Premarital Curriculum Project DRAFT
K-Love
PremaritalCurriculumProjectSample1.pptxStudent name
Pre-Marital Curriculum
NOTES for your Teaching goes here. This is very helpful to students who take this project and use it. It helps you remember the things you were studying when you built the Premarital Project.
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Table of Contents
You will notice that the outline/map is a bit hard to read in this slide. I would change things up so the couples I’m leading can read it easily. Again, this is a Sample, not an Example, so it can be improved on.
NOTES for your Teaching goes here. This is very helpful to students who take this project and use it. It helps you remember the things you were studying when you built the Premarital Project.
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Session 1. An Intimate Marriage Based in Reality
Session 2- In-laws and outlaws
Session 4 - Love Styles
Session 5 – Hope in Marriage
Session 6- Communication
Session 7 – Sex
Session 8- Forgiven
Session 3 – Getting Intimate
Personal / Church Philosophy Goes Here
NOTES for your Teaching goes here. This is very helpful to students who take this project and use it. It helps you remember the things you were studying when you built the Premarital Project.
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Session #1 An Intimate Marriage Based in Reality
Chances of divorce for newly married couples are between 40-50%.
Couples entering their second marriage raise this chance to 55%.
The longer a couple is married the lower the chances of divorce.
Our focus: Build a strong marriage and reduce the chance of divorce.
NOTES for your Teaching goes here. This is very helpful to students who take this project and use it. It helps you remember the things you were studying when you built the Premarital Project.
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Intimacy begins with a couple that is focused upon God.
With God as the focus in marriage, each member grows closer together as they grow closer to God.
Husband
Wife
God
NOTES for your Teaching goes here. This is very helpful to students who take this project and use it. It helps you remember the things you were studying when you built the Premarital Project.
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With a focus upon God in your relationship a marriage can withstand the pressures of the world.
Focus upon God allows for separateness of the individual and the oneness of the couple.
This allows for an understanding of the unique way God has made your spouse.
NOTES for your Teaching goes here. This is very helpful to students who take this project and use it. It helps you remember the things you were studying when you built the Premarital Project.
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Dispelling myths focusing on reality
Myth #1: “Everything good in our relationship will get better.”
Some things will get better which is good because you are going to get sideswiped by things you never saw coming.
Marriage magnifies any problem area you have with interpersonal relationships.
NOTES for your Teaching goes here. This is very helpful to students who take this project and use it. It helps you remember the things you were studying when you built the Premarital Project.
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Dispelling myths focusing on reality
Myth #2: “Everything bad in my life will disappear.”
There is one savior and that is Jesus Christ.
John 15:20 “If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also.”
If you have problems now, you will have problems when you are married.
NOTES for your Teaching goes here. This is very helpful to students who take this project and use it. It helps you remember the things you were studying when you built the Premarital Project.
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Dispelling myths focusing on reality
Myth #3: “My spouse will make me whole”
Marriage is reliant upon a strand of three cords not two.
Overreliance upon your spouse results in enmeshment.
Marriage is an interdependence upon each other not a dependence on one another.
NOTES for your Teaching goes here. This is very helpful to students who take this project and use it. It helps you remember the things you were studying when you built the Premarital Project.
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Dispelling myths focusing on reality
Myth #4: “We expect exactly the same things from marriage.”
Two individuals, from Two separate backgrounds, with Two separate families does not equal 1 view 2+2+2=1?
Marriage is filled with unwritten, unspoken, and often unconscious rules.
NOTES for your Teaching goes here. This is very helpful to students who take this project and use it. It helps you remember the things you were studying when you built the Premarital Project.
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Homework
For the next week I want you to think about your marriage ten commandments.
These are the things you expect and anticipate to happen in marriage (daily living, where to spend holidays, who works and when, children…).
Have Fun!
NOTES for your Teaching goes here. This is very helpful to students who take this project and use it. It helps you remember the things you were studying when you built the Premarital Project.
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Session #2 “But I thought you loved going to my parents”
Have you thought that when you are marrying your spouse you get the package of their family too?
Family of origin contributes tremendously to our communication styles, marital roles, and conflict resolution.
Each of your families will follow you into your marriage whether you want them to or not.
NOTES for your Teaching goes here. This is very helpful to students who take this project and use it. It helps you remember the things you were studying when you built the Premarital Project.
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Communication Styles
Have you considered how your family communicates?
