Why is the foundation important?
Just like in life, the place to start is the foundation: without a solid foundation, everything else is unstable. When an entrepreneur decides to start a business, the first step is arguably creating a business plan. When a student first learns a new sport they start with the fundamentals. Everything big and worth doing is best done with a game plan. Marriage is no different! If you go into marriage without a plan, without preparing the foundation, the result is unstable, unreliable, and unpredictable.
Assuming most people agree that a foundation is important for a marriage to work, then the question is how to build a plan for a successful marriage. What makes a good marriage plan? What preparation is important or even necessary? Then, because obviously building a marriage plan wasn’t difficult enough, in a blended family we add kids immediately into the mix and now your plan has to include them! Your foundation must keep in mind children and another parent (or parents) who affect everything…especially when we don’t want them to!
Some of you who are reading this are already in a marriage with a blended family. Maybe you spent the time to build a solid foundation and it is merely needing some maintenance. Perhaps some others reading this are married but realizing they did not spend enough time, or any time, building a foundation for the relationship. That is OK! The peace-giving truth is that there is hope! You can begin building a solid foundation today or repairing a broken one. It isn’t too late.
Let’s start with some ways to build a foundation prior to marriage and then we will go into some of the steps for maintaining that foundation and repairing cracks as they appear in a follow-up post.
When should kids meet your significant other?
First, let me share what we feel are some baseline values we held as single parents going into a relationship. We both love our children. We both had a desire to protect our kids’ hearts while we were in the process of dating. This meant that when we first met each other, and until we felt confident our relationship was more than a short fling, we did not introduce our children to the person we were dating. We told our kids that we were dating, but we felt that their emotions were being challenged enough with our first marriages ending that they did not need to be faced with a potentially short-lived relationship. We did not want our children to become attached to someone who we weren’t confident we wanted to be attached to ourselves.
Please hear our hearts in this. If you began dating and introduced your children into the relationship immediately, we are not judging you! We are not saying you did anything wrong. For us, this was something we felt we needed to do to protect the hearts of our kids because of our situation. We believe there is value in waiting. One of our mentors, and the pastor of the church we are a part of, often says “order affects outcome”. We believe this to be true and hope that you will also pay attention to the order in which you do things so that your outcome is what you want.
When our kids met the new significant other in our lives, we kept it short, and in an environment where the kids would feel safe and not threatened. Our kids were 2, 4, 8 and 12 the year that we began dating. Our children met their parent’s significant other before meeting the other children. Then we allowed our children to slowly acclimate to these new people in their lives with fairly short, joint activities together. In truth, it was very stressful as parents. We were not sure what we were doing, and we were praying and hoping our kids would get along. In this way, a new relationship where each person is already a parent is very different from a typical new relationship. If there are children still living in the home, the children also need time to get to know their future potential step-siblings long before they are living under the same roof.
The time frame you choose for introducing your children to your dating partner, and the children to one another, will vary. It will depend on many circumstances: Do they already know each other from church or school? How old are all the children? How mature are the children? How long do you plan to date before engagement/marriage? We waited until we felt confident we were moving toward marriage. For us, it meant 6 months into our dating for the older kids, and 8 months for the younger ones. The children didn’t meet each other until a few months after that.
It is important to be honest with your kids, although what and when you tell them will be different depending on their ages. You have an opportunity to model a healthy dating and premarital relationship for your children. The foundation you are building is not just for you, but it is for your children to live with and hopefully recreate in their future.
When looking at bringing someone else into your children’s lives, we strongly encourage you to take your time. Do not rush things. Allow the relationships to be built and trust to form before making decisions that are difficult to change. We have watched and read about many parents who have brought the person they are dating into the family relationship only to end things soon after. Take the time needed to ensure the relationship you share with your date has a good foundation beginning – before bringing your children into the mix.
Expectations
Before we got married, we talked. Sitting over a slow lazy dinner, just the two of us, our conversations ranged over a huge variety of topics. We were also big texters, in fact, we still are. When we were each at our own homes, taking care of our kids separately, and not in the same place together; we sent hundreds upon hundreds of text messages.
Coming into a relationship after divorce, certainly, we talked a lot about our past. We talked about our childhoods and upbringing, and coming from divorce we definitely discussed our first marriages. But here is an important distinction: we did not just sit and bash our exes. We talked about what we learned from our first marriages. We talked about what worked and what didn’t. We talked about what we have done to help ourselves grow, heal, and mature. As things got more serious, we talked more about our values in raising our children, our finances, and our expectations for our next marriages.
This is an important practice before getting married. It can be very easy to skip over though, in the excitement of a new relationship and the rose-colored glasses we all like to put on. However, this is absolutely crucial when building a blended family. You must have conversations about nearly everything related to merging two families; you must work to prioritize and compromise where needed in order to get onto the same page. This is not a process that you can shortcut if you care about the end results. Order affects outcome.
Some topics we encourage discussion on:
- Family dynamics growing up, and expectations for family dynamics in the marriage
- Relationships with friends, and how do you plan to maintain those while building a new marriage
- How do you prioritize your time for yourself?
- Personal money styles, budgeting, and debt
- Running the home: who cooks? Cleans? Does yard work? Car maintenance? Home maintenance? Pays the bills?
- The children: what responsibilities belong to which parent?
- What is your love language? What makes you feel loved? How do you express love?
- Sex: initiation and frequency
In a blended family, it would also be a great idea to review each of your parenting plans if you have one set up by a court system. Look at holiday plans, financial aspects, and decision-making processes. As a spouse of someone with a parenting plan, you will need to be aware of what is in your spouse’s plan, as you will be helping him or her uphold it.
These are all just a sampling of the conversations you should be having before taking the steps of blending your family together officially. Not discussing them can have painful results. It goes back to the order of steps affecting the outcome. One of the best ways to work through these conversations is to get help with them. There are many resources available to couples for this type of counseling. One resource that we personally have used and helped others through is the Symbis Assessment.
What are some ways you have built your relationship foundation?
Share in the comments below
