5 Goals of Pre-Marriage Counseling

Short-term pre-marriage counseling is a great way to get your marriage started off on the right foot, and set your family up for success. Understanding the goals of premarital therapy can help you and your fiancée focus on building a strong foundation for your future.

How Short-Term Pre-Marriage Counseling Sets You Up for Success

Pre-marriage counseling is a type of short-term therapy that couples can use to plan for their future together. It gives you a safe space to discuss difficult but important topics with each other, with the support of a psychotherapist trained to help you develop better conflict resolution and communication techniques. By doing this work in premarital counseling, you can reduce the risk your marriage will end in divorce, and improve both of your abilities to ride through the ups and downs of life. 

Religious Premarital Counseling vs Psychotherapist’s Couples Counseling

Many churches, temples, and other religious organizations offer or even require a form of premarital coaching before the couple can be married by a religious leader. This service can overlap with pre-marriage counseling with a psychotherapist, but it is not the same. A faith-based approach often focuses on the values, morals, and principles of the faith, such as:

• Spiritual compatibility
• Aligning faith-based values
• Application of religious norms (such as gender roles or dietary choices)
• Financial and time commitments to the organization

Psychologically based couples’ counseling can touch on compatibility and alignment of values, but focuses on facilitating the couple’s communication. By modeling healthy conflict resolution and building coping skills, couples commit to a shared vision of their family’s future, which may or may not include anything based on faith or religion. 

5 Goals of Pre-Marriage Counseling

The overarching goal of pre-marriage counseling is to establish a solid foundation for your marriage. If you and your partner decide to go through pre-marriage counseling, one of the first things you and your psychotherapist will do is outline the specific goals for your time together to help you get to that point. These can be customized to address your specific priorities and circumstances. Common goals include:

1. Discussing Important Marriage Issues

Often, when couples get engaged, their dating life has focused primarily on shared interests and activities. By the time you get engaged, you may not have had many deep conversations about key parts of what makes a marriage work. Common topics of conversation include:

• Finances and how partners treat money
• Roles within the marriage
• Sexuality and intimacy
• Religious beliefs and practices
• Cultural differences
• Children and child-rearing
• Family dynamics (including blended families and in-laws)
• Attitudes, values, and beliefs
• Coping mechanisms
• Communication styles
• Personality traits
• Physical and Mental health concerns

One of the benefits of pre-marriage counseling is that it sets aside time to discuss these sometimes difficult topics in a safe and supportive space. You can add or focus on topics where you and your fiancée are farthest apart, or have the most difficulties, so you can develop stable and reasonable expectations for yourselves and your family in the future. 

2. Setting Family Values, Expectations, and Limitations

One common source of marital dysfunction is if partners have incompatible values or expectations about their relationship or family goals. This can range from practicing different religions to different assumptions about household income or lifestyle. That’s why setting family values, expectations, and limitations is a goal of pre-marriage counseling. This might mean setting a family budget, discussing how to respond to demands from extended family, or laying out career goals. Taken together, these conversations will lay out a roadmap for your family in navigating the obstacles ahead. 

3. Improving Communication and Conflict Resolution

Psychology-based pre-marriage counseling often focuses on developing strategies and skills for problem solving, communication, and conflict resolution. This skills-based approach to short-term therapy equips you to deal with life’s challenges, and avoid developing resentment or jealousy toward your spouse. Rather than arguing when disagreements arise, you can practice these skills to have constructive discussions, keeping the health of your relationship, and support of each other at the center of your conversations.

4. Identify and Address Unhealthy Behaviors

Everyone comes into their relationships with certain behavior patterns and coping mechanisms learned in childhood or developed over their own history. But some of these behaviors may be unhealthy or create problems for your spouse. For example, if one spouse has a history of substance dependency and is in recovery, the other spouse’s habit of occasionally enjoying those substances, even within healthy bounds, may create an unnecessary challenge for their spouse. In other cases, the behavior itself may be unhealthy, such as co-dependency, conflict avoidance, or defaulting to blame. Premarital counseling can help identify these behaviors, though you may also need to follow up with individual counseling or psychotherapy to address more serious mental health challenges. 

5. Addressing Anxiety and Fear Around Marriage

Often, one or both partners may have anxiety or fear related to the relationship generally, or marriage more specifically. You may worry that marriage will end in divorce (this is especially common for the children of divorced parents), fear infidelity, or worry you will lose some part of yourself to the relationship. Pre-marriage counseling gives you a safe space to unpack those feelings, so your partner can hear them and respond in ways that support you. 

Get Started on Pre-Marriage Counseling with an Experienced Psychotherapist

Premarriage counseling may be short-term, but you and your partner won’t be able to resolve all your differences overnight. If you have recently gotten engaged, or are beginning to plan your wedding, now is a great time to get started on pre-marriage counseling that will meet your goals, and build a stable foundation for your family’s future. 

David Stanislaw is a psychotherapist with over 30 years of experience. He helps individuals and couples plan for the future through pre-marriage counseling and individual therapy. Contact David Stanislaw to get help today.