How To Prepare For Marriage While Single: 10 Tips To Get Yourself Ready

How to prepare for marriage?! This is something everyone called to the vocation of marriage will ask themselves at some point. Preparing for your marriage may sound intimidating, but it shouldn't be. 

The morning of his wedding, a friend of mine walked down the aisle of the nearly empty church. He had arrived early to prep for the ceremony. As he neared the altar, another friend asked a question: “How do you feel?”

The groom smiled.

“Ready,” he said.

He felt prepared for the sacrament by whatever he’d done with the time that led up to his wedding. Sometimes, my memory of that inspires me to ask myself: What are you doing with the time that will lead up to yours?

To be clear, I’m not engaged (not even close). You might not be either. But how to prepare for a successful marriage still concerns us. What we do while we are single is as important as what we do when we are planning to get married. 

So we really should learn how to prepare for marriage while single. If you haven't given a single thought to your plan for marriage...then, this post is for you! Keep reading! 

Why think about preparing for marriage while single?

Not preparing for marriage while single is like signing up for a marathon without training for it. Can it be done? Yes. You can totally show up on race day without having trained. But people who don’t train for a marathon are more likely to burn themselves out by starting at an unsustainable pace. They might hydrate more or less than they need to, both of which are dangerous. And many will drop out of the race instead of finishing.

But runners who train first can endure more during a race than runners who don’t. They show up with skills and strategies. Preparing for marriage now means you can show up at your wedding with those things, too. 

Here’s How to Prepare for Marriage While Single: 10 Tips

While there is no perfect step-by-step guide on how to prepare for marriage, these ten tips should help get you headed in the right direction. These ten tips for getting married will help you become the type of person you want to be before you get married and also allow you to better prepare for your vocation! 

1. Seek healing.

None of us gets to adulthood unscathed. Some of what you witnessed or went through left wounds. Now is a good time to work through them. If you don’t know what they are, pay attention for your triggers and battles; we can trace our triggers and battles back to our wounds.

Part of the preparation for marriage might be counseling and spiritual direction. Until we seek healing, we’ll stay stuck in places where we could be free—and you should be free. That’s not just because your future spouse deserves a healthy version of you or because your future kids deserve that too. They do, but you also deserve health. God created us able to grow. We don’t have to settle for the status quo. Also, when you do find that someone for your future marriage, don't shy away from premarital counseling before the big day! 

2. Ask for feedback.

Ask a trusted acquaintance (maybe even someone of the opposite sex), a good boss, one of your best friends, your mom or dad. “In what ways could I be a better friend to you?” “Is there anything I can do to improve my performance?” “What do I do that most annoys you?” If you’re scared to ask these questions, good. It is scary—but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ask them.

Asking for feedback reveals your blind spots, the parts of you that you can’t see until other people show you (and you can’t fix a problem you don’t see). Get used to it, because a good spouse will give you feedback—and a good spouse will ask for feedback, too. If you never ask for it while you’re single, you probably won’t ask for it while you’re married.

3. Manage your money.

After the wedding, what’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine—including a lot of your debt and other consequences of the habits that got you into it. I was in my early thirties before I took money management seriously. Now, I shudder at the thought that I could have gotten married before I cleaned up my mess. The best part, though, is how fast I undid the damage by doing the easiest thing I’d ever avoided doing: I made and stuck to a budget. 

Life is hard when you’re single, but it’s harder, or at least more complicated, when you’re not. Part of planning to get married is fixing your finances now. It’s also considerate of your future spouse and kids. Money messes don’t go away when you ignore them. They get bigger and they get inherited. Your spouse or kids may pay for it if you don’t. So, start budgeting now, your future spouse (and children) will thank you for it! 

4. Take care of your body.

Have you ever wanted to call a loved one out for how he or she neglects his or her health? It's difficult to watch somebody you love make costly choices or take unnecessary risks. At the end of the day, we don't get to decide what our loved ones do. But what if you’re the loved one?

