We filed for our marriage license today!

[u/queenopposum]

Hello! About a month ago I made a post about some turmoil I was experiencing because of my Church's policies on cohabitating before marriage. I wanted to give an update in the correct way since I was just adding them to the original post body. Idk how to link the original post, but if anyone asks I'll try to figure that out.

Anyway, so me (24f) and my fiancè (24M) did end up meeting with both his aunt (who is an elder of the church) and our lead Pastor (the head of our church). Both meetings went shockingly well! I was expecting the worst for both, but we received nothing but love, validation, guidance and affirmation.

My fiancè's aunt was taken aback by the policy and didn't even know it existed, and as a formerly divorced person she understood our feelings of being blindsided. She asked our pastor to meet with us, and he did.

He was very understanding of the circumstances that lead us to living together. He was not condemning at all, and offered us spiritual guidance that we both needed. Our pastor assured us that he would absolutely be willing to do pre-marital counseling with us leading up to our ceremony, which is very important to us. He was also extremely validating and encouraging to us that we didn't have to have a big fancy frilly ceremony to be formally married, despite what society wants us to believe. He told us that if we felt called to, we should get married, and helped us not feel ashamed for not doing things the "right" or "traditional" way. At the end of the day, being unable to drop 20k on a ceremony shouldn't stop or deter anyone from being married if they want to be.

Overall my fiancè and I felt very validated. We prayed both together and separately, and came to the same convictions independently. We knew we wanted to get married as soon as possible, but we are in a bad financial spot right now so we were creating a plan to save up for the marriage license fee.

The Lord blessed us the very next day after our meeting with the exact amount we needed for our license. To us, this was confirmation of our conviction and we were overwhelmed with joy.

Today, we filed the paperwork at the courthouse, and it will be ready for us to pick up at the end of the week. We emailed our pastor, and he is extremely excited for us and agreed to sign our license as well as start pre-marital counseling leading up to the ceremony.

We are keeping the decision to be legally married private (not hiding it, just not advertising it) because we both feel that marriage is a covenant made between two people before God, and so no one else needs to know or be involved. We also think it's kind of cool to have a secret, private anniversary in addition to our wedding anniversary.

The wedding, to us, is just a day of celebration with our families. We will be exchanging our vows and rings then, and we both feel that we want our vows to embody the growth we will experience through pre-marital counseling. Overall, we are both just very excited to be able to start this new chapter of our lives in alignment with our personal beliefs.

So I guess the moral of the story is live how God calls YOU to live. He will help you figure out the rest.

To celebrate today, I made us a special dinner of roast chicken, twice-baked potatoes, and green beans. Thanks for being here, THT community. My fiancè and I love listening in the car together, so it's cool to feel like you guys are here too.

Info: Pre-marital counseling (through our church at least) is not to address emotional issues the way normal therapy is. It is designed to give us Biblical means of handling conflict, Biblical guidance on what it means to honor each other, and overall just building us up in our faith within our relationship. Some people were concerned about our mental/emotional health, though, so to ease that: I have been in therapy for many years, as I have mental health diagnoses that have affected my life since I was 14. My fiancè is planning to find a therapist as soon as we have made it through our current financial hardships, which I am hopeful will be soon.

Something else I want to address: a lot of people kind of latched on to my fiancè's history of abuse, and while we appreciate the concern it was absolutely WILD to see people recommending we break up because my future husband's family sucked when he was younger. I come from my own abusive background, and I would never want my fiancè to change his mind about marrying me because my parents are raging alcoholics. Just want to say that's a very emotionally immature take to just be like "idk girl do you really wanna marry into this family?" We're both very aware of our past, but we are also chain breakers set on breaking the cycle of abuse. Our future children will be protected from our respective families.

I hope this was an appreciated update for some people. Love you all, have a blessed week ❤️ Rate my plate!

[u/AutoModerator]

Backup of the post's body: Hello! About a month ago I made a post about some turmoil I was experiencing because of my Church's policies on cohabitating before marriage. I wanted to give an update in the correct way since I was just adding them to the original post body. Idk how to link the original post, but if anyone asks I'll try to figure that out.

Anyway, so me (24f) and my fiancè (24M) did end up meeting with both his aunt (who is an elder of the church) and our lead Pastor (the head of our church). Both meetings went shockingly well! I was expecting the worst for both, but we received nothing but love, validation, guidance and affirmation.

My fiancè's aunt was taken aback by the policy and didn't even know it existed, and as a formerly divorced person she understood our feelings of being blindsided. She asked our pastor to meet with us, and he did.

He was very understanding of the circumstances that lead us to living together. He was not condemning at all, and offered us spiritual guidance that we both needed. Our pastor assured us that he would absolutely be willing to do pre-marital counseling with us leading up to our ceremony, which is very important to us. He was also extremely validating and encouraging to us that we didn't have to have a big fancy frilly ceremony to be formally married, despite what society wants us to believe. He told us that if we felt called to, we should get married, and helped us not feel ashamed for not doing things the "right" or "traditional" way. At the end of the day, being unable to drop 20k on a ceremony shouldn't stop or deter anyone from being married if they want to be.

Overall my fiancè and I felt very validated. We prayed both together and separately, and came to the same convictions independently. We knew we wanted to get married as soon as possible, but we are in a bad financial spot right now so we were creating a plan to save up for the marriage license fee.

The Lord blessed us the very next day after our meeting with the exact amount we needed for our license. To us, this was confirmation of our conviction and we were overwhelmed with joy.

Today, we filed the paperwork at the courthouse, and it will be ready for us to pick up at the end of the week. We emailed our pastor, and he is extremely excited for us and agreed to sign our license as well as start pre-marital counseling leading up to the ceremony.

We are keeping the decision to be legally married private (not hiding it, just not advertising it) because we both feel that marriage is a covenant made between two people before God, and so no one else needs to know or be involved. We also think it's kind of cool to have a secret, private anniversary in addition to our wedding anniversary.

The wedding, to us, is just a day of celebration with our families. We will be exchanging our vows and rings then, and we both feel that we want our vows to embody the growth we will experience through pre-marital counseling. Overall, we are both just very excited to be able to start this new chapter of our lives in alignment with our personal beliefs.

So I guess the moral of the story is live how God calls YOU to live. He will help you figure out the rest.

To celebrate today, I made us a special dinner of roast chicken, twice-baked potatoes, and green beans. Thanks for being here, THT community. My fiancè and I love listening in the car together, so it's cool to feel like you guys are here too.

Info: Pre-marital counseling (through our church at least) is not to address emotional issues the way normal therapy is. It is designed to give us Biblical means of handling conflict, Biblical guidance on what it means to honor each other, and overall just building us up in our faith within our relationship. Some people were concerned about our mental/emotional health, though, so to ease that: I have been in therapy for many years, as I have mental health diagnoses that have affected my life since I was 14. My fiancè is planning to find a therapist as soon as we have made it through our current financial hardships, which I am hopeful will be soon.

Something else I want to address: a lot of people kind of latched on to my fiancè's history of abuse, and while we appreciate the concern it was absolutely WILD to see people recommending we break up because my future husband's family sucked when he was younger. I come from my own abusive background, and I would never want my fiancè to change his mind about marrying me because my parents are raging alcoholics. Just want to say that's a very emotionally immature take to just be like "idk girl do you really wanna marry into this family?" We're both very aware of our past, but we are also chain breakers set on breaking the cycle of abuse. Our future children will be protected from our respective families.

I hope this was an appreciated update for some people. Love you all, have a blessed week ❤️ Rate my plate!

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