Marriage Prep Beyond the Checklist: 4 Soulful Tools for Deeper Connection During Your Engagement

Wedding planning is event planning, but getting married is master's level personal growth and development.

Most couples spend months obsessing over centerpieces, comparing vendors, and perfecting their timeline. They'll debate napkin colors for hours but never discuss their conflict styles. They'll hire three different photographers but never explore how they each express love.

Here's the truth: your wedding day will be beautiful regardless of whether you choose eucalyptus or baby's breath. But your marriage? That requires intentional preparation that goes far beyond any checklist.

By the end of this post, you'll know the four tools to making your wedding planning process a marriage preparation process, so that you can get married consciously and intentionally.
Why Most Couples Get Marriage Prep Completely WrongThe wedding industry has trained us to focus on the performance rather than the partnership. We're taught to plan an event, not a life together. But what if your engagement period could be the most transformative season of personal growth you've ever experienced?

What if, instead of just planning a party, you could use this sacred time to:

• Align your deepest values and vision for marriage
• Understand each other's unique relationship patterns
• Create rituals of connection that will serve you for decades
• Step into your wedding day with unprecedented clarity and presence

​This is what conscious marriage preparation looks like. And it starts with four powerful tools that will transform your entire approach to getting married.

Tool 1: Create Your Relationship GPS with Intention Setting

The Pin on Your Marriage Map

Intention setting creates a "pin on the map" for your journey (whatever ot may be). It defines your aspirational outcome and articulates the specific actions you'll take to get there.

When you set an intention for your wedding planning process, you're deciding the experience you want to create (what do you want to FEEL) and then mapping out the actions that will lead to that experience. Everything else becomes a matter of commitment and follow-through.

Your Daily Anchor

​Practically, your intention becomes an anchor that keeps you on course toward your vision. Here's how to use it:

• Write your intention and place it in your wedding planning materials
• Read it aloud every time you start any wedding planning task
• When facing difficult decisions or uncertainty, return to your intention and read it aloud—often the right choice becomes obvious

You can set intentions for multiple areas:

• Your wedding planning process
• Your vow writing journey
• Your actual marriage

An example of a wedding planning intention could be “As a conscious partner, it is my sincere intention to use our wedding planning process as an exercise in teamwork, so that I can feel connected with my partner throughout this process.”

Tool 2: Activate Your Growth Radar with Journaling

The Science of Intentional Focus

Regular journaling creates a powerful transformation in what you're able to see and experience. When you consistently focus on specific values and intentions, you activate your reticular activating system (RAS)—your brain's filtering mechanism that determines what you notice in the world around you.

For engaged couples, this means centering your attention on the qualities and experiences you want to grow in your relationship. By focusing on what you want to bloom, you're directing your limited resources—time, energy, bandwidth—toward your relationship priorities.

​Beyond Random Reflection

​Here's how it works: Let’s say you set an intention to center teamwork throughout your wedding planning.  Every morning you journal about your intention to bring it into awareness.  Your brain, activated starts noticing opportunities for teamwork everywhere. Some decision making process, that maybe you’d be inclined to just let your partner deal with alone, (“I don’t even know what charger plates are?!”) will inevitably pop up and because you used your journal to center your intention, you may see this opportunity for what it is, a chance to connect with your beloved 

The Season Journals Engagement Journal takes daily journaling even further, and provides the perfect framework for this intentional focus, with prompts designed specifically for couples navigating the engagement season.

This intentional journaling practice transforms wedding planning from a stressful checklist into a journey of deeper connection and shared vision-casting.

Tool 3: Decode Your Relationship Dynamic with SYMBIS

Understanding the Human Underneath the Behaviors

Marriage preparation assessment tools like SYMBIS help couples understand themselves in the context of their relationship. As a certified SYMBIS facilitator, I've seen how powerful these insights can be forengaged couples.