In marriage, you’ll commit your life to a spouse and probably also kids. What will it communicate to them when you say “I give you me” but you don’t take care of you? As you plan for a healthy marriage, it's a good time to break the bad habits that threaten your body and to create habits that will protect it.

5. Do stuff that requires discipline.

Make your bed every day. Get up early. Pray on your lunch break—add something that requires discipline to your daily routine. Our responsibilities will only increase after marriage, and especially after having kids and diving into family life. To pull off what we’ll need to pull off will require grace and help, but it will also require discipline. 

We will have to manage ourselves so we can do in a day what can’t be done if we’re unmanaged (or if our video games or our phones still manage us). Getting good at discipline now is good preparation for a great marriage.

6. Get uncomfortable.

Spouses should be safe and free to be vulnerable with each other without shame. You’ll see each other in your sorrow and anger and anxiety. Your spouse will need you to witness those emotions, not to shut them down—which is why you should get used to being uncomfortable.

If you want to prepare for marriage, do things that’ll stretch you—things you’re a little nervous to do. Drop-in for a class at CrossFit gym. Strike up a conversation with the grumpiest usher after Mass. Ask your boss for a raise. You’ll hone the skill of sitting in discomfort instead of running from it. Doing this will also help you grow your communication skills which is something married couples need to have. 

7. Hang out with God a lot.

It is one thing to know about God, but it is another to know him. How do we get to know him? By hanging out with him, like you would with anybody with whom you’re in a familiar (and permanent) relationship. How does any relationship get more intimate? We give it our time and our energy. Over time, we give the person more access to us and access to more parts of us. How much access to you do you give God lately?

He is the only one who can save you. He is the only source of any hope, joy, or peace you’ll ever have. If we don’t seek it from him, we will seek it from people who can’t give it to us—including a future spouse. Spending time with God is something you will see time and time again from many areas of marriage advice for having a successful Christian marriage. 

8. Practice chastity.

At a conference where I gave a chastity talk, a woman looked at my book, which is called Chastity Is for Lovers, and said, “This is great, but it doesn’t apply to me. I’m married!” My heart sank. Somehow, nobody ever had told her that chastity, which isn’t the same as abstinence (but requires it outside marriage), isn’t just for single people. 

So if you’re preparing yourself for marriage (whether you're in a new relationship or an old one), practice chastity now with your significant other. Chastity is a decision we make every day to do the right thing with sex—to engage in it only if we can do so freely, totally, faithfully, and fruitfully, which doesn’t involve using or abusing each other, can’t be done outside the sacrament of marriage, and involves working with and not against our fertility.

9. Surround yourself with happy, holy marriages.

Which of your friends, mentors, or family members are in happy, holy, strong marriages? Spend time with them. Assume that if they have achieved what you haven’t achieved yet, they may know something you don’t. 

It’s easy to take cues and advice from people who have what we have. But it’s better to take cues and advice from people who have what we want. Learn from them. (And let them introduce you to their single friends.)

10. Accept that you don’t have to be totally ready.

There is no perfect circumstance, no level of growth we reach, no intensity of feeling that tells us “you are ready for marriage.” If that’s what you’re waiting for, you may be waiting forever. No newlyweds feel 100% prepared for everything that marriage involves on their wedding day, and that's okay. No amount of wedding planning will ever prepare you for this sacrament that lasts the rest of your life! 

Yes, marriage preparation is wise. And I implore you to do it, starting now. But you will probably never be more prepared than when you finally accept this: You don’t have to be totally ready. You just have to be willing to do the work.

Final Takeaways on Getting Ready for Marriage

I don’t know if anybody knows exactly how to get ready for marriage—and I know there’s no way to know what marriage will bring. Married life is definitely going to be full of surprises, and part of having a happy marriage will be learning how to deal with those surprises. The best marriage is one that is made of people who are always ready to sacrifice for each other and do their best. The right way of preparing for marriage will vary from person to person, but these ten tips here should serve most people well.

Remember, it won’t hurt to do while you’re single what you know will help when you’re not. Yes, there will be things you won’t see coming. But in matrimony, there is always something for when those things come: God’s grace.