My husband and I eloped 4 weeks after our first date, so there was no time for counseling, but it’s been more than 42 years, so I don’t know if it would have made a difference or not. Before my daughter married the first time, I asked her and her fiance to go to counseling. They didn’t, and they were divorced in less than 2 years.
I know some churches require it, but religious angle aside, I think it’s a good idea, especially for younger first-timers. It should cover practical matters that probably don’t come up over dinner dates. Like how to manage finances, where to live, how many (if any) children, consolidating households (“Whadya mean you want that thing in our living room??”) I’m pretty sure if my daughter had done so, she could have avoided marrying a big baby with no ambition. (But I have held back my I-told-you-so)
Granted, there’s no guarantee, but surely it could do more good than not. Did you do it? Would you do it? Do you think it matters?
I did it because my church required it - but it was really kind of a waste of time. Most of the pertinent issues were covered in the 4.5 years we were together before the wedding. We already had joint bank accounts and had even bought a car together , we both knew we wanted kids and wanted to stay in the same area and there weren’t any households to consolidate- we got together young enough that if we had moved out of our parents’ apartments, we would have moved in together instead of having different roommates. Six hours on a Saturday didn’t make a difference.
My first long-lasting marriage was akin to @doreen’s experience. We weren’t kids, were in long-time established relationship, etc. The weekend of Catholic standard counseling we got wasn’t 100% useless, but didn’t add much. We did watch it really open the eyes of a few young couples in the same group event.
~Thirty five years later my second short-lived mistaken marriage would have benefited greatly from some kind of pre-marital counseling to tell us both we were utterly screwing up. I fear the only way that would have worked though is if we’d each met separately with the counselor and told them our wildly different tales of expectations and redlines. Us meeting together with the counselor would have simply kept the unmentionable misgivings unmentioned. Oops.
Even for an established couple, there can be an educational component (for example, “Let’s talk about the different ways your sexual relationship may change over time and ways not to take each other for granted.” I think there’s utility to pre-marital counseling, and possibly to a Marriage Encounter-style weekend, but meeting over a few weeks is more likely to be useful. /retired therapist
I don’t really see how it could hurt, other than possibly being a waste of time.
My experience is similar to a few mentioned up-thread - my wife and I were together for plenty of time before marriage to know what was coming. And we were old enough to have a pretty good idea of what we wanted and didn’t want.
I would definitely recommend it to any couples that were (a) young (like under 25) and/or (b) getting married quickly (< 1 year after having met). I think those are the two groups most likely to learn something that might cause them to either reconsider or at least enter their marriage with all of the information they need.
I really like @LSLGuy’s suggestion of meeting separately with a counselor, but I don’t think a counselor would divulge what the other party said, so other than some sort of “maybe you should slow this down” advice or a follow-up joint meeting where what was said privately was aired I’m not sure how it would work practically.
I think that this is a big “it depends” issue. In my case, it would not have helped as I was (until three years ago) an undiagnosed autistic (diagnosed Level 1 ASD) with a slightly/somewhat toxic, dysfunctional upbringing. As such, I was, for about the first thirty years of our marriage, a walking bag of emotional grenades. None of this could have been sussed out in a session or workshop at that time; it took me years of counselling and a formal autism evaluation and diagnosis to get us to where we are.
The only reason that we are still married is that, for some reason, she saw something worth holding on to and saving. So here we are, happily married and all of my damaging behaviour dealt with.
Again, this is my particular situation so, it depends IMHO.
I don’t know either of you, but I want to say here – maybe not. A skilled counselor can bring out things that neither of the clients were expecting to talk about. Non-verbal cues, among other things, can give away a lot that a good counselor can pick up on and follow.
Full disclosure: I had good luck with my own counseling and am therefore sort of a fanboy. We haven’t had couples counseling, although I’ve often thought if we could find a good one who was fully bi-lingual it could help us a lot. Maybe we just need to hire an interpreter.
I wouldn’t expect much from just one session or workshop in any case. Effective counseling takes time, as well as commitment from the clients to do the hard work.
By “educational component” do you just mean bringing up the idea that the sexual relationship may change over time, or are you referring to something more - I can’t imagine a way to predict how or why it will change, there are so many ways.
We went through a few sessions because it seemed like The Right Thing To Do. I don’t feel like it made any difference.
