B/F informed me a bit ago, during a conversation about THE FUTURE, that when we decide to get married, he definitely would insist upon pre-marital counseling. I found this curious. He reasoned that if we spent enough time together to know one another fairly well (we don’t live together as of yet but are planning on that first, about mid-this-year, before any further steps are taken), we would have questions about one another that could perhaps affect a marriage down the road, and we would be wise to get a 3rd, qualified person’s help in smoothing out any of those types of questions that could become problems later.
As this would be a 2nd marriage for both of us, and we both definitely have baggage from prior relationships/marriages, I can see his point. Still, something in me is reticent. Can’t define it. I guess it would strike me as weird to discuss potential problems with a counselor as if they WILL become problems later. Seems eerily & potentially self-fulfilling, I guess.
Married or about-to-be-married or formerly-married Dopers, did any of you go thru this process? What was it like? Did it “help”? Do you talk together, or separately, to the 3rd party? Did you do this the first time around or the second (or more)? And if you didn’t go thru pre-nup counseling, WOULD you do it next time, assuming you have the enthusiasm for a “next time”?
WHY would any self-respecting person feel “weird” about doing this?
I needn’t add that I didn’t do this prior to first marriage. It wouldn’t have crossed my mind. Wonder if it would have made a difference?
Did with my first marriage, as a requirement of the Catholic Church.
Describing it as my first marriage will let you know how successful it was.
Didn’t with my current marriage - which has been going strong for over a decade.
But I would. I think talking to a third party with specific goals in mind can help a couple do some serious talking - something most couples don’t set time aside for before getting married. Things like “what are my goals” “What are my priorities” “What do I value” My first marriage was plagued by me getting security from having money in the bank and frugal living - and being married to a guy who liked to buy very generous gifts for relatives and friends (as well as just impulse spending). Had I understood what I valued I wouldn’t have married a guy who didn’t not only value that, but valued something completely contrary to having that - he likes to spend money. Moreover, good counseling would have helped me see that I wasn’t going to “fix” this and that it wasn’t wrong - it was just a value set at odds with my own.
I don’t have a pre-nup either, but if I ever got married again, I’d have a pre-nup. Most importantly for itemizing out what I have now in terms of assets and debts - and understanding what my partner has - as well as protecting them. But I’ve seen a few “oh, my God, I didn’t realize you had that much debt” marriages.
(My first marriage was primarily plagued by him being a cheating nutcase - but there were other factors that left both of us unhappy).
My first thought was of Bobcat’s latest movie (he directed not acted) “Let sleeping dogs Lie.”
I did no such thing. Might have been a good idea had I of done so.
Did. Highly recommend it. Several couples in the class had never discussed things like finances (are you a saver? a spender? some of each?) or children (any? if yes, how many?) etc. In short, issues that have the potential to cause a great deal of strife. Two couples decided not to marry after all because their differences were so great.
You don’t want to wait until you’re legally hitched to discover that, while you may love each other, you are completely unsuited to live in the same house. You don’t need a counsellor to help you sort it out, though - there are a lot of *(x) number of questions to talk about before marrying * - type books that you can buy.
It was required by our church (United Methodist) and my understanding is most churches require it now to be married in their church, which may or may not factor into your decision. The normal process in our church was to meet jointly with the pastor over a course of a few weeks, with I think one or two individual meetings. However, the pastor and my husband were close friends, and I wasn’t up to doing that with my husband-to-be’s golf buddy!
As an alternative, we went to a one-day seminar led by two married counselors with about 12-15 couples. The day was intense, exhausting, and not enjoyable. However, by the end of it I was thoroughly convinced that if I’d tried it with any of my previous boyfriends, we would not have made it through the day. I saw that as a good omen.
The group included some people getting married for the second time and some starry-eyed young sweethearts. Some tears were shed, but not by us.
It will be 8 years soon and we are still doing well.
Funny story - when they set up the chairs in a circle at the beginning of the day, they set up an odd number of chairs. You’d think they’d have learned that’s an unlikely or unfortunate situation at premarital counseling. Maybe some Bridezillas bring their mothers?
I am not married, but I wouldn’t get married to anyone who wouldn’t agree to prenuptual counciling. I also wouldn’t marry anyone who wouldn’t sign a prenup. I know it seems unromantic and a bit accusatory, but I refuse to be one of those women who didn’t think it through and now has to sort through it essentially all alone because I was blinded to the fact that I was going to get married to an asshole. (I also don’t believe in alimony and I would want it specifically stated that alimony couldn’t be paid for more than 6 months after a divorce, but that is another matter.) I would want to sit and talk to the man I was getting married to about all the important things and having a third party there can really help prevent it from turning into an accusatory situation. If we don’t agree on the big things it is important to know that before the ceremony and the paperwork.
I once dated a guy who was very sweet but it turned out he lied about a bunch of stuff, thinking I wouldn’t date him if he didn’t agree with me on everything. One day on the way back from a hockey game he started crying and sobbed, “I really want to have kids someday!” I looked at him and said, “I told you before we even started dating that I don’t like children and I don’t ever want any of my own.” He said he kept thinking I would change my mind, but imagine if he just kept waiting for me to change my mind…we would have ended up married and he would have been miserable because I couldn’t give him something he needs.