The assessment reveals crucial information about:

Your Conflict Styles: How you each respond when tensions arise, helping you see past behaviors to the human underneath. When you understand that your partner's withdrawal during conflict isn't rejection but their natural coping style, you can respond with compassion instead of escalation.

Love Expression Patterns: The specific ways you each naturally show and receive love, creating a roadmap for connection that goes beyond the basic love languages.

Sexual Relationship Expectations: Your desires around frequency, initiation, and intimacy—conversations that are straightforward now but will be invaluable to navigate over the decades of marriage ahead.

From Insight to Practical Skills

​This isn't just about gaining knowledge—it's about developing practical relationship skills. The more you understand what makes up your partner and how they show up in relationships, the more you can connect with the human underneath their behaviors.

Equally important, the more you understand about yourself and how you show up, the more likely you'll be to take ownership when your behaviors are the problem and make movement toward personal growth and mastery of how you show up in your marriage.

​Think of it as learning the unique fabric of your relationship—understanding which threads run in the same direction and which move in contrast, all working together to create something beautiful.

Tool 4: Write Vows That Actually Transform Your Marriage

Beyond Pretty Words

Most wedding vows fall into two categories: traditional religious frameworks or modern performative speeches. Intentional vow writing is different—it's a process of identifying and declaring your deepest commitments.
Intentional vows incorporate four essential elements:

1. Your foundational memories - how you got to where you are
2. Your shared vision—the life you're building as partners
3. Why you love them—the specific qualities that draw you to this human
4. What it will take—the actions and commitments required to create your vision

The How to Vow Framework

My How to Vow framework walks couples through a specific process: visualization, organization, warming up for the big day, and how to shine during your ceremony. This isn't about writing pretty words—it's about creating a declaration that will anchor your marriage for decades.

Interested in learning more about my How to Vow Framework - get on the waitlist and I’ll let you know as soon as my course gets released!
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The Magic of Conscious Marriage Preparation

Let me tell you about Jasmine and Aladdin (not their real names, but you get the picture). When they first came to me, they already knew they wanted to be intentional about their wedding planning process. They weren't just planning an event—they were preparing for a life together.

They used the How to Vow framework to infuse their personal vows with intention and purpose. They incorporated meaningful rituals into their ceremony. They completed a deep-dive marriage preparation program that included SYMBIS-style assessment and coaching.

The result? Their ceremony was, in their words, "super duper magical." Everyone present—including me—was fully there in that moment. The presence felt… more present. I can’t describe it but to say, it was intense.  As an empathic person, it is a skillset of mine to tune into the energetics of a space, and as an officiant, I use that skill all the time to “create space” for my couples to get married in a really conscious and connected way.  At this particular elopement, I didn’t need to create anything, these two brought the vibes with them because this all meant more to them than just a performance.

This is what becomes possible when you use your engagement season for what it can be: one of the most intentional periods of relationship growth you'll ever experience.

Your Conscious Marriage Journey Starts Now

Wedding planning will happen whether you're intentional about it or not. Vendors will be hired, flowers will be chosen, and guests will be invited. But marriage preparation? That's a choice.

You can spend your engagement checking items off a list, or you can use this sacred time to build the foundation for a lifetime of conscious partnership.

The four tools we've explored—intention setting, regular journaling practice, relationship assessment, and intentional vow writing—will transform your entire approach to getting married. They'll help you step into your wedding day not as performers putting on a show, but as two humans making the most important commitment of their lives with full awareness and intentional presence.

Ready to begin? Download my free Engaged Couple's Guide to Intention Setting right now and take the first step toward a truly conscious marriage. Your future selves will thank you.

Your marriage deserves more than a beautiful party. It deserves intentional preparation, conscious commitment, and tools that will serve you for the rest of your lives together.

The question isn't whether you'll plan a wedding—it's whether you'll prepare for a marriage. Choose consciousness. Choose intention. Choose each other, fully and completely.

What's one intention you want to set for your engagement season? Share in the comments below—I'd love to celebrate this sacred time with you.