About the Authors

Dale and Susan Mathis serve couples in premarital counseling and as facilitators and mentors for their church’s premarital ministry.

As a retired Air Force Lt. Colonel, Dale brings a wealth of experience and knowledge to bear in serving couples preparing to marry. Dale has two Master’s degrees in counseling and has worked in counseling and Human Resources for over 30 years. Dale received his Masters in Counseling from University of New Mexico and a second Masters in Specialized Counseling from St. Mary's University in San Antonio, Texas.

Susan, a former teacher, is Editorial Director of nine Focus on the Family publications, including the Focus on the Family magazines and the Focus on Your Child newsletters. She has been editor of Focus on the Family magazine, LifeWise magazine, Single-Parent Family magazine and was a curriculum writer for the Association of Christian Schools International. She has written hundreds of articles and columns for magazines and newspapers. Susan received her degree in English and Communications from Regis University.

Part of our motivation for writing this book is to help you explore areas that we were too young and naïve, too inexperienced or unaware to know how to handle. Since we both experienced the grief and heartache of failed marriages early in our adulthood, our objective is to prevent anyone -- especially you -- from going through the trauma, heartache and pain that results.

We’re also aware that one of the reasons for our failures is that we didn’t have a manual like this to help us learn. Marriage can get complicated, and knowing some of its complexities and secrets ahead of time can help you be more successful than you could ever be going it alone. We hope to help you avoid frustrations, hurts and failures by knowing about the issues that can lead to trouble as a couple.

In fact, Dale decided to get his first master’s degree in counseling in 1971 so he could help identify what went wrong with his first marriage and learn how not to make the same mistakes while helping others avoid them too. Though educated in secular universities for his advanced degrees, Dale is convinced that Christ at the center of a marriage yields much better results than all the secular psychology put together.

I [Susan], on the other hand, had a different kind of schooling. I’ve been honored to choose, review, edit and publish literally thousands of articles on marriage and family life during my tenure as Focus on the Family magazine Editor and Editorial Director, and I’ve learned a lot—truths that can now help others.

As we wrote this book, we not only had lots of fun together, but we also learned so much from and about each other, all of which helps us in helping others. As a couple, it’s our privilege and joy to regularly empower future mates to start out on the right path together, whether we’re working as facilitators in our church’s premarital ministry, with a young couple still in college, or in private counseling with an older couple. In our years of serving in premarital ministry, we’ve found that couples who take the time to really prepare for their future together walk into marriage with a confidence and security they wouldn’t have otherwise.