The Case for Premarital Counseling

Major life decisions require time and wisdom to be effectively navigated. If something is going to affect you in the long term, or if it’s going to have a huge impact on your life, it warrants meaningful consideration. You don’t want to make a rash decision that significantly affects your well-being and the rest of your life. Premarital counseling is one of the ways couples can meaningfully explore the complex and important question of marriage.

If two people are planning on getting married, doing premarital counseling may not be high on their list of priorities. Their attention could be drawn by other concerns that feel more pressing, such as venues, caterers, vendors, deposits, color schemes, the guest list, and the seemingly endless tasks that come with a wedding. These things rightfully clamor for attention, and it’s easy to see them as making or breaking the couple’s special day.

Premarital counseling can feel like an unwelcome intrusion amid this flurry of activity. Depending on what a person has heard about premarital counseling, it can feel like a roadblock or even an unnecessary exercise for your relationship. It’s helpful to describe what premarital counseling is and its role for a couple.

Different types of counseling help individuals and couples navigate aspects of their lives and relationships. The aim is to help them discover patterns and habits of thought and behavior that promote or undermine well-being. The counseling process helps the couple or individual identify these and learn new ways of thinking or doing things. This is all in an effort to help them flourish.

When it comes to premarital counseling, it’s a structured time and process of walking with a couple to explore their readiness for marriage in a practical as well as biblical manner. One way to think of what premarital counseling does for the couple is that it operates like a mirror and a guide for them relationally.

Like a mirror held up to your face reflects it and shows you what you look like, the premarital counseling process reflects the realities of the relationship. This helps the couple see their strengths as well as areas for growth in the relationship. These are sometimes called blind spots. Much like a person cannot see their blind spots unless they intentionally turn and give attention, a person cannot acknowledge or address concerns until intentionality and action occur.

Premarital counseling also functions as a guide for the couple. Beyond identifying the strengths and areas for growth, your counselor will also provide you with a biblical foundation for understanding marriage and its purpose.

These biblical principles, as well as practical strategies, are essential for building a Christ-centered and Christ-honoring marriage. God loves and honors marriage. He uses the illustration of a bride and bridegroom to signal the importance of His covenant relationship with His people.

The Blessing and Responsibility of Marriage

For believers in Jesus, marriage is a joyfully serious matter. It’s not the sort of relationship a person should enter lightly. The other part of the equation is that marriage is meant to be a blessing for the couple, a source of companionship, shared growth, and joy. As a special kind of bond and commitment between two people, marriage reflects Jesus’ own love for His church (Ephesians 5:32), making it a beautiful blessing.

While it is a blessing, marriage is not without its responsibilities. It’s a rather long passage, but 1 Corinthians 7 tries to set out the realities of married and single life. Our lives are meant to honor the Lord regardless of whether we’re married or not, but the apostle is clear that married life brings potential distractions and responsibilities. These can take away from an exclusive focus on the work of the kingdom.

Marriage requires a lot from a person, including patience, commitment, and selflessness every day. This doesn’t detract from either the ups or the downs. Marriage blesses a person as a source of emotional and spiritual support, a space to share life with a companion, and the opportunity to serve the Lord together. Marriage is also a foundation for a family and a legacy that could extend over generations.

Just as marriage has its blessings and responsibilities, it also has significant challenges. Some of these challenges include balancing family expectations and obligations with your own desires. When married, you’re no longer your own, and that can bring tension when your desires are at odds with your partner.

Other challenges that could arise within marriage include managing the financial responsibilities that come with the relationship and a family. A family requires more financial resources to sustain, and that could be a pressure point for a couple.

A couple can also face the challenge of misalignment. This misalignment may be regarding their life goals. How they handle spirituality and worship, how to handle their money, the rules around social media engagement, whether to have friends of the opposite sex, how to relate to in-laws, whether to have kids and how many, expectations about sex, roles in the home, and different ways of engaging in conflict.

Lastly, marriages often face the challenge of coping with differences in personality and preferences between the spouses. One spouse might be outgoing while the other is a homebody. Spouses may differ on issues of discipline, how to relate to their children, or even how to spend their time and money. These challenges can be the source of deep conflict in a marriage.

How Premarital Counseling Helps Couples

Premarital counseling helps couples in several important ways. This is tied to the kinds of things that a couple talks through with their counselor during their sessions. Premarital counseling encourages the couple to engage in honest and vulnerable conversation about their values and expectations for the marriage. Couples may mask these, but doing so only causes problems as the years go by.

As couples share about themselves, their relationship, and more, they can also identify potential areas of conflict. If a couple has different expectations about family time, that could be the source of conflict in the future when they are figuring out where, how, and with whom to spend the holidays. It’s better to get ahead of these topics and deal with them before they derail the relationship.

Conflict is a reality in every relationship. However, conflict can vary depending on how the couple handles it and how often it recurs. One of the things premarital counseling does is to equip the couple with tools for mutual spiritual growth, financial goal setting and planning, as well as healthy conflict resolution. Knowing how to handle conflict is a valuable life skill and makes for a healthier relationship.

Premarital counseling also helps couples grasp the seriousness of marriage as a lifelong covenant before the Lord. This isn’t to scare the couple but to urge them to make a prayerful and informed decision about entering a lifelong relationship that will impact them over the long term. Entering marriage with eyes wide open includes spiritual preparedness and carrying realistic expectations into the relationship.

As the couple prays and discerns whether they are ready to commit to a lifelong partnership, they can better embrace the joys, responsibilities, and challenges of marriage. Candidly exploring the various facets of their relationship helps to equip the couple to face the ups and downs of married life in a God-honoring manner that combines faith and wisdom.

Engaging in Premarital Counseling

Premarital counseling prepares a couple to make informed decisions about their future. The couple will talk through their hopes and goals. Together, they will learn more about themselves, including their strengths and areas of growth as a couple. When a couple understands what marriage is like and when they prepare themselves for the reality of marriage, they can enter their future together with greater confidence.

If you’re looking to get married and build that relationship on a strong foundation, you can reach out and speak to a counselor for premarital counseling.