Pre-Marital Counseling – Making Sure You’re Ready for the Next Steps!

Pre-Marital Counseling

Pre-Marital counseling is a wonderful way to explore your current relationship to see how you are thinking about things, creating awareness around your expectations and getting to know your partner more deeply.

Love is wonderful, but living day to day and making some tough decisions may not often come easily.  Pre-marital counseling can really help you:

1. Learn how to bring up difficult or challenging subjects in a collaborative or productive way. Nobody wants their feelings hurt, or wants to be blamed or hurt, so learning how to communicate in a way that works for both of you is essential to long term success.

2. We intentionally discuss what day to day, year to year life will look like. This means addressing topics such as finances and goals, chores and household maintenance, person goals, career goals, family of origin and creating a family if that’s what you want.

3. Sharing your history with these topics is a great way to see how you are informing future decisions. Hindsight will impact foresight, so how seeing how aligned you and your partner are can really reduce conflict.

4. Going into this transition with eyes wide open can give you both insight to the other person, offering the opportunity for empathy, support, compassion, thoughtful considerations and decisions that work for the relationship.

5. Discussing your hopes and goals for the relationship can bring you closer. The less room there is for interpretation, mind reading and blindly hoping means there is a lot of space for intentional love and support. Knowing what your partner is thinking and wanting gives you the chance to be there for them!

What happens in pre-marital counseling?

Whole Health Counseling has a fun process of opening the conversations about a variety of topics that include:

• Personal Goals

• Career Goals

• Religions and Spirituality

• Physical Fitness and Health

• Having children or not

• Financial goals, short term and long term

• Sex, Intimacy and Closeness

• How your family of origin is influencing your relationship

• Community and Social Life

• How you want to interact with extended family

• Recognizing trauma or pain that needs extra support and care

• Communication and resolving conflict

Together we make a priority list of these things and talk about why it’s important, what is your relationship with the topic, how you want to think about it together and find ways to work together. Even if you want different things, working together strengthens the relationship.

Addressing common worries is very helpful because in therapy we actually check in with reality. We can explore where the worry comes from, talk about how you both can address it and often challenge irrational fears.

Anxiety can perpetuate worry, so actually learning what’s reasonable and what’s not helps manage this. Plus, by talking about it, your partner knows how to address your worries in a support, reassuring and loving way. Nobody wants to sit alone in these feelings because that can breed resentment.

Real Benefits of Pre-Marital Therapy:

• Strengthen communication which creates a more pleasant and happy relationship

• Learn more about why your partner thinks the way they do

• Take mind reading out of the relationship and learn to be more direct

• Learn the different ways of being supportive – emotionally, physically, reassurance, actions or just simply listening

• Create open communication about sex and intimacy, nurturing this part of your relationship so there is fun and fulfillment

• Be realistic about your expectations of each other and the relationship

Often we never learn what it takes to be a good partner, so taking a pre-marital counseling is setting a strong foundation for a healthy and happy relationship.