We establish communication patterns we are comfortable with those patterns tend to be the ones we grew up with in our parents homes.
Communication also contributes to safety in the home; was it safe in your home growing up to communicate openly?
NOTES for your Teaching goes here. This is very helpful to students who take this project and use it. It helps you remember the things you were studying when you built the Premarital Project.
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Family Roles
We each maintain a role in the family.
These roles are often developed by watching our parents.
What roles do you see your partner being in? What roles do you see yourself in?
Are there any differences in your expected roles?
NOTES for your Teaching goes here. This is very helpful to students who take this project and use it. It helps you remember the things you were studying when you built the Premarital Project.
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Conflict Resolution
How was conflict modeled in your home growing up?
When did you know conflicts were resolved with your parents? How do you know when conflicts are resolved in your current relationship?
Proverbs 27:17 identifies iron sharpens iron, what does this indicate for conflict in a Christ filled marriage?
NOTES for your Teaching goes here. This is very helpful to students who take this project and use it. It helps you remember the things you were studying when you built the Premarital Project.
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Homework
Discuss some of the elements of your parents marriage that you disagree with and elements that you like.
This is not free reign to take shots and your parents remember: Exodus 20:12 "Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you.”
NOTES for your Teaching goes here. This is very helpful to students who take this project and use it. It helps you remember the things you were studying when you built the Premarital Project.
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Session #3 Getting Intimate
Intimacy is foundational to a marriage; strong marriages work towards greater intimacy together.
Intimacy includes a couple growing in their faith together toward Christ as individuals as well as together.
Support, care, honesty, closeness, and communication are all components that contribute to the experience of intimacy in a relationship.
Intimacy occurs in different levels with a couple:
Spiritual
Physical
Intellectual
Spiritual Intimacy
If spiritual intimacy is left out of your marriage it gives Satan tremendous ground to attack you.
Spiritual intimacy involves building each other up in Christ.
Read the Bible together
Pray together
Serve together
Pray for each other
Intellectual Intimacy
This level of intimacy has to do with the sharing of thoughts and ideas.
Brings couples closer together by sharing in hopes and goals.
Understanding one another’s thoughts aids with understanding each others motivations.
Exposes emotional needs and how those needs are met.
Physical Intimacy
This level of intimacy contributes to and is contributed to by both intellectual and spiritual intimacy.
Physical intimacy draws husbands and wives together in a united fashion that communicates interdependence, desire, trust, and safety.
Homework
For intimacy to be achieved in marriage all three aspects of intimacy must be focused upon.
For the next week focus upon your spiritual intimacy by reading the Bible together and praying together, when apart pray for your partner. Focus you attention upon how you think and feel about your partner during these times.
Session #4 Do you have any style to your love?
Love is a necessity in marriage but it is a difficult concept to define. For our purposes we will again utilize a triangle to identify styles of love:
Passion
Intimacy
Commitment
Passion
This component of love is the physical element of sensation and desire for physical affection.
This element of loves serves as a motivational factor.
This element fades if couples are not purposeful about maintaining it in their relationship.
Intimacy
While intimacy is foundational to a strong marriage it serves as an element in the experience of love.
It allows a couple to feel the emotional facets of love.
Growing intimately with each other refuels physical passion in relationships; allowing each member to feel secure, safe, and vulnerable with one another.
Commitment
Commitment provides certainty in the midst of an uncertain world.
The commitment aspect of love serves as the foundational bedrock that brings stability to the marriage even when passion and intimacy wax and wane in the waters of the relationship.
It provides the element of the marriage that identifies to one another that no matter what I will be with you until death parts us.
Maintaining Balance
Maintaining balance on all three sides of the triangle is important. A balanced triangle results in consummate love.
Unhealthy love styles throw love off balance
Romantic love: focuses upon passion and intimacy with commitment lasting as long as the passion and intimacy lasts
Foolish love is built upon commitment and passion with little focus upon intimacy resulting in commitment that lasts as long as the passion
Companionable love is built upon intimacy and commitment with low passion, resulting in a good friendship but ineffective marital relationship
Homework
Focus upon elements of your marriage that fit into these styles of love. How will you continue to maintain proportional amounts of passion, intimacy, and commitment in your relationship?
Session #5 Marriages float, with hope
There is always conflict in marital relationships; in the midst of this conflict it is vital to find hope.
