3 Reasons To Try Premarital Counseling Before Your Wedding Day
3 Reasons To Try Premarital Counseling Before Your Wedding Day
It’s time to get married! The checklist when getting married can be overwhelming, as worries and planning about wardrobe, location, finances, and in-laws consume an engaged couple’s time and energy. Often, one meaningful and crucially important item gets left off the list: Premarital counseling.
What is premarital counseling?
Premarital counseling is a form of therapy that aids couples in constructing and maintaining a strong and healthy long-term relationship. It gives couples therapeutic and relational tools to help build a stable and mutually satisfying marriage. Premarital counseling provides a toolbox of helpful techniques and methods to improve and repair a marriage when things feel uneasy or begin to fall apart.
Why get premarital counseling?
Often couples move into the newlywed season of life with rose-colored glasses. Everything feels new and exciting. This time of idealized good times is known as “the honeymoon period.” However, this fanciful time will not last forever. Couples who seek premarital counseling can strengthen their relationship before encountering obstacles and unforeseen problems. One study showed that premarital counseling and couples counseling can reduce the risk of divorce by 31%. This is a very impressive statistic considering that over half of marriages in the United States end in divorce.
How does premarital counseling help your marriage succeed?
Premarital counseling can improve communication and conflict management skills. Some of the topics and skills training may include how to be more assertive, active listening, becoming more aware of your partner’s communication and conflict management styles, how to be with each other in stress, understanding how your partner gives and receives love, and celebrating strengths while evaluating growth areas.
Premarital counseling can also help a couple better understand their core values and differences. This includes topics such as managing finances, understanding family roles, children, feelings around intimacy and romance, knowing what role, if any, faith will play in the relationship, and something as simple as how to spend leisure time as a couple.
Premarital counseling builds confidence in the partnership and encourages more teamwork. Building a foundation of therapeutic work as a couple can set a couple up for success in the future when things get tough and can help build intimacy and a deeper connection through shared goals and values. By starting off having some difficult conversations early on, you are making it easier for yourselves later on in the relationship. Couples often feel more connected than ever and hopeful for the future after going through this process.
What is Prepare/Enrich?
While many counselors handle this type of counseling differently, one form of premarital counseling offered at Nashville Psych is Prepare/Enrich. Prepare/Enrich uses an evidence-based assessment to help each partner feel supported and represented in their relationship while bringing confidence and equipping into a new marriage. Prepare/Enrich is one of the most widely researched assessment tools with its background in the Family Adaptability and Cohesion Evaluation Scale (FACES). Prepare/Enrich and FACES are some of the most researched assessment tools with numerous published articles about its validity and reliability.
How will a counselor utilize the assessment?
A certified Prepare/Enrich counselor will use the assessment to assist the couple in learning communication and conflict management skills, financial management tools, creating an atmosphere to discuss questions about sexual intimacy, and many other practices and skills to help a marriage succeed over the long haul. A certified counselor will complete the premarital counseling process in around six weeks utilizing 90 minute sessions. In many states, a discount for marriage licenses is given when a couple has completed eight hours of premarital counseling. In Tennessee, a couple can save $60 off the cost of a marriage license by participating in just four hours of premarital counseling. Once the counseling sessions are over, the counselor will provide the couple a certificate of completion.
Is premarital counseling right for you?
Premarital counseling will increase the skills needed for a successful, loving, and mutually beneficial marriage. Couples will have a toolbox of knowledge ready and waiting when signs of problems in the marriage occur. Premarital counseling is an important investment in the life of a couple and should be on every marriage to-do list.
If you or someone you know is interested in getting started, we encourage you to reach out at (615) 582-2882 or clientcare@nashvillepsych.com.