Becoming a Husband Begins Before You Meet Your Wife
How single men can prepare for the vocation of marriage.
So I went ahead and did something…
After dating for almost a year, I finally proposed to my girlfriend, the most beautiful, virtuous, caring woman I’ve ever met.
Beyond mentioning the incredible blessing that it is to have found a woman who loves Jesus even more than I do, who supports me, strengthens me, and motivates me to keep growing as a leader and as a man, I thought this was a great opportunity to share with you a little bit more about my testimony, and some hopefully helpful lessons about preparing for marriage.
In this article I want to tell you how I got to this point, and how God silently prepared me to find my future wife and made me ready to assume the role of a husband and father. I do this hoping that you can find some guidance regarding how to prepare yourself for marriage and internalize the fact that this preparation begins long before you even find the woman who’ll walk with you until heaven.
I write this not as an expert on marriage (obviously), but in an attempt to share my learnings, lessons, and successes with you, so they can hopefully serve you too. Again, God has blessed me with an extremely peaceful, loving relationship, and I believe our success has been in no small part due to the changes God worked on my heart —and hers— since way before we met.
This will be a short article, but this Saturday I’ll post a detailed “protocol” of how you should prepare for marriage even before meeting your wife. That one will be an exclusive article, so if you want to read it (and also support my future family), you can upgrade your subscription here:
My conversion happened almost four years ago, at a low point in my life, when I finally decided that I couldn’t go through life without God’s guidance. That moment was the moment I chose to live a chaste life, to reject the temptations of the world and to start walking somewhere better.
Of course there’s been ups and downs, but looking back, I can’t help but thank God for giving me the gift of a changed heart, as I am 100% convinced that if it hadn’t been for His saving grace, I would never have met my soon-to-be wife, and even worse, I wouldn’t be a man who could confidently say he’s ready to commit to her.
As I reflect on how God changed me during the last couple of years, there are some things which I recognize clearly as necessary steps to the process that brought me to this point, where I have found an amazing woman and am now ready to marry her.
These are the areas that I felt The Lord was calling on me to improve upon, so that I could become a man ready to lead a family righteously.
Interior Disciplines
Contrary to the common advice the world gives regarding marriage, what makes you ready to marry is nothing external —not your income, not your wealth, not your position—, but rather who you are internally.
In that sense, the skills that make you fit for marriage need to be developed in solitude first, so that when the right woman comes, you will be ready to lead her.
Nearly all of these skills relate to self-mastery, as only after you’ve made some decent progress in controlling your lower impulses and appetites will you be strong enough to lead a household.
You should be aiming to develop the disciplines that relate to controlling your appetites, managing emotions, resisting temptation, fasting, and setting limits. All of these strengthen the leadership muscles that will help you take care of a good woman when you find her, and your family afterwards.
You should also learn to be responsible for yourself: your finances, your schedule, your routine, your spiritual life. Few things drive good women away faster than childish, immature attitudes that make her feel like she’s your mother.
Most importantly, you need to be a man who knows where he’s going, what he stands for, what he won’t tolerate and what matters most to him. You need to have a clear set of guiding principles for your life and family, so that you can choose the right woman and lead her and your children with clarity and purpose. If you don’t know what you stand for, and if you don’t strive to live a life coherent to those values and principles, how do you expect to attract a compatible woman?
Practical Preparation
In short, you prepare for marriage by living now the habits you will need later:
Creating order in your life: this does not mean perfect order —which isn’t achievable, nor desirable—, but structured routines, predictable habits and reliability.
Developing financial habits: budgeting, avoiding debt, building savings. As stated earlier, it really doesn’t matter if you’re wealthy or not, but it does matter if you’re responsible with the income you have.
Building emotional maturity: meaning healthy communication, patience, conflict management and the emotional stability required to provide your future wife with emotional security. Your role as a man includes being stable in times of crisis, so if you’re still governed by your emotions, you’ll have trouble finding a feminine woman and making your relationship flourish.
