For you to live chastely, you naturally have to build a ton of complementary virtues like discipline, fortitude, charity, and patience. Chastity is a cheat code for masculine formation.

Additionally, chastity allows you to discern more objectively, because when you remove sexual intimacy from the equation, you can be more honest and unbiased about whether or not the person you’re dating is a good fit. Lust, as we know, clouds your intellect, therefore chastity clears it.

Step 4: Learn to Commit

Most men are deeply afraid of commitment, and this becomes apparent in many areas of their lives:

• Relationally, they jump from one girlfriend to the next (or never even date anyone), always waiting for a perfection that isn’t real, or simply chasing novelty.

• Professionally, they stay at a job for a year or a few months and then jump to the next one.

• Spiritually, they never truly commit to living their faith fully, knowing that that will mean giving up certain things for good.

You want to be the exception to this rule. Commitment is a muscle that you train. Marriage is a lifelong commitment, and if you haven’t learnt to commit to something else before you give yourself completely to your wife, it’ll be difficult for you to keep that promise. I think that this is one of the reasons why it’s so critical to live a faith that is radical in the best possible sense: it trains you in commitment and actively teaches you what it means to choose one thing and reject all others.

When you surrender your entire life to Christ (not just what comes easily to you), you will learn what it takes to give yourself completely to your wife when she arrives.

Do not be a lukewarm Christian. Learn, study, and most importantly, practice the faith fully.

Step 5: Clarify Your Direction

After that, you need to engage in the difficult but incredibly rewarding process of finding out your calling, or at least the direction you feel compelled to walk towards over the foreseeable future. A man is the leader of his household, and if he doesn’t provide clarity and direction, the entire household will drift into chaos.

What this means practically is that you should analyze the talents God has given you, and think about how He’s calling you to use them. What sort of job do you think you can be good at that also helps others? What kind of missions or apostolates can you partake in to ensure you’re giving back? What do you imagine your life will be like in ten years?

How do you think God wants you to impact the world for the better?
What cause sets your heart on fire?

Ask yourself these questions in prayer, preferably before the Blessed Sacrament, because even if the answer doesn’t come with complete clarity, you’ll find in your heart at least some guidance as to the path that you should begin to walk.

Step 6: Determine Non-Negotiables

Now that you know your mission (or at least have a general direction), and now that you’re learning how to be a committed man who strives to live chastely, you can start —yes, only now— to think about the woman you’d like to marry.

You can begin to think about the things that you’d want for the mother of your children, in order to help you discern whatever dating/courtship opportunities appear in the future.

The reason why we didn’t do this sooner is that it would be hypocritical to start listing the qualities you’d want in a wife when you aren’t even in a solid position when it comes to your faith, purity, and life’s mission. Now that you are doing some things right, your mind is clearer, and thus you can start to consider what kind of woman you’d like to spend the rest of your life with. It’s important to do this because otherwise it’ll be much easier for you to ignore obvious red flags and persist in relationships that shouldn’t have a future.

List the virtues you’d like your wife to have, what you imagine her relationship to God being like, and list all the behaviors or beliefs that would make you say “no” to a potential relationship.

It’s only after you’ve done this that the real work begins.