A Letter to the Man Who Just Got Engaged

Congratulations. I mean that without any reservations.

Marriage is one of the most significant things a man will do with his life. It reaches him emotionally and spiritually, and it reaches into every practical dimension too, including his finances. You're about to enter a covenant that will shape your spending and your saving, the way the two of you make decisions and the way you fight, and what you decide is actually important. The man who walks out of the church on his wedding day is not the same man who walked in, and that is entirely by design.

So: congratulations. And also: there are a few things I'd like to say to you before the wedding.

I've done a lot of premarital counselling. Money comes up in most of those sessions, usually obliquely, folded inside conversations about values or about what each person expects the other to carry. What I've noticed is that engaged couples talk around money far more than they talk about it. They talk about the kind of life they want to build together and how many kids they're thinking about. They don't always sit down with a piece of paper and a coffee and say: this is what I earn and this is what I owe. What about you?

That conversation is about as romantic as a dentist appointment. Have it anyway. You are about to merge your financial lives, and doing that without a clear picture of where each of you stands is like two people agreeing to drive somewhere together without telling each other how much gas is in the tank.

My wife and I started marriage with student debt. We both knew about it going in. The weight of what we were combining only became clear once we were combined.

The first few months took some recalibrating. Clarity arrived in less comfortable ways than either of us had anticipated. The grace required in those early months went both directions. I had to extend some, and I needed to receive some.

I'm sharing that because the couples who handle money well in the first year are almost always the ones who talked honestly before the wedding. There is a difference between knowing your fiancée has student debt and knowing the exact balance, what rate it's charging, and what comes out every month. The vague version lets you both keep a comfortable distance from the truth. Once you know the actual figures, you can sit down and make a plan around them.

The invitation is simple: before you get married, sit down together and write down the numbers. Both of your actual incomes, after tax. All of the debts, with balances and rates. The savings each of you is bringing in. What each of you currently spends in a month. Just the numbers on paper, without editorializing. The only goal that night is to see it clearly, together. Solving it can wait for a second coffee. The money and marriage guide goes deeper into how to build the shared framework after that; the first conversation is only about the truth of where you both stand.

I want to say something about the particular temptation a man faces heading into marriage.

The temptation is to have your finances sorted before you tell her anything, to present yourself as a man who has it together. Underneath that is usually pride, or the conviction that a husband is supposed to be the one who's on top of things financially. I understand the instinct. It comes from a genuine desire to be a good provider. But taken too far, it becomes a kind of isolation. You start managing things alone that were never meant to be managed alone.

Ephesians 5 talks about a husband loving his wife as Christ loved the church, sacrificially and with nothing hidden. I take that passage to reach past the emotional and spiritual dimensions of marriage into the practical ones, money included. A man who keeps his wife in the dark about their finances is holding back something she has a right to and a need for, and that falls short of the love Paul describes. The love Paul has in mind means she knows what you know.

I promise that kind of openness lands as relief once you're on the other side of it. Carrying the whole financial weight alone, editing the news you bring home every payday, wears a man down.

Now, a practical thing that nobody mentions in wedding planning, and which I will mention because it is an act of love in its own right.

If you had a will before you got married (and most young men don't, but if you did), Ontario law used to revoke it for you automatically the day you married. That stopped in January 2022. A will made before the wedding now survives it, still saying what a single man wanted, still naming whoever you named back then. You'll need a new one. It is an unglamorous errand and a real act of care. Rules differ by province, so check yours.

More immediately actionable: the week after your wedding, call HR. Or log in to your workplace benefits portal. Or contact your bank, and whoever holds your RRSP or TFSA. Because the beneficiary designations on all of those accounts (RRSP, TFSA, a life insurance policy if you have one, any workplace pension or group benefits plan) are still pointing at whoever you named when you set them up, which is probably your parents or nobody at all.

Naming your spouse as beneficiary is a form, ten minutes per account, and no lawyer needs to be involved. If something happens to you, the money in those accounts then goes directly to her, outside your estate, without a probate process that can take months and cost real money. There are few more straightforward acts of financial care you can do for the woman you're about to marry. Do it that same week, while you're thinking about it, before the thank-you notes and before the rental suits go back.

One more thing, and it is the one I most want you to hear, because I have lived it.

Marriage is going to form you as a steward.

I know that sounds counterintuitive. You've heard the jokes about what marriage does to a man's bank account. What I've found, in my own marriage and in what I've heard from enough other men to see the pattern, is that a man who is financially accountable to his wife is a better steward than he was alone. The wellbeing of another person turns out to be a sharper motivator than personal discipline ever was. Abstract future-you, the one you're theoretically saving for, is easy to discount. Try discounting the specific woman across the table at dinner, whose security and whose future you are now responsible for.

The fights will happen. I won't pretend otherwise. And when they come, the money is usually just the surface of it. Underneath is fear, or values that went unspoken, or one person feeling unheard, or one person carrying more anxiety than the other knows. The grace you need for her spending patterns is the same grace you'll need for her personality on a hard day, which is the same grace you'll need for yours. Marriage is a long and astonishing act of mutual grace. Money is one of the places where that grace gets worked out.

But when you get it right, when you're sitting at the kitchen table in the second year of marriage with the budget on the laptop and the coffee going cold and you're actually making a plan together, there is something in it that feels like what marriage was always supposed to be. Two people, one direction, working out what they've been given and how to hold it well before God.

That's worth working toward. I think you'll find your way there.

Go. Get married. Have the hard conversation before the ceremony and the long one after. Every small, faithful act of financial honesty in that first year is building something that will carry you for decades.

May your wedding day be full of grace, and your first year together be honest and good.