Tag: wills and estate planning

Premarital counselling covers a great deal. Communication styles. Conflict resolution. Finances, usually briefly. Roles and expectations. Sometimes a personality assessment.

What it rarely covers is the texture of the thing — the ordinary, unglamorous realities that couples only discover in the second year and then assume they are the only ones experiencing.

We asked around. These are the seven that came up most often, from couples married anywhere between four and thirty-two years.

1. The wedding will end, and there will be a strange quiet afterwards

Nobody warns you about the drop.

For six months, sometimes a year, your life has an organising purpose. There are decisions to make, vendors to chase, families to manage, a countdown running in your head. Everyone you meet asks about it. You are, briefly, the centre of a small universe.

Then it happens, and it is over, and you are in a flat with someone, on an ordinary Tuesday, and there is nothing to plan.

Many couples describe a low, disorienting week or two in the first months — not unhappiness exactly, but a flatness they feel guilty about. It is not a sign that you married the wrong person. It is the ordinary aftermath of a long project ending, and it passes.

What helps is having something to move toward. A savings goal, a trip, a ministry you join together, a house you are working toward. Give the marriage a next thing early.

2. You did not marry a person. You married a family, a history, and a set of unexamined assumptions

Everyone nods at “you marry the family.” Few people grasp how deep it runs.

It is not primarily about in-laws visiting. It is about the thousand tiny defaults each of you absorbed before you were old enough to notice. How loudly people argue. Whether raised voices mean danger or just emphasis. Whether money is discussed openly or never. Whether Sunday afternoons are for rest or for visiting. Whether a closed bedroom door means privacy or rejection. What “clean” means. What time is late.

Neither of you chose these. Both of you assume they are simply how things are done.

The first serious argument in many marriages is not about the stated subject at all. It is two default settings colliding, with both parties genuinely bewildered that the other could see it differently.

The couples who navigate this well develop a habit of asking, mid-disagreement: “What did this look like in your house growing up?” It defuses more conflicts than any technique in a book.

3. Physical intimacy takes work, and for many Christian couples it takes longer than expected

This is the one that people are most reluctant to say aloud, and the one that causes the most private distress.

Couples who waited often arrive with an unspoken expectation that obedience will be rewarded with immediate ease. When it is not — when the first months are awkward, or painful, or complicated by years of internalised messaging that sex was dangerous and shameful — many conclude something is wrong with them.

Very little is wrong with them. Bodies take time to learn each other. Anxiety is a physical inhibitor. A decade of “don’t” does not reverse in a night because a ring changed hands.

Two things help. First, talking about it as a shared project rather than a performance either party is passing or failing. Second, being willing to seek medical or professional help without shame if difficulty persists. Persistent pain in particular is a medical matter, not a spiritual one, and it is treatable.

4. You will have the same argument for years, and that is normal

Research on long marriages consistently finds that a substantial proportion of conflict is perpetual — rooted in stable differences of personality and preference that will not be resolved because there is nothing to resolve.

One of you is early; one is late. One wants people in the house; one needs the house quiet. One processes decisions by talking; one by withdrawing to think.

Couples who expect every disagreement to be permanently solved treat the recurrence of these as failure. Couples who understand them as perpetual learn to manage them with humour and accommodation rather than trying to win them.

The question worth asking about a recurring argument is not “how do we settle this?” but “how do we hold this well for the next forty years?”

5. Praying together will be harder than you imagine

Almost every Christian couple intends to pray together daily. A minority manage it.

The reasons are rarely spiritual. Schedules diverge. One person is a morning person, the other collapses at eleven. Praying aloud in front of the person who has seen you at your worst is oddly exposing. And after a difficult day, praying together requires a reconciliation you have not yet made.

What works better than an ambitious daily commitment is a small, specific, sustainable one. Two minutes before leaving the house. A short prayer over the meal that includes something real rather than only thanks for the food. One evening a week, protected.

Couples who set the bar low and clear it consistently end up praying together far more over ten years than couples who set it high and fail by March.

6. Someone will drift first, and it will not be dramatic

Marriages rarely fall apart in an explosion. They erode.

It looks like this: work gets demanding, so conversation shrinks to logistics. Children arrive, so evenings belong to them. One of you finds a friendship where you feel more interesting than you do at home. Phones fill the gaps that used to be filled by talking. Nobody does anything wrong at any single point.

