If you are asking this question – should we do premarital counseling – it means you are in a relationship and want to move forward towards marriage or you are already engaged.
You are asking the right question!
My husband and I have been married for over 30 years, my parents were married for over 50 years and my grandparents were married for over 70 years! There are very few divorces in our family and extended family. I would give much of the credit for this to following biblical principles, but there are many factors.
what is premarital counseling?
We have been mentoring couples for several years … all ages but mostly young adults. We started serving in a marriage ministry at our church and saw that a lot of problems couples were having could have been avoided had they been given the necessary tools when they were just starting out. So we decided to pivot a bit and serve in the “Marriage Prep” ministry, as we call it.
Premarital counseling is learning from another more experienced couple how to create an amazing marriage. Some mentors, like us, use a curriculum like Prepare-Enrich that helps assess the couple and points out where their strengths and weaknesses are. We use that tool, along with many years of personal experience (what we learned the hard way), to help couples see where their possible pitfalls are, how to build on their strengths, and just general tools to keep in your marriage toolbox for when you will need them.
why should we do premarital counseling?
The biggest reason to do premarital counseling is to properly prepare for marriage. If this is your first marriage, there is a lot you don’t know. Meeting with a mentor couple who can teach you how to handle things BEFORE they happen is a great advantage. It’s like they can see around the corner before you can, and can let you know what to do before you hit the wall. If you have been married before and it didn’t work out, this is a great way to see maybe what you did in your last marriage that you don’t want to repeat.
what will we learn?
Some things we go over would encompass:
- Finances (is one of you a spender and one a saver)
- Communication (men & women communicate VERY differently)
- Conflict resolution (you never need to fight)
- Sexual expectations (we talk about this from a biblical perspective, but also bringing in issues from past relationships)
- Spiritual beliefs (are you both on the same page with what you believe)
- Leisure activities (do you have anything in common)
- Friends & family (do you have controlling parents, do your friends approve of your relationship)
- Personal style & habits (how do you handle the little annoyances)
- Roles & responsibilities (who does what inside and outside your home)
This list just touches the surface, but you can see how beneficial it would be if you knew how to handle these areas to avoid problems.
Of course this will not make your marriage perfect, but we like to say “marriage doesn’t have to suck”. So many couples are told “your first year of marriage is the worst!” We say your first year of marriage is what you make it. I’ll be writing another blog about our marriage, and how we’ve made it work all these years along with tips from other long time married couples.
here’s what one couple has to say about it …
For my husband and I, premarital counseling was a necessary prerequisite to marriage. Both of us valued starting our marriage off well, and we knew that the preparation and support we would receive in premarital counseling would be a necessary step towards starting our life together. Before starting premarital counseling, we both had unspoken expectations about marriage, and while some of them may have lined up, some of them did not. In premarital counseling, we had to have the hard conversations about expectations, finances, family, and more. Honesty was unavoidable because good premarital mentors are straightforward and candid. That being said, their goal wasn’t to split us up, but rather they wanted us to have these conversations so that our expectations were clear before our wedding day. They also provided us with the tools we would need to navigate these conversations. Premarital counselors have years of positive marital experience, and their godly wisdom played a vital role in the start of our marriage. We are forever thankful for the mentorship we received before our marriage that allowed us to prepare for the road ahead.