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 - not just emotionally, not just spiritually, but in every practical dimension, including his finances. You're about to enter a covenant that will shape how you spend, how you save, how you make decisions, how you handle conflict, 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 almost every session, but usually obliquely - folded inside conversations about values or decision-making or what each person expects the other to carry. What I've noticed is that engaged couples rarely have the actual money conversation. They have conversations around money. They talk about what kind of life they want to build together, what they imagine their home looking like, how many kids they're thinking about. They don't always sit down with a piece of paper and a coffee and say: here is what I have, here is what I owe, here is what my actual income is, here is my credit score, and what is yours?

That conversation is important. Not because it's romantic - it isn't - but because 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.

I'll be honest: my wife and I started marriage with about $80,000 in combined student debt. That wasn't a secret, exactly, but I don't think either of us fully understood the weight of what we were combining until we were combined. The first few months included some genuine moments of recalibration - not crisis, but clarity arriving 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 not sharing that to frighten you. I'm sharing it because the couples who handle money well in the first year are almost always the ones who talked honestly before the wedding, not just hopefully. There is a difference between knowing your partner has student debt and knowing the exact balance, the interest rate, and the monthly payment. Knowing the first lets you keep a comfortable vagueness. Knowing the second puts you in a position to actually make a plan.

So here is the invitation, and it's 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, honest, without editorializing. You don't have to solve anything in that conversation. You just have to see it clearly together. The money and marriage guide goes deeper into how to build the shared framework after that - but the first conversation is just about the truth of where you both actually stand.

I want to say something about the specific dynamics of being a man heading into marriage, because I think it matters.

The temptation is to have your finances sorted before you tell her anything. To present yourself as a man who has it together - not as a performance exactly, but out of something like pride, or the conviction that a husband is supposed to be the one who's on top of things financially. I understand that instinct. I think it comes from a real and genuine desire to be a good provider. But the impulse, taken too far, 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, honestly, with nothing hidden. I don't think that passage is only about the emotional or spiritual dimensions of marriage. A man who is not transparent with his wife about their financial situation is not fully loving her in the way that passage describes. He is protecting her from information she has a right to and a need for. The kind of love Paul has in mind involves full knowing, not managed disclosure.

This is good news, I promise, even if it doesn't sound like it. The alternative - carrying the financial weight alone, managing the picture she sees, editing the news you bring home - is exhausting. I've sat with men in their forties who have been doing it for fifteen years and they are tired in a way that goes all the way down.

Now, a practical thing that nobody ever mentions in wedding planning conversations, and which I will mention because I think it's actually an act of love.

In Ontario, marriage revokes your existing will. If you had a will before you got married - and most young men don't, but if you did - it is no longer valid. You'll need a new one. This is not a fun errand. It is a real one.

More immediately actionable: the week after your wedding, call HR. Or log in to your workplace benefits portal. Or contact your bank, your insurance provider, your RRSP or TFSA account holder. Because the beneficiary designations on all of those accounts - your RRSP, your TFSA, your 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.

Updating your beneficiary designations to your spouse does not go through your estate. It does not require a lawyer. It does not require probate. It is a form. It takes ten minutes per account. And it means that if something happens to you, the money goes directly to her, quickly, without a legal process that can take months and cost real money. It is one of the most straightforward acts of financial care you can do for the woman you're about to marry. Do it the week of the wedding, while you're thinking about it, before the honeymoon, before the thank-you notes, before the return of the rental suits.

Here is the thing I most want you to hear, because I believe it and I have lived it.

Marriage is not a financial cost. It's a financial formation.

I know that sounds counterintuitive. You've probably heard jokes about it going the other way. But here is what I've found, both in my own marriage and in sitting with enough other men to have a real sense of the pattern: a man who is financially accountable to his wife is a better steward than he was alone. Not because she's watching him, but because the wellbeing of another person turns out to be a sharper motivator than personal discipline. Abstract future-you, the one you're theoretically saving for, is easy to discount. The specific woman sitting across from you at dinner - whose comfort, whose security, whose future you feel responsible for - is not abstract at all.

The fights will happen. I won't pretend otherwise. Money fights are almost never really about money - they're about fear, about values that haven't been articulated, about 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 just 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 coffee going cold and you're actually making a plan together - there is something in that that feels like what it was always supposed to be. Two people, one direction, figuring 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. Update your beneficiary designations. Call HR. Open the TFSA if you haven't. And know that 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.