Answer

Should I Wait Until My Career Is Established to Get Married?

You have someone, or you could have, and the sensible-sounding plan is to finish the degree, clear the loans, land the job, and then marry. Everybody around you is nodding along. It feels like the responsible order.

No, do not wait for that. Marriage is the foundation you build a life on, not the reward for having built one. God has never asked His children to be financially established before beginning it, and the couples who went through the lean years together usually name that period as the one that made them.

Eternal Truths

Marriage is ordained of God as the beginning of a family, not the capstone of a career. The Family: A Proclamation to the World puts marriage and family at the centre of the Creator’s plan, and asks husbands and wives to help one another as equal partners. Partnership is the mechanism, which means it starts before the resources do.

Being unequally provided for is not the danger; being unequally committed is. Elder D. Todd Christofferson explained that marriage is not one social arrangement among several but the setting God established for the work families do (“Why Marriage, Why Family”). The Church’s counsel to couples on money is that they manage it wisely together and stay out of debt (Marriage). That is a habit two people build, not a threshold one person clears alone beforehand.

You are meant to act, not to wait for perfect conditions. The Lord said that His people should be anxiously engaged in a good cause and do many things of their own free will, rather than waiting to be commanded in all things (Doctrine and Covenants 58:26-28).

What Can Make This Confusing?

“Get established first” borrows the language of prudence, and each step is sensible in isolation. What the sequence quietly assumes is that marriage is a cost you take on once you can afford it, rather than a partnership that changes what you can afford. Money strain is real. But the couples who struggle most with it are rarely the ones who started with little. They are the ones who never learned to talk about it.

Questions to Think About

• What exactly would have to be true before I felt established, and who set that bar?
• Am I delaying a decision, or has the opportunity simply not arrived?
• Could I talk honestly about money with the person I am considering marrying?

What You Can Do

Have the money conversation before the engagement rather than after. Debts, income, spending habits, what each of you was taught about money at home. One honest hour now does more for a marriage than another year of saving alone. If marriage has not come to you yet, none of this is a rebuke; this answer is for people who have the opportunity and are waiting for conditions. The essay behind it goes further.

Jesus Christ can build something durable out of two people who have very little, and He has been doing it for a long time.