How Long Is Premarital Counseling?

3. Building Practical Skills

During this phase of premarital counseling, couples can discuss those moments where perhaps they felt frustrated with one another, or they believed they were communicating with each other as a unit in a way that felt comfortable. But this conversation leads to the first real teaching component of the premarital counseling program.

With an understanding of the assessment and the background information of when and how problems might arise, with the guidance of your counselor you can now build practical skills that will help you and your partner navigate issues in your relationship that are sure to crop up from the challenges you mentioned to the premarital counselor, or perhaps more underlying concerns.

Across this phase, you’ll both learn communication skills, how to handle certain challenging moments that are existing in your relationship currently, address pain points, and much more. Considering an emphasis on the plurality of “skills,” you and your partner will have the chance to utilize multiple strategies to combat your most concerning situations. If one doesn’t quite work, try another. 

This is all very helpful to any couple, even those who believe they are — and might well actually be — very happy and high functioning. Still, challenges will come up, even for those couples, who sometimes have a tendency to be a little avoidant of issues because they don’t want to rock the boat. Believe me: avoiding premarital counseling for this reason would be a huge mistake.

When seemingly minor speed bumps turn up, they disregard them, and do their best to focus only on what they believe are the positive aspects of their relationship. But truthfully, literally all couples have things to work through. What happens in a marriage when those ups and downs turn into the edge of a cliff? That well-intentioned strategy of “not talking about it if it’s not yet a problem” is not a good plan, in retrospect. Smart, successful couples are proactive in addressing things before they become a capital-P Problem. That is what good premarital counseling is for.

4. Creating Agreements

KIDS: Are you and your partner totally on the same page about kids? How many do you want? When said kids arrive into this world, who is going to be caring for them? Mom? Dad? (Or other Mom?) Grandma? Mary Poppins? The cat? We need to figure this out. Kid questions are even more pressing when you’re blending families, or about to do a step-parent thing. Divorce rates are much higher for second marriages involving kids, usually because of disagreements about parenting. Take heed.

MONEY: How will you