If you knew a way to increase your marriage's success by 30 percent, wouldn’t you take it?
Well, there is a way. It’s called pre-marital counseling.
Marriage is a big deal. You long to find a person to love for the rest of your life. Finding an individual may be the most enjoyable part. Keeping them and your relationship healthy and happy for decades can be a little more complicated and requires dedication and maintenance.
Recently, pre-marital counseling is on the rise. Couples of all ages are making efforts to ensure their marriage lasts, and can adequately deal with the ups and downs of life, together.
The benefits of pre-marital therapy include better communication, conflict resolution skills, and learning how to meet your partner's needs. Most importantly, you get to know each other better.
From the time you meet and fall in love, you may not be as focused on the issues that may become issues later on. Pre-marital counseling helps you get answers now, allowing you to move forward with confidence.
You may be wondering how you can prepare for pre-marital counseling. After you find a licensed therapist, start developing a list of premarriage counseling questions to ask during your session.
Below are common questions asked by couples in pre-marriage counseling.
How Should We Handle Finances?
Financial problems lead to many divorces today. The reason doesn't have to do with the money in the bank account, but how spouses take care of their money.
Before you get married, you and your future life partner should know exactly how the other feels about topics such as financial debt, money priorities, budgeting, spending, saving, giving, and how you will handle unexpected expenses.
Working out a financial plan before you marry can save you a lot of confusion and misunderstandings in the future.
What Are Our Goals?
In pre-marriage counseling, learning how to set goals together can be one goal. It is essential to know you and your spouse are headed in the same direction, towards the same goals. The sooner you know this, the sooner you can start working on these goals.
Your licensed pre-marital counselor can teach you how to set long-term and short-term goals. Long-term goals include things like where you want to be in ten years or twenty years. Do we want kids and how many? Where do we want to live and work?
Short-term goals can include questions about accomplishments you want to happen in the year after your wedding.
Because many couples find their goals aren’t the same, pre-marital counseling teaches you how to prioritize and compromise.
How Will We Participate in Spirituality or Religion?
In the beginning, love helps you overcome differences like religious or spiritual beliefs. Over many years and many life experiences, these changes and can cause friction in relationships.
Knowing your partner’s beliefs on faith before you marry can help you make critical decisions like where to get married, get spiritual support, raise your children, bury one another, and which holidays to celebrate. These are essential issues that can be resolved before your wedding with the guidance of a marriage professional.
What Are Our Goals for Expanding Our Family?
Couples make decisions on whether to have children or not. This is a big decision that can profoundly affect your relationship. If you have always dreamed of having a child, but your partner has never wanted kids, this will create relationship conflict.
If you have always wanted to give birth to a child, but your partner only wants to adopt children, this can become an issue.
Because there are so many ways to expand your family, you must know how your partner feels about each. You cannot just assume you are on the same page with your future spouse. Find help through a licensed counselor. This is not an all-or-nothing topic, and with help, you can learn to work through these differences.
What Helps Us Have a Healthy Intimate Relationship?
For some, intimacy means sex. For others, intimacy means romance without sex. Confusion over expectations regarding intimacy can create discord in a marriage.
With pre-marriage counseling, you and your partner can sort out what each of you expects in terms of sexual relationships, foreplay, and romantic activities. It helps if you define each. Getting on the same page with your partner about this topic can prevent feelings of hurt, resentment, and being undervalued.
Plus, it can be fun to discover how to meet your partner’s needs intimately.
How Weird Are Our Families?
Let's face it; all families have quirks that, to others, seem very weird. What are your family's quirks? What are your partner's family's quirks? It is best to learn these before you marry, become part of their family, and vice versa.
Unless you have been dating or engaged for years, likely, you don't know your partner’s family very well. You have a one-sided perspective of each family member. Learning more about the good and bad of future family members can eliminate surprises in the future.
It can help you understand your partner on a deeper level. You may also discover positive qualities about your in-laws that you wouldn't have known without your counselor's help.
How Weird Are We?
Admit it; you have behaviors that right now seem cute and fun, like snorting when you laugh or brushing the hair out of your lover's eyes. After many years together, that snort can become more annoying than lovable.
It's essential to learn how to address pet peeves with your partner. While you and your partner may not eliminate the pet peeves, at least you will be aware of them. You won't have pent up anger because you learned how to communicate about this and many other crucial factors that make a marriage great.
You can have a successful, life-long union with the person you love. With pre-marital counseling, you can increase the odds of reaching this goal while also creating a meaningful, healthy marriage.