What did make a difference was the book Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. We can debate the validity of that book until the end of all time, but two things we learned from it helped me and Mrs. H understand each other, and which put the brakes on a bunch of future conflict before it even arose. 1) When people (women particularly) are complaining or talking about a problem, they don’t necessarily want their problem to be solved. They want to be heard, understood, and supported. Don’t give advice; listen and support. 2) Men (most of anyway, one supposes) value our time alone, particularly when we’re stressed (the author called it “going into a cave”). When I come home from work in a foul mood and go straight to playing World of Warcraft, Mrs. H knows that I’m not ignoring her, I’m just processing my day in my own way. Half an hour later I’ll be fine and we’ll talk and go on about our lives.
My husband’s church required it, and I came out a big fan – I don’t know that it made a huge difference in our case (we had been dating for a while and are both pretty laid-back, logical people), but it was a helpful way of making sure we’d covered all our bases (we pretty much had) and also to make sure we were aware of some good ways to communicate when we did have issues. I think it also normalizes the idea of marital counseling so that if/when you need it later on, you have more of a framework to think of it as a good thing to seek out.
I was enough of a fan that I really heavily encouraged my younger sister, who was talking about marriage to her then-boyfriend, to do pre-marital counseling and offered to pay for it. Now… I was pretty sure that if she went to counseling with the guy she was dating at the time, it would help her see that they were extremely unsuited for one another and in fact brought out the worst in each other. Though my vague memory is that they ended up breaking up before going to counseling. (Anyway, she did do counseling with the man she ended up marrying and is still married to. Her old boyfriend eventually got married to someone else and then divorced.)
The person who married us came to my wife’s house a few days before the wedding to collect information, and maybe he was doing some counseling. We were a thousand miles away from each other before, and never lived closer than 600 miles apart for the seven years we knew each other. I could tell he thought we were doomed.
We’ve been married 47 years. Besides formal counseling not being feasible for us, no one could have understood our relationship, so it could only have hurt.
Here is a thread from 2003(!) on a related topic. My first contribution in that thread, post #5, contains an echo of the same issue @Voyager mentions just above.
Namely that if the counselor can’t correctly understand your premarital relationship, it’s a good bet their marital advice will be less than helpful.
I mean a conversation about what the research shows and suggests is useful, not a response to a specific problem or issue being raised by the client(s). More of a “Hey, you might want to know” than an intervention. An example is the PLISSIT Model.
We were married under the care of a Quaker meeting that asked us to meet with a Clearance Committee to at least make sure we’d been talking about the right things. It took us seven years to get around to getting married and yes, we had. It wasn’t a bad conversation but I can’t say it helped or hindered anything. We were open to the idea of there being something revelatory from it but there wasn’t.
I think it’s a great idea, whether the officiant is secular or religious. Even officiants who don’t require counseling have the right to refuse to marry a couple that they feel should not be married, for any of a gazillion reasons.
I’ve had pastors tell me that refusing to marry a couple can be a conversation as difficult as planning a child’s funeral.
When my then-fiancee and I were planning our wedding, it was going to be officiated by her pastor, from an ELCA church. The ELCA, at least at that point, required some level of pre-marital counseling: he offered to take us through the stock published guides and work sessions that the denomination had, or take us through a series of “Dutch uncle” conversations, which covered the same topics.
We opted for the latter, which was actually fairly enjoyable; he was a great guy, and an observant guy, and while the conversations weren’t uncomfortable or difficult, they did bring up things that the two of us hadn’t thought much about.
I’m not sure how much it made a difference for us: we’ve generally gotten along, and have stuck together for 33 years, but where we’ve had significant disagreements, particularly in the first ten years or so of the marriage (e.g., relations with her difficult family members, sexual compatibility), either it wasn’t covered in the counseling, or we hadn’t realized it was going to become as significant an issue as it became.
My wife’s church required it, so we didn’t. It didn’t take long, and I don’t remember much about it (36 years later); It might not have been necessary in our case, but it did no harm. All I remember was the admonishment that this was the time to mention awkward facts that we might not have told each other before, but neither one of us had had a previously unmentioned marriage, child or criminal record, so we were cool
In response to a couple of different posts: a good counselor should not be giving advice, they should be giving the couple a safe space to reveal themselves to themselves, so they can make wiser decisions. The counselor shouldn’t have an agenda about things they should be talking about either, they should be following the lead of what the couple finds important. Maybe that isn’t what your average pre-marital counseling looks like, but that’s what the helpful kind would look like.
Yeah. It’s not supposed to be: “You guys should have this approach to money or sex or children” - it’s more like “You guys: Have you talked about sex, or money or children? You probably should before you get married”