Hope is defined as: HOPE = Willpower to change + Waypower to change + Waitpower even if change is not happening
Without all three of these components hope fades and eventually dies out.
Hope aids with overcoming obstacles
Problems tend to manifest in marriages in one of eight separate arenas.
What people generally recognize as a problem is often the symptom or sign of a deeper issue at hand.
Eight problem areas
Central beliefs and values
Core vision
Confession/forgiveness
Communication
Conflict resolution
Cognition
Closeness
Commitment
When conflicts arise they can generally be factored down into one of these categories; by doing this it allows you to communicate upon a solution to the core factor as opposed to the symptoms of the problem.
Homework
Focus upon two ways of promoting hope in your relationship and future marriage. Two tasks to do are:
1) identify a couple within your lives that will help you build up your marriage.
2) identify Gods hand at work in your relationship this week; even if you don’t think He is at work in your relationship He is, identify where.
Session #6 I Can’t Hear You
97% of couples that report their communication with their partners is excellent are happily married; compared to 56% who rate their communication as poor.
Communication patterns are learned; therefore they can be unlearned and/or relearned.
Two ears, and one mouth this is about the ratio of listening needed in marriage – listen twice as much as you talk.
We grow as individuals when we listen to our partner; this growth is not limited to us but our partners also grow in this process.
When we listen to each other there is an aspect that reaches deeper into each other drawing us closer together.
There is no greater time to listen than when one partner in the relationship is under distress or there is a conflict brewing.
Speaker-Listener Technique
Conflict and stress tend to gain momentum when we are experiencing them with or from our spouse.
This technique will aid with developing a sense of how to slow down a conversation and feel heard.
Speaker & Listener Roles
The speaker is to:
Speak for themselves no mind reading allowed.
Keep statements brief not go on and on.
Stop so the listener can paraphrase.
The listener is to:
paraphrase what is heard without rebutting.
remain focused upon what the speaker has said.
When the speaker is certain the listener has heard, change roles.
Homework
Your homework this week is to utilize this technique at least on time per day for practice.
This is not a new communication pattern to utilize in typical conversation but is a safety net to fall back on when difficult issues are pressed and one of you feels unheard.
Session #7 Sex
A common misnomer of sex in a marriage by those who are unmarried is that “now that I’m married I can have all the sex I want.”
There are two problems with this statement first it is “I” focused, second it limits sex to a merely physical act.
Sex is also a cognitive, emotional, and spiritual act.
God designed sex for marriage; therefore it must be important!
Sexual Desire and Drive
Sexual desires and drives are not necessarily the same for each member in a marriage.
Some people have a higher or lower sex drive.
If this is the case look back to the previous lesson and focus upon communication to help.
“I want Christians to be known for good sex” Mark Gungor
Sex communicates to each other that you are loved and allowed into the world of one another.
Elements in a marriage that lead to sexual gratification come through developing intimacy.
Sex is the build up and anticipation that precede the act of sex.
Husbands: if you want to have sex tonight begin this morning by complimenting your wife.
Homework
Read the book of Song of Songs together and discuss what you may not understand as well as what you do understand.
Discuss how sex is more than just a physical action that occurs between the man and woman in the book.
Session #8 Forgiveness
While conflict isn’t a requirement in marriage, it is an unavoidable consequence of putting a man and woman together in a marital relationship.
Reconciliation is necessary in marriage; to achieve reconciliation there must be confession and forgiveness .
Steps to confession
There are four steps that aid with confession.
The first step is a recognizing the hurt the other is experiencing.
Second recognize that you have contributed to the hurt.
Third identifying and accepting that your actions were wrong.
Fourth a heartfelt desire to change your actions.
Forgiving
Forgiveness does not imply that you have forgotten about the actions of the other person, but it is also not complete when you still desire for the other person to have some type of difficulty befall them.
Forgiving is stating is that you will not bring it up again and that you do not seek any revenge for the action.
This does not imply that you will place yourself back into a harmful situation but that there is a “reduction in the desire to distance, seek revenge, or defend oneself and a desire to reconcile if good moral norms can be reestablished.”
(Worthington 1999, p.134)
Homework
Discuss with one another the elements within your life as an individual that God has forgiven you through the sacrifice of His Son Jesus Christ.
By understanding how much we have been forgiven it often enables us to forgive one another with greater ease allowing for confession and reconciliation.
References
You will need to not only cite your sources as you use them in the above sessions, you will need to develop a slide that has them listed here.
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