The following is a response we wrote back to an African woman whose fiance was beginning to act as though he wanted out of their engagement. She asked for our help in what she should do about this problem. If you aren’t from Africa we’ll have different contact information for you at the end of this article to make it relevant to you. Here is what we wrote her on this particular problem that may or may not help you with this same situation:

Dear ______,

Please proceed very, very slowly on this one. If you’re already having problems of this magnitude when you’re engaged I can assure you that unless you both are TOTALLY committed to marrying and being committed to each other after marriage to do all you both can do to make it a healthy, loving marriage, your marriage will have little chance of surviving.

Just look around you to see all those that are divorcing and those who are married who have very dysfunctional, terrible relationships. Just because you love each other at this point in your relationship, it isn’t a guarantee that you will continue to love each other later on after you marry and you start encountering problems that life throws at you. It may not seem possible that this could be true but how many people do you know who marry walk down the aisle thinking they will eventually destroy the love they have for each other? Almost none! And yet it happens all the time.

For a good marriage to happen you have to put in a lot of hard work, compromising, asking God for abundant wisdom, and sheer determination to push through against all the odds. Very few people tell you that a good marriage doesn’t just happen, it takes hard work! Read the following quote from a WONDERFUL book that I highly recommend for you to read:

“Marriage can be wonderful. It can be deeply satisfying and mutually fulfilling. But if it becomes that, it is because both partners have paid a very high price over many years to make it that way. They will have died to selfishness a thousand times. They will have had countless difficult conversations. They will have endured sleepless nights and strained days. They will have prayed hundreds of prayers for wisdom and patience and courage and understanding. They will have said “I’m sorry” too many times to remember. They will have been stretched to the breaking point often enough to have learned that, unless Christ is at the center of both their lives, the odds for achieving marital satisfaction are very, very low.”

(This comes from the book, “Fit to be Tied” by Bill and Lynne Hybels.) (You can either get this book at your local Christian bookstore or order it through www.amazon.com)

That statement is more true than I can emphasize. For some reason the man you are engaged to isn’t totally committed to getting married like you are. This is a real red flag signaling eventual trouble if you don’t BOTH work on figuring out why this is and BOTH work on a solution for putting this behind you as you pursue a TOTAL commitment on both of your parts to work through whatever separates committing to your relationship 100%.

You may also want to contact the ministry for Focus on the Family which has a web site for South Africa at www.safamily.org.za. They may be able to advise you better than we can and also let you know of some other material that you can get ah old of which may be able to help you through this crisis. They’re great folks there and they do counsel those who ask for it. You may want to give them a try.

One more web site that may be able to help you is also put together by Focus on the Family. It is found at www.troublewith.com. When you go into it and see the list of topics they have available go to the section entitled, “Getting Married” and click on it. They have a lot of different articles to read and resources that they recommend which you may find very helpful because it’s designed for those like yourself who are looking to marry someone.

I pray this helps. I wish I could give you more advice than this but Steve and I aren’t counselors —we’re marriage educators. We have a lot of things on our web site in the “Pre-married” section that you can read up on that might help you but other than that and contacting either Focus on the Family or a counselor, I don’t know what else to tell you. Keep pursuing an answer though. Don’t pursue marrying this man if you have to talk him into marrying you. I can almost guarantee you that you’ll eventually be sorry.

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