Then one day, five years in, you realise you know your spouse’s schedule intimately and their inner life not at all.

The counter to erosion is not a grand gesture. It is a protected, recurring, unremarkable slot — an hour a week where the only agenda is each other. The couples who survive the child-rearing years with their friendship intact almost all report some version of this.

7. The people who married in your church are struggling too

Perhaps the most damaging thing about Christian marriage culture is the performance.

Couples arrive at church looking composed, having argued in the car park. Everyone assumes everyone else is doing better than they are. So nobody asks for help until the situation is serious, at which point the community that could have helped early is hearing about it for the first time.

If you take one thing from this list, take this: find one older couple, or one couple your own age, with whom you can be honest. Not a small group where you share prayer requests about your cousin’s job. A real, mutual, unimpressive honesty about how it is actually going.

The isolation is the danger. The struggles themselves are extremely ordinary.

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What to do with this before the wedding

If you are engaged and reading this, the most useful exercise is not to memorise the list. It is to sit down together and answer four questions honestly:

• What did conflict look like in each of our homes growing up?
• What are we each expecting the first year to feel like?
• What is our realistic, sustainable spiritual practice as a couple — not the aspirational one?
• Who are the two people we will tell if we are struggling?

An hour on those four questions is worth more than most of what will be said at the reception.

Ask this question in a church hall and you will get two confident answers, both delivered as though the matter were settled.

The first: “We are one flesh. One flesh means one account. Separate money is separate hearts.”

The second: “I have seen too many women left with nothing. Every wife needs her own account.”

Both answers come from real experience. Both are argued sincerely. And both are stated with far more biblical certainty than the Bible actually provides.

It is worth saying plainly at the start: Scripture does not prescribe a banking arrangement. There were no joint accounts in the ancient Near East. What Scripture gives us is a set of principles about ownership, provision, trust, and stewardship — and those principles can be honoured through more than one structure.

What “one flesh” does and does not settle

Genesis 2:24 is the verse that gets quoted most: a man leaves his father and mother, is joined to his wife, and they become one flesh. Jesus repeats it in Matthew 19. Paul echoes it in Ephesians 5.

The passage is doing serious theological work. It establishes that marriage creates a genuine union — not a partnership of two independent parties who remain fundamentally separate. In a Christian marriage there is no “my money” in the sense of money you have no claim on. Whatever the account structure, the underlying ownership is shared.

But notice what the text does not say. It does not describe how that shared ownership should be administered. A couple who keep one account and a couple who keep three can both hold their assets in genuine common ownership. A couple with one account can also, in practice, operate with one spouse entirely in the dark and entirely without access — which is unity on paper and something else in reality.

The one-flesh principle rules out secrecy and separate ownership. It does not rule out separate administration.

This distinction is the whole argument, and most church-hall debates skip past it.

Where Proverbs 31 actually lands

The other passage that gets pulled into this discussion is Proverbs 31. It is usually cited by the side arguing for wifely independence, and it does more work for that position than people realise.

The woman described there considers a field and buys it. She plants a vineyard from her earnings. She makes linen garments and sells them, and supplies sashes to the merchants. She trades, and perceives that her trading is profitable.

This is a woman with economic agency. She is making acquisition decisions and running commercial operations. Her husband is described as trusting her and lacking nothing — not as approving each transaction.

The text does not tell us how her money was held. It does tell us that a wife independently generating and deploying income is not a departure from the biblical picture of marriage. It is one of the Bible’s most celebrated pictures of a wife.

The case for a fully joint account

Couples who pool everything usually cite three things, and all three have merit.

It forces conversation. When every purchase is visible, spending patterns get discussed rather than hidden. Many couples find this uncomfortable at first and healthy afterwards.

It removes scorekeeping. Where incomes are unequal — and they usually are — separate accounts can quietly turn into a ledger. Who paid for what. Who contributed more. That ledger is corrosive, and pooling removes the arithmetic that feeds it.

It reflects the theology honestly. If ownership genuinely is shared, there is something clarifying about a structure that says so without qualification.

