Am I Ready?: How to Know You’re Ready for Matching & Blessing
Contributed by Benjy U.
This is one of the most common questions that folks ask themselves, especially when considering when to begin the Matching Process and receive the Blessing.
So, when are you truly ready?
The short answer is: it’s up to you to decide.
The reality is that anyone who is in a healthy marriage will admit that they were anything but ready to be in a relationship when they got married.
I know that doesn’t help you at all, but hear me out 🙂
Any couple that has a successful and thriving Blessing knows that we don’t come into the relationship already having everything figured out. We bring our immaturity, bad habits, misconceptions, and emotional issues with us into the relationship.
Therefore, the best question to ask yourself is not, “Am I ready?”
Instead, ask yourself, “Am I willing?”
Am I willing to grow?
Am I willing to leave my unhealthy habits behind me?
Am I willing to be open-minded to potential Matching partners?
Am I willing to let God work in my process?
In a nutshell, am I willing to grow and to even sacrifice?
True Father once shared a beautiful sentiment to anyone preparing for marriage:
“Marriage is not a simple matter of a man and woman of marriageable age coming together and combining their two lives. Marriage is something built on the basis of sacrifice. The man must live for the sake of the woman, and the woman for the sake of the man. As you continue to live for the sake of your spouse, your selfish mind disappears completely. The heart that seeks to sacrifice this way is the heart of love. Love is not a man and woman meeting each other and having a good time. Love is offering up your life. If you marry, you must do so on the basis of your determination that your life is for your spouse.” – As a Peace-Loving Global Citizen, 226
So you can start by asking yourself that question: “Am I willing?”
But don’t worry, we won’t just leave you without some guidelines to help you figure this out 🙂
Benchmarks to Consider If You’re Ready
Below we have outlined some very specific guidelines that can help you decide if you are ready to be in a relationship.
This is not a rulebook or set of rules, but rather a guideline to help you decide for yourself if you are truly ready to be in a Matching Process and receive the Blessing. It’s more of a helpful list of benchmarks to help figure out if you feel qualified and confident to be in a relationship.
By the end of reading this guide, we hope that you will have some clear action steps of ways that you can improve on yourself and ensure a smooth and healthy Matching Process moving forward.
Again, these are simply recommended milestones for you to consider and hopefully accomplish before you begin a Matching Process and a Blessed relationship.
If you can honestly assess yourself and take the steps that you feel you need to accomplish these benchmarks, then you will have the best possible chance of creating a healthy and beautiful blessed marriage that God envisions for you.
Let’s get started.
1. Vision
Your vision is really all about what you envision for your future, for your future marriage, for your future family, and for your life.
It is through having a clear vision that everything else falls more into place and the steps you need to take to go through the Matching Process and receive the Blessing become more and more clear with a clear vision.
Dr. Yong has specifically been emphasizing the importance of having a vision recently. When I asked him about common issues regarding faith and other issues that come into our lives, his response is usually along the lines of, “If you have a strong vision, many of the issues you face will not be an issue.”
He specifically mentions that sexual temptation will not be an issue if you have a strong vision.
That might seem like an overly simplified response, but it actually holds lots of truth. The more clear that you are about the person that you want to be in the near future, the easier it will be to keep your focus on that and ignore anything that might be distracting or taking your focus away from that vision and priority.
2. Your Understanding of the Blessing
One of the most fundamental foundations of a successful Blessing is simply the ability to have a clear understanding of the value of the Blessing. We have seen over and over that individuals who go into a Matching Process and receive the Blessing with a firm belief in what they are signing up for are able to navigate their Blessed marriage in a healthy and productive way, especially when the relationship becomes tense or they come into difficulties, as most marriages will face at some point.
I have a good friend who I was helping through the Matching Process. Before he decided to go to the Blessing, he made a tremendous amount of effort to understand what the Blessing means to him. Of course, he was told from a young age about the value of the Blessing was, but he didn’t really understand it for himself.
So before going to the Blessing, he determined to ask everyone he could about what the Blessing meant to them. And at the end of his journey, he came to a clear conclusion about what it meant to him. The key here is that he asked a lot of different people and asked the right people. He asked his parents, he asked leaders, he asked people older and younger than him, and he came to his own understanding of the Blessing is.
At the same time, he also read a lot of True Parents’ words on the Blessing, which is also a crucial way to understand the Blessing on a deeper level.
This is the kind of process that is necessary in order to fully understand the Blessing for yourself. Maybe you’re already very clear on what the Blessing is, which is great. The important point here is to constantly be developing your understanding of the Blessing.
3. Your Relationship with God
We cannot mention the value of the Blessing without talking about a fundamental key to understanding the value of the Blessing. That is simply having a relationship with God.
It is infinitely more difficult to truly understand how valuable the Blessing is without a strong connection to God and understanding God’s heart. It is through having compassion and empathy with God’s heart that we can understand how important the Blessing is to God, to the world, and to True Parents. it is also through an understanding of God’s heart that we are able to understand True Parents’ work and why they have done what they have.
For that reason, an important milestone to consider before receiving the Blessing is to have a clear understanding of what the Blessing is and a clear relationship with God and True Parents.
4. Your Impact
An important element of casting your vision for your life is considering what kind of impact you want to have on the world.
This is more than just what kind of career you want to follow or how many people you want to help, but it’s really about what your unique contribution is to the world.
If you can have a clear understanding of what you can uniquely contribute to making an impact in the world, then it will help you make clear decisions about who to be Blessed with and how to develop that relationship. On top of that, it might even make finding someone a potential spouse easier and more clear if you can share a common vision with that person.
