Before the Altar: 150 Questions Every Engaged Couple Needs to Ask

By Aja Jackson

"Many couples spend more time picking out their wedding cake, which may or may not be gone by the end of the wedding, than they do planning for the marriage they hope to have for the rest of their lives."

In Before The Altar: 150 Questions Every Engaged Couple Needs to Ask, author and marriage educator Aja Dorsey Jackson guides engaged couples to start marriage off on the right foot. Through multiple questions sections, Before the Altar identifies common conflict areas in marriage, and pinpoints the most important questions couples need to ask before they walk down the aisle. With a wrap up activity at the end of each section and free workbook, Before the Altar is designed for couples of all backgrounds to not only ask the hard questions, but to use the information learned to give their marriage the best possible outcome. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Aja Jackson
• Release date: Feb 2, 2015
• ISBN: 9781507073803

Book preview

Introduction

Why do I need this book?

You don’t.

You could just do what couples do all of the time. Every year, millions of couples around the world get married and most of them don’t ask any of the questions in this book. Many of them make it. You could do the same. 

But I’m going to assume that you opened this book because you want to do everything you can to get the best start possible to the rest of your life with the one you love. I’m going to believe that you came here because you realize that you don’t just want a beautiful wedding, you want a beautiful marriage. I’m going to understand that you know that marriage takes work and that in order to do the right kind of work, you need to learn where and how to work.

So how do your find out where you need to work? You ask questions. You wouldn’t buy a car without asking questions. You wouldn’t buy a house without getting a thorough inspection and learning your new property inside and out. In fact, you probably would do very few things in life without asking any questions at all. If you’re like me, you do a little bit of investigating even before you buy a new shirt online!

You ask questions because you need to prepare. Unfortunately, many people enter marriage with about as much preparation as they would have gotten for that new shirt purchase. In truth, many couples spend more time picking out their wedding cake, which may or may not be gone by the end of the wedding, than they do planning for the marriage they hope to have for the rest of their lives.

I’m about to give you some bad news (but there’s good news to come, I promise).

Regardless of what you’ve seen all of your life in the movies, love won’t find a way.

Love, like life, while powerful, is really just a shapeless, motionless blob. In fact the whole premise of my first book and blog, Making Love in the Microwave, is that love is in the doing. You cannot expect love to just happen forever. Love won’t make a way. You have to make a way for it.

Now, the good news: You are in the best possible position to create your love story.

Right now, everything that your marriage will be is in front of you. Once you are five, ten, twenty years