The weakness of this model is that it can conceal an imbalance. A single joint account administered exclusively by one spouse, with the other having no card, no login, and no real knowledge of the balance, is not unity. It is control wearing unity’s clothes. If your household runs this way, the account structure is not the problem — the arrangement behind it is.

The case for some separation

The most common workable version is not fully separate accounts. It is joint plus personal: one shared account that both incomes flow into and from which all shared obligations are paid, plus a modest personal account each, funded by an equal transfer.

The arguments for it are also serious.

It reduces friction over small things. Some couples genuinely cannot discuss a purchase of a few thousand naira without irritation. A small discretionary allowance each removes an entire category of argument at very low cost.

It preserves dignity where incomes differ. A spouse who earns significantly less — often a wife who stepped back for children — should not have to request money for a gift, a hair appointment, or a contribution to a friend’s wedding. A personal allowance restores the dignity of spending without asking.

It provides a route out of danger. This is the argument nobody enjoys making, but it must be made. Financial control is one of the most common mechanisms of abuse, and a spouse with no independent access to funds has no practical ability to leave, seek help, or protect children in an emergency. Churches that teach total pooling as a moral requirement should reckon honestly with the women this has trapped.

The weakness of this model is drift. Personal accounts that start as small allowances can quietly become parallel financial lives if the couple stops reviewing them. Separation needs maintenance in a way that pooling does not.

What the principles actually require

Strip away the structures and Scripture is fairly demanding about four things.

Transparency. Ananias and Sapphira were not judged for owning property. They were judged for jointly agreeing to misrepresent it. Concealment between spouses about money is the thing Scripture treats seriously — and it is entirely possible in either structure.

Provision. 1 Timothy 5:8 makes provision for one’s household a matter of faith itself. Whatever arrangement you choose must actually deliver food, shelter, education, and care.

Generosity. Giving should be a joint decision reflecting the household’s shared conviction, not something one spouse does quietly around the other.

Stewardship over ownership. The deepest complication in this debate is that neither answer is fully correct, because ultimately the money is not the husband’s or the wife’s. Both are managing something entrusted. That reframing tends to dissolve a good deal of the heat.

A practical way to decide

Rather than adopting whichever model your parents used, work through four questions together.

What are our fixed shared obligations each month? Rent or mortgage, food, school fees, transport, giving, savings. This total goes into the joint account regardless of which model you choose.

What proportion of income does that leave? If it leaves very little, personal accounts are largely theoretical and you may as well pool.

Does either of us have a spending pattern that needs visibility? Be honest. If one spouse has a gambling history, a debt problem, or a pattern of large undiscussed purchases, transparency should be structural, not merely promised.

Does the arrangement leave both of us able to function if the other were suddenly unavailable? If one spouse cannot access funds tomorrow morning without the other, the structure has failed regardless of how unified it feels.

The honest conclusion

There is no verse that settles this. Anyone who tells you there is has either not read carefully or is defending a preference with borrowed authority.

What Scripture requires is that your money be genuinely shared in ownership, honestly disclosed, faithfully used to provide, and generously given. A couple can meet all four with one account. A couple can meet all four with three.

Choose the structure that makes those four things easiest in your marriage — and then review it every couple of years, because the right answer at 26 with no children is often not the right answer at 44 with three.

Every married couple has a conversation they keep postponing. For some it’s about in-laws. For others it’s about intimacy, or where they’ll spend Christmas. But there is one conversation that couples avoid more consistently than any other, and it is almost never the one they think it is.

It is not “how much do you earn?” Most couples settle that before the wedding.

It is not “who pays for what?” That one usually sorts itself out within the first year, informally, through habit.

The conversation couples avoid is this: what happens to the money if one of us is no longer here?

It sounds morbid. That is exactly why it gets postponed — sometimes for decades, sometimes until the moment it is needed and it is far too late to have it.

Why we avoid it

There is a quiet superstition that runs through many homes, including Christian ones: that talking about death invites it. We would rarely say this out loud, because we know it does not hold up. But it shapes behaviour anyway. A husband suggests writing a will and his wife says, “God forbid. Why are you talking like that?” The subject closes. It does not come up again for three years.