You don’t have to be entirely clear on what kind of impact you want to make with your life, but at least considering it is important. As long as it is something that you want to do someday, then that is an excellent quality to have to bring into a Blessed marriage.
Of course, the Blessing itself is a contribution to the world and eventually will become is the hope of God and of True Parents.
5. Raising a Family
Speaking of raising a family, it is important to have a vision for how you want to raise your family. It doesn’t matter right now how many children you want to have or how you want to raise them exactly, but it’s important to consider that it’s something that you genuinely want to do and it’s something that you want to eventually invest your whole self into together with your spouse.
Most individuals who are entering a Matching Process and want to receive a Blessing are seriously considering family and want to have children and raise them to also receive the Blessing someday. With that said, it’s important to have a similar desire to raise a family. When you begin a Matching Process with someone and communicate, you can start to discuss how you wish to raise your family.
Of course, this is something that will change over time. You might say right now that you want seven children and then after two children, you decide you only want to have three. Or something like that.
It goes without saying that if you have a basic understanding of the Blessing and want to receive it, then you by definition want to expand God’s lineage to your children and raise them to receive the blessing as well. As we know, the blessing is God’s intention to pass on his lineage throughout the world.
6. Career
Career and occupation are important factors for a lot of people, but I think the way that we are looking at it as a society is not the healthiest currently. It’s really a subjective answer, and it’s not going to be a black-and-white answer for most people.
The reality is that our careers and our life paths are always unfolding and we never know in five or ten years down the road what we might be doing as a living. Therefore, it’s not entirely necessary to have a clear decision on what kind of career path you want to take, but it is important and recommended to at least have some general idea of what you would like to do. It is also important to be currently taking the steps to have a general career.
And importantly, to have a general idea of what kind of skill sets you have and how you want to use those skill sets in the workforce.
When I was Blessed in marriage, I had very little career clarity, but I knew the general direction in which I was going and was working very hard to take the right steps to follow my dreams.
With that said, I wouldn’t get too hung up on making sure you have a career plan set and graduating university or grad school or Ph.D. before considering the Matching Process. Many people have done this, and it does not seem to serve them well because the reality is we never become less busy. The correlation is that the older we get and the more experience we have, the busier we become.
It’s unrealistic to assume that you are going to become any less busy after you graduate GPA, university, grad school, etc.
Therefore, I recommend that you look at this as an opportunity to create a well-balanced lifestyle.
It is entirely possible to pursue a career and be married and raise a family at the same time. Why? Because we have been doing it throughout all of history. Ever since the beginning of human history, we have been able to do the necessary things for our liveliness while also simultaneously raising a family. We are designed to be able to do that, and the idea that we must first focus on career and work and then have a family is not very productive.
Of course, you can decide to just focus on career and school and work temporarily and then decide to go into Matching Process, but I would really challenge to consider if perhaps you are pushing off relationships and the Blessing because it is inconvenient.
If so, then I can almost guarantee that the right time will never come. More so, I would just focus on developing yourself and finding the right person, and simultaneously trying to balance your career and also being in a relationship.
7. Finances
Okay, now we get into finances. This is truly an important consideration for a lot of people. However, I want to make this as simple as possible, which I think you will like.
The reality is that there is no clear-cut answer to how financially literate you should be before entering a relationship. Everyone differs so vastly in their understanding of personal finance and opinions about money management. So the clear and best answer we can give is:
If you can manage to save $3,000 for your Blessing Offering when you receive the Blessing, then you are in good standing.
If you can manage to save $3,000, that means that you have the basic budgetary and personal finance skills to do well financially. It means that you can create a budget, keep the budget, pay bills, and save for something in the future. Many people are not able to save $3,000 understandably, which is why it’s important to do this early on before even considering the Matching Process. It’s important to consider making a budget and a savings plan to figure out how you’re going to manage to save that much.
The reason that we have the $3,000 milestone is that the standard Blessing Offering is $2,000 plus $1,000 for other expenses, such as traveling to Korea for the Blessing or hosting a nice local Blessing.
If you can save $3,000, you are in good standing. That is about as far as we can go to recommend personal finance.
Saving $3,000 might sound like a stretch for some people, which is understandable. I personally was a college student at the time when I was Blessed with my wife, and I had to be creative to find a way to make $3,000 to go to Korea for the Blessing. So what I did was fundraise for about two hours every Friday for several months until I made the money I needed to do it. Doing so not only gave me the funds to pay my own Blessing Offering, but it also gave me the spiritual benefits of fundraising, interacting with people, and connecting with God’s heart through fundraising. I was able to offer it as a condition for my Blessing. That was one of the best conditions I did to prepare for the Blessing, and I would highly recommend fundraising to raise funds for your blessing offering. It’s really a win-win.
8. Sexual Integrity
Now we get into one of the most important aspects of readiness: your sexual integrity.
Are your habits, thoughts, and feelings in line with what you want to bring into your relationship with your spouse?
Do you have a porn and masturbation habit or addiction?
Do you find yourself feeling a lack of integrity when it comes to your sexuality?
If so, please watch the video on Porn & the Matching Process and consider joining a High Noon program.
Conclusion
We’ve covered a lot of basic benchmarks to consider before beginning a relationship. Again, these are not rules or requirements, but rather consideration for you to determine your own readiness for the Blessing.
And chances are, if you work on these areas of your life, they will make you an even more marriageable and upstanding individual for your future spouse.