Living a life of service: this is probably the most important —and most difficult— thing on this list. Even before entering into marriage, a relationship shines light on all the selfish attitudes and habits you have. True love is sacrificial and devoted to service, even more so in the positions of leadership that God has tasked us with. By making an intentional effort to live a life of service, you train humility and sacrificial self-giving, both essential for a prosperous relationship.
Strengthening your faith: In line with my earlier point about being a man who knows where he stands on things, you need to take your faith seriously. You need to understand why you believe and be coherent in living out those beliefs. If you’re a Catholic like me, that means that you need to strive to be in a state of grace, go to confession often, read Scripture and other spiritual readings, go to Mass, and seek a spiritual director if it makes sense for your current situation.
All of these are things that you need to start doing before you find the right woman. Oftentimes men live disordered lives and claim that they’ll fix themselves once they find “the right woman”. But that’s not how it works. The right woman only comes when you become the right man.
These are practices that build you up and set you on the right path, so you can welcome a good woman into your life when God decides it’s time.
A Note on Readiness vs. Perfection
Many men postpone marriage by saying they’re “waiting for the right moment”, thinking that they need to be completely healed first, or have everything figured out, or be earning a specific amount of money before they can commit.
But while those reasons might sound sensible (and maybe in some cases they are), the vast majority of men who postpone marriage until they’re “ready”, are using it as a cope to avoid making a commitment and closing all other doors. Prudence is a virtue, cowardice is not.
You don’t need perfection, you just need a clear trajectory. Perfection is unrealistic and too often used as an excuse to cowardly avoid commitment. Everything you’re “waiting for”, you could keep working towards while married. If not, then it probably isn’t a goal worth pursuing.
Marriage requires a foundation upon which you can both build together, not flawlessness on your side.
Being ready could be as simple as being committed to growth, being aware of your flaws and actively working to improve on them, being stable enough emotionally to not crash out under all pressures, and being responsible enough to assume your role in the relationship. Remember that God never calls men who are perfect, but men who are willing to be formed, and men who have surrendered their hearts to Him.
Make the Most of Your Single Phase
The final lesson I’d like to share with you is this: before God blesses a man with a wife and a family, He often gives him a desert. At least, that was the case for me.
After the initial emotional high of surrendering my heart to Him wore off, I went through a very difficult period, when God felt far away, when I couldn’t hear His voice, and I didn’t understand what I was supposed to do with my life. It’s often true that God allows these deserts in our lives so we can detach from the world and learn to depend exclusively on Him.
These deserts serve a purpose, and that is to strengthen your faith and build your virtue on solid ground, instead of on the quicksand that is emotion.
Walking through these spiritual deserts that precede big changes is a great opportunity:
To rely on God and not your own strength
To cultivate virtue in private, out of love of God and not to earn praise and recognition
To handle responsibility and take ownership for your failings and sin
To persevere even when nothing seems to be happening
To become a man capable of sacrifice, perseverance, and endurance even when you can’t feel God’s presence clearly
Do not feel as though you’re behind if you’re going through such a desert, and try always to find the lesson that God is trying to teach you. All great men of faith in history have had to walk their own deserts, and they have all emerged ready for their God-given mission afterwards.
I hope this advice helps you on your journey, and I sincerely pray that God blesses you with a great woman in your life. Do not listen to the doomers and nihilists who claim “all women are…”. They are wrong. There are plenty of good women around, but they are waiting for a good man to find them.
I feel incredibly blessed to be in this position, and I’m immensely grateful to God for the gift of my future wife. I am grateful to you too for your continued support, kind words, and prayers.
Finally, if you want to support my work and my future family in this new phase, and if you’ve ever found value in my writings, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. You’ll get twice as many articles + the full archive of posts, as well as my eternal gratitude (although you already have it ;)).
I appreciate you all, and thank you for reading!
In Christ,
Juan
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How can you know that marriage is your vocation when you haven’t even had your first kiss at 28? I want to be married and my libido is admittedly rather high.
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