There is also a theological confusion at work. Some believe that planning for death shows a lack of faith — that a person who truly trusts God does not need contingency plans. But Scripture consistently commends the opposite. Proverbs praises the ant that stores in summer. Joseph’s entire ministry in Egypt was a fourteen-year contingency plan. Paul told Timothy that a man who fails to provide for his household has denied the faith. Providing does not stop at the boundary of your own lifespan.

Planning is not doubt. Planning is love expressed in paperwork.

What actually happens when a couple never has this conversation

Consider a fairly ordinary situation. A husband dies suddenly at 52. He had a good job, a mortgage he was steadily paying off, a savings account, and a small piece of land he bought years ago intending to build on.

His wife knows about the job and roughly what he earned. She does not know which bank holds the savings account, because he handled all of that. She has never seen the land documents. She does not know whether the mortgage had any insurance attached to it. She does not have access to his email, so the statements and correspondence are locked away behind a password she never needed to know.

None of this is unusual. It is the normal result of a normal division of labour in a normal marriage. And it turns a season of grief into a season of grief plus administration, plus uncertainty, plus — in too many cases — family members appearing with claims on property and no document to contradict them.

The widow in that scenario is not suffering because her husband did not love her. She is suffering because love was never written down.

The five things that need to be said out loud

You do not need a financial adviser to start. You need an evening, two cups of tea, and a willingness to be slightly uncomfortable for an hour.

1. Where everything is. Not the amounts — the locations. Which banks. Which accounts. Where the property documents physically sit. Which insurance policies exist and who the insurer is. Whether there is a pension, and with whom. This alone solves a large share of the problem, and it requires no lawyer and no money.

2. How to get in. Passwords, PINs, and the location of physical keys. This is genuinely awkward, because it feels like handing over privacy. It is worth agreeing on a method rather than a full disclosure — a sealed envelope in a known place, or a password manager with a designated emergency contact. The goal is not surveillance. The goal is access at the moment access is needed.

3. Who is named. Most insurance policies and pension accounts have a named beneficiary. Many people named someone a decade ago and have never looked since. Parents, siblings, a former partner. Check. This is a fifteen-minute task and it overrides almost everything else, including in many cases what a will says.

4. Whether there is a will. A will is not only for wealthy people. It is for anyone who owns anything and has people they care about. Where there is no will, the law decides distribution — and the law’s default rarely matches what the couple would have chosen, particularly where there are children from a previous relationship or extended family with expectations.

5. What you would want. Not just the assets. Would you want the house sold or kept? Would you want the children to finish school where they are? Should the business be continued or wound up? Your spouse will have to make these decisions under the worst conditions of their life. Knowing your mind is a mercy.

How to start it without it feeling like a funeral

The framing matters more than the content. “I want to talk about what happens when you die” will end badly. Try instead:

“I realised today that if something happened to me, you wouldn’t know where half of our things are. That’s not fair to you. Can we fix it this weekend?”

You have made yourself the subject rather than your spouse. You have named a specific, solvable problem rather than an abstract dread. And you have proposed an action with a date attached, which is the difference between a conversation and a resolution.

Some couples find it easier to attach the conversation to an existing event — the start of a new year, a birthday, the purchase of a house, the birth of a child. These are natural review points, and the emotional weight is lower.

The version of this for younger couples

If you are newly married and own very little, you may be tempted to conclude that this does not apply to you yet. It applies to you more cheaply than it will ever apply again.

Life insurance is priced on age and health. The premium a healthy 28-year-old pays is a fraction of what the same person will pay at 45. A will drawn up now can be updated later at low cost. And the habit of financial transparency, established in year one, is far easier than installing it in year twenty when patterns of secrecy have already set.

The couples who handle this well are rarely the couples who found the perfect moment. They are the couples who had an imperfect, slightly awkward conversation early, and then revisited it every few years as things changed.

A closing thought

There is a particular kind of care that does not feel like care while you are doing it. Sitting down with a notebook and listing account numbers is not romantic. Reviewing a beneficiary form is not intimate. Signing a will is not a love language anyone has written a book about.

But the widow who knows exactly where everything is, who is not fighting relatives over land, whose children’s school fees are covered because someone thought ahead — she experiences that paperwork as one of the most loving things her husband ever did.

Have the conversation. This month, if you can. It will take an hour, and it will be the least dramatic and most important hour you spend together this year.