I would do it. I wouldn’t insist on classes, through a church or otherwise, if my SO wasn’t into the idea, but I’d at least want to buy one of those workbooks and go through it as a couple. There are bound to be some things in there that we haven’t had a chance to discuss yet, or just plain haven’t thought of. I’m not living under the illusion that pre-marital counseling will guarantee a life of perfect wedded bliss, of course - I just think it’s smart to enter into marriage with both eyes wide open. If we don’t share the same ideas about what “marriage” is supposed to mean, and what roles we expect each other to play, better to work that out *before *getting hitched.
I would recommend it. I had to do it to be married in the Catholic Church. I was kinda resistant, not because I was afraid of the intensity of therapy and/or what would come up, but rather I thought that it might be cheesy. It wasn’t all that bad- it was light-hearted and fun for the most part. It wasn’t what I would call hard core therapy, but rather a forum to discuss the important issues- put them out on the table. There are a lot of couples who just let stuff slide, keeping things inside, thinking that they can talk about it and change themselves or their partner later. It was great that my wife and I got acknowledgement that although we are different in many ways, we make a great team and it confirmed the idea that we were right for each other.
I would, but I’d make sure that I got a counselor that worked for me.
Every parish in my home town has different requirements. Some do a single afternoon, some 24 hours (usually spread in 12 sessions). Any parish will accept another parish’s counseling. The parishes that get more requests? The ones that take longer.
All of us have things that we’ve never thought about but which may at some point become a problem. It may not even be something that “sounds serious”, like how do you feel about saving, is it a problem to you if your SO makes more money, do you want kids, would you be interested in adoption… it may be something like, “if one of you two snores or your sleep cycles are very different, what would you do? Would separate bedrooms automatically feel like ‘the beginning of the end’?” A good counselor can get you to think and talk about those things and to develop techniques to deal with hurdles as they appear (and they will appear, anybody who thinks otherwise is too delusional to enter a marriage).
I didn’t, but I would. I would recommend doing it BEFORE you move in together. I see so many people that end up married because it was the next step in a pretty-good relationship where the partner’s didn’t have many long-term goals in common.
I haven’t been married off yet, but I would strongly recommend it and will try to convince you to do the same.
Several well designed psychological experiments have demonstrated that the programs have a surprisingly strong and lasting effect upon marriage stability and happiness. It’s a relatively minor investment in your happiness and success as a couple.
This isn’t the type of situation where they sit you down and say, “Sooo, Ms. DiMwitter, why do you continue to be a continual failure in the eyes of your soon-to-be inlaws and can you outline a twelve step program for discontinuing the fuck-ups for us?” It’s where people are sat down and basically given a list of the big issues that couples fight over and told to discuss them rationally and before anyone feels trapped or resentful about the situation.
It was a requirement at the church where we got married; it consisted of a couple of hours’ chat with the vicar about the institution of marriage, and an evening meal with a married couple from the church, over which were discussed such things as our plans/preparation (if any) regarding joint finances, children, homebuying, how we would resolve future differences/disputes should they arise, and a whole load of other stuff.
Some people have said they think this represents unnecessary intrusion into our privacy, but I disagree; although the sessions only seemed marginally useful - as we had ourselves pretty much organised anyway - I see this as the church taking responsibility that the people it joined in marriage were ready for it and walking into it with their eyes open. I don’t see how it could possibly be a bad thing.
I didn’t for my first (and only) marriage, and I’m not sure I would do it again if the M-question arose with 'im indoors. To my mind, you need to be able to talk about those issues with your partner and if you can’t have that discussion openly and frankly with him/her, what difference is a third party going to make?
I’d just like to point out here that I’ve never had therapy or counselling of any sort so I know absolutely nothing about it!
I can kind of see the point there, but part of me is still not getting it…if I couldn’t talk openly with 'im indoors about stuff then I’m not sure counselling would make that much of a difference. Just me, I guess.
Yeah, fair point; I’m actually unclear on what would happen if it became apparent during counselling that the couple-to-be were severely unsuited/adjusted to one another. In the case of church-based counselling like we had, I think the church would refuse to conduct the ceremony until and unless the problems were resolved, but that wouldn’t stop them going elsewhere to get married and I have no idea what would happen in a purely secular context.
Maybe it’s mostly a feelgood thing - certainly for me, it was reassuring as a sort of pre-marital checklist, to make sure we’d not neglected some important facet of the whole thing.
I’d recommend it strongly–but it doesn’t help make for a good marriage as much as it can head off a bad one. Case in point, my marriage, or as it was known, the Ox-Box incident*, in which we knew each other since childhood, went to college together, lived together for five years, while in the same graduate program, and saw counselors along the way to smooth out problems while we were engaged: Didn’t help. The problems didn’t go away, they just worsened. OTOH, I have seen counselors with some of my post-marriage girlfriends, and this time I paid attention: when intractable problems arose, one or the other of us ran like a scared rabbit, and rightly so. So while it hasn’t solved problems pre-emptively in my marriage, it has prevented several other ill-fated marriages from taking place. SO: Yay, pre-marital counseling!
*credit W. Allen