Email this page to friends About the Author Gene Thomas Gomulka is a retired Navy Chaplain with over 30 years of pastoral and military experience. Having received the Alfred Thayer Mahan Award from the Secretary of the Navy "for literary achievement and inspirational leadership," his goal is to promote better military marriages. To learn more about his recent works, The Survival Guide for Marriage in the Military, and his Marriage and Military Life inventory for dating and married couples, visit the Survival Guide for Marriage in the Military Website. Gene Gomulka Archives Deployment Center Spouse & Family Benefits and Resources Military Opinions Index

Dear Gene-Thomas, My fiancée and I are getting married as soon as I return from Iraq. My battalion chaplain said he would be happy to counsel us as soon as we return, but my fiancée will never be visiting me at our base prior to the wedding back home. How can we prepare for our marriage even though we're thousands of miles apart?...

Rod

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Dear Rod,

Let me congratulate you on recognizing that marriage is more about sharing an intimate married life together than simply a wedding ceremony and reception. It is for this reason that engaged couples are reminded that “A wedding is a day – A marriage is a lifetime.” Unfortunately, too many couples spend most of their time preparing for their wedding day and not their married lives together. What good are expensive wedding photos, a stunning wedding dress, and an elegant reception complete with gourmet food and an awesome band, only to be divorced two or three years later?

There are a considerable number of deployed personnel like yourself who plan on marrying once they return from their deployments. While your chaplain can provide you with some helpful information while you are deployed and a civilian clergy person can help your fiancée address a number of very important topics (communication, conflict resolution, finances, sexuality, children), what you and your fiancée really need to examine is how you relate as a couple to these particular issues. For example, when do you want children and how large a family would you like to have? Are you satisfied with the manner in which you are able to resolve your differences? Have you decided how you will divide different responsibilities such as cooking, cleaning, and paying the bills? Does your budget include setting aside money in anticipation of the day when children will involve additional expenditures?

Premarital inventories such as Marriage and Military Life , FOCCUS and Prepare are designed to help couples evaluate their strengths and weaknesses in various areas of their relationship with the goal of resolving differences and overcoming certain problematic issues. If I were your battalion chaplain, I would provide you and your fiancée with a copy of The Survival Guide for Marriage in the Military and have each of you complete the inventory in the back of the book. I would then have you write to each other about those statements to which one or both of you answered “no” or “uncertain.” If you found that there were certain issues that you as a couple were incapable of resolving even with the help of the “reflections” found in the book, I would then suggest that you discuss these matters with a chaplain, counselor or member of the clergy prior to your wedding.

Recently I had dinner one evening with three couples whose marriages I conducted. I'm pleased to report that all three of the couples were happily married with children. Before consenting to witness their marriages, I required them to complete the premarital inventory found in The Survival Guide for Marriage in the Military . I told them at dinner that I never would have consented to marry them had they had some serious unresolved differences as a result of completing the inventory. However, having completed the inventory that allowed them to identify and address potential weaknesses in their relationship, they were then able to strengthen their love for one another and reduce the potential for divorce and unhappiness in their relationships.

If your battalion chaplain deployed with you in Iraq has a better idea as to how you can enhance your chances for having a happy and life-long marriage, I would be interested in knowing what he might suggest. In the meantime, I will continue my research and writings designed to help lower growing military divorce rates and to enhance the love that dating and married military couples have for each other and their children.

Gene-Thomas Gomulka

Columnist and author whose books are available at www.plaintec.net

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Have a question? Write Gene Gomulka at letters@plaintec.net

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