The Marriage Course

Meg and Jon share their experiences...

Lockdown has certainly had it's challenges, but we have both recently reflected on the ways lockdown has been a blessing to us. Proper, intentional, quality time together was sometimes at a premium with busy jobs, long commutes and a full calendar at weekends. Lockdown gave us time to have real conversations; ones that aren’t about the bins, a potential new patio, or what is happening at the weekend. This was wonderful, but it also meant more time to really recognise what we weren’t talking about and more time to realise we had to actually listen to each other for us to be really communicating rather than just talking.

So one evening, when Jon suggested it might be a fun activity during lockdown, we decided to sign up the HTB Marriage Course online. We are so glad we did. We were able to confront some of the things that had already gone unsaid in our short marriage (and already there was more of these things than we had imagined), we laughed many times, cried only a couple and shared openly about how we both felt. We found the evenings to be enjoyable, enriching, often hilarious and they certainly helped us to hear each other more clearly.

The marriage course enables you to take time to really get to grips with where you are both at in your marriage, to listen to the other person intentionally, to share openly about what has (or hasn’t) been happening and to challenge each other - gently, graciously and in an ‘indoor voice’! You explore communication, connection, conflict, forgiveness, and in-laws (!) amongst other key topics. It also gives time for you to pray, with and for each other – and we know for sure that we hadn’t been doing enough of that.

The marriage course requires you to give one evening, once a week, to each other and to your marriage. And when you consider this and wonder if it is too much effort, takes too long, doesn’t fit in, or if too much has happened and the barriers are too great… remember that God created marriage and he’s right there in it with us. He wants our marriages not just to work, but to be wonderful and fulfilling and happy! So pray with each other, ask if this is the moment to sign up to the course? We can’t recommend it enough.