Lessons You Can Learn From Premarital Counseling

The time between popping the question and the happy couple saying “I do” is often tense and packed with myriad activities. The happy couple not only has to pull together a wedding, decide who to invite, what color schemes to make use of, and figure out how to work out differences of opinion, but they also have to start working out details of their new life together, such as where they’ll live and how to relate to their in-laws.

Throughout all of this, premarital counseling plays a significant role in preparing for life after the wedding. Premarital counseling helps couples anticipate issues that can undermine their marriage and equips them to handle challenges that may arise. A couple can learn a few vital lessons as they go through the premarital counseling process.

What Premarital Counseling Can Teach a Couple

In the busyness of wedding preparations, premarital counseling can seem entirely superfluous, and indeed a possible waste of time. Some couples consciously avoid premarital counseling because they assume that it will raise issues and problems that weren’t there before, disrupting the bliss of their impending nuptials, and possibly even leading to the wedding being called off.

It should be said that premarital counseling can get uncomfortable because it will probe into delicate matters as well as things that people might assume without really investigating. However, not going for premarital counseling is a little like not wanting to go to the doctor in case there’s something that needs attending to, or not taking your car into the shop because there might be an issue. It’s better to know what’s going on and deal with it.

During premarital counseling, your counselor will work with you to address some issues common to most marriages. As unique as every couple is, some common pressure points come up again and again for couples. These include issues such as money, sex, roles in the household, child-rearing, conflict management and resolution, and boundaries for the couple between themselves and other people, such as in-laws.

These common issues that are addressed in premarital counseling are often the issues that, if there’s inadequate preparation to deal with them, most often lead to marital unhappiness and ultimately divorce. A couple gives themselves a good shot at a happy and healthy marriage if they address these issues before they get married, so that they start their marriage with a common understanding and purpose.

Some of the things that premarital counseling can teach a couple include the following:

It can reveal some hidden assumptions and unstated expectations

We often move through life with certain assumptions about how things are and with certain expectations about how things ought to be. These assumptions and expectations are most often revealed when we encounter situations that leave us feeling disappointed, frustrated, or hurt. Introspection will often reveal assumptions and expectations that we carry.

Your expectations about how marriage works, what roles you and your spouse should perform, what intimacy will look like, how you’ll relate to other people as a couple, and what your family and home life will look like are all things that we absorb from the world around us. For instance, you may assume that your relationship will be like your parents’, or, contrarily, that it’ll be nothing like theirs.

Premarital counseling will unveil these assumptions and expectations, helping you explore and communicate these things to one another. This will help you set realistic expectations of your marriage, as well as make you aware of what your spouse expects and hopes for in your relationship. It’s better to walk into a marriage with this self-understanding as a couple.

It will help you become better communicators

As you explore various topics, your counselor will help you talk about your thoughts and feelings. It’s important to know how to identify and express your feelings because they affect much of what we do and how we relate to each other. Your counselor will also help you grow your vocabulary and your ability to express what you feel without causing unnecessary hurt or resorting to assigning guilt, blame, or shame.

As you go through the counseling sessions, you can develop a deeper understanding of your personal communication style. Some people are assertive, while others are aggressive communicators, and still others are passive or passive-aggressive. Again, knowing your style of communication and how that relates to your future spouse’s style is important information to have.

When you understand your communication style, which includes its strengths and drawbacks, you can also begin to learn how to moderate your style with an awareness of how others communicate. If you communicate with big gestures, for instance, it helps you to know that it can come across as aggressive and that you may need to temper your expressiveness to give others room to agree or disagree with you.

It will help you understand how you deal with conflict

Conflict, unfortunately, is a part of every relationship. People will always have differences in opinions, and those differences can escalate into conflict. Every marriage needs skills to navigate conflict appropriately. It’s easy for spouses to resort to name-calling or to use low blows to win an argument. It’s possible to engage in healthy conflict that resolves issues well.

Premarital counseling will help you explore how you deal with conflict and how that can affect your relationship. Some conflict styles that include criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling, making threats, or personal attacks avoid dealing with the core issue and make engaging with each other difficult. Your counselor will help you develop greater self-awareness and curb unhealthy impulses.

It can reveal potential issues

Premarital counseling also provides an opportunity for the couple to explore their relationship and pinpoint potential issues in the relationship before they happen. For instance, by talking through how the couple would like to raise their children, the couple can discover if they share a similar parenting philosophy, and perhaps whether they both want children.

It’s important to stress that premarital counseling doesn’t create problems for a couple. Rather, it helps them to see things that they may have missed, for whatever reason. Your counselor is a trained professional, and they are also a neutral third party who can observe the dynamics in your relationship through their years of experience with other couples.

It can show you your strengths as a couple

While premarital counseling can show you areas where your relationship needs work, it can also show you your strengths as individuals and as a couple. Whether it’s the ability to listen, the willingness to show support and extend forgiveness, or the desire to give a fair hearing to others, your strengths matter. Sometimes, you’re oblivious to your strengths, or don’t view them as such.

Making Use of Premarital Counseling for a Strong Marriage

Premarital counseling is a tool that couples can use to strengthen their future marriage and empower their decision-making. Through the process of premarital counseling, you may find that your prospective spouse perhaps isn’t someone you’d be happily married to. That’s okay, and it means that premarital counseling has done its job. It has empowered you to make a wise decision about your future.

When couples work through their concerns and make the informed decision to get married, they will do so equipped to face the challenges that marriage brings. This is why couples who undergo premarital counseling are less likely to divorce – they entered their relationship aware of the hardships that could come, and they obtained the tools to handle those challenges without breaking apart.

If you are on the way to getting married, you give your marriage the best chance of success by preparing for life beyond the wedding day. Daily life with another person amid work, chores, children, runny noses, financial stress, and conflict requires creativity, resilience, great communication, and the ability to be empathetic and forgive wrongs against you.

Consider seeing a premarital counselor to give your marriage a solid foundation. We can connect you to a counselor in our directory when you contact us today.