Following on your Catholic marriage prep class, we encourage you to continue strengthening your relationship through intentional and regular enrichment opportunities. We call these “Marriage Boosters.” 🙂
Oftentimes, a simple article or video will help to spark meaningful conversations between husband and wife. We hope to inspire such conversations with an ongoing series of content accessed through this site.
Finances: The 50/30/20 Budget Rule
Kelley Long, CPA and Certified Financial Planner, helps you budget with the 50/30/20 Budget Rule and gives suggestions for how to make money a bonder in your marriage.
Love the Way Jesus Loves You
Every newlywed couple will tell you that the essence of married life is love. However, individuals define love as they please. Often our idea of love is shaped more by popular culture, social trends, Hollywood movies and pop music than by the gospel. Jesus has set the standard by which we must measure our love. The norm is Jesus himself. As John reports: “Love one another as I have loved you.” To love as Jesus loves is the challenge facing every Christian couple.
Finances: Updates Needed Once Married
Kelley Long, CPA and Certified Financial Planner, goes over what documents need to be updated after you get married.
And They Lived Happily Ever After
The same world view that spreads the idea that we have to be skinny to be beautiful and rich to be happy brings us the fairy tale that having a healthy marriage means no fights, no stress, and lots of hot, passionate sex. The unfortunate result is that we often compare our less than perfect relationship to one that only exists in books and movies. When our marital relationship starts looking more like (gasp) our parents’ marriage than the “ideal,” we begin to doubt our spouse and ourselves.
Making Happiness a Habit: Intro
Habits, the little things that you do over and over are important. Good habits can strengthen your marriage. How do you choose the most important habits so that your marriage can be happy? Dr. Jim Healy, who has been studying the psychology of well–being for many years, talks about how forming habits around the communication themes of thanksgiving, petition, contrition, and praise can make your marriage happy.
Timing is Everything
Even though we’d been together for several years, we finally had to face one of those conundrums of married life: how do two people get along in such close quarters? What is the right amount of time together and time apart? After much trial and error, here are the conclusions we came to, and how we applied each theory to our marriage.
Making Happiness a Habit: Thanksgiving
Dr. Jim Healy explains how gratitude is so important in marriage, using examples from his own marriage, and offers suggestions for habits to encourage gratitude and make your marriage happier, including one that only takes 5 seconds.
25 Ways to Fight Fair
Have you noticed that some couples seem to be fighting all the time, while others seem to be forever at peace? The fact is, all relationships experience turmoil from time to time. It’s important that we, as individuals and as couples, continue to improve our communication and conflict management skills, so that both spouses feel heard and understood.
Making Happiness a Habit: Petition
Dr. Jim Healy explains three ways we use petitioning to strengthen our marriage and offers suggestions for forming habits to make your marriage happier. He gives strategies for communicating without criticizing.
The Bride Without Shoes
Self-giving and sacrifice are essential elements of Christian love. Benedict XVI wrote in his encyclical, “God Is Love,” that married love is not self–seeking, but seeks the good of the beloved, and mature love is ready and willing for sacrifice.
Healy Making Happiness a Habit: Forgiveness
Dr. Jim Healy explains how important forgiveness is to strengthen a marriage and offers suggestions for forming habits to make your marriage happier. He uses examples from his own family on how he’d try to get out of asking for forgiveness and how his marriage improved when he learned to replace these behaviors with habits of happiness.
In-laws Together, Crossing the Bridge
How do we manage the transition from child to spouse? In the marriage ceremony, we are instructed to leave our mother and father and “cleave to each other,” leaving childhood behind, yet sometimes parents have trouble thinking of their children as adults.
Making Happiness a Habit: Praise
It’s important to praise our spouse. Dr. Jim Healy discusses how giving and receiving praise can strengthen a marriage and offers suggestions for making it a habit to make your marriage happier. Praise can build you both up and make your marriage better.
Catholic Couple Checkup for Married Couples
You probably worked through a “premarital inventory,” also called a relationship survey, as a part of your marriage preparation program through the Church.
The Catholic Couple Checkup is an inventory designed for couples to work through online, in the comfort and privacy of your home. It only takes about 20 minutes each for you to complete your portion (his and hers) of the Checkup.
Once complete, you will receive a report that does a great job of illustrating the areas of strength in your relationship, as well as the areas that could use work. The report also includes discussion starters to facilitate deeper conversations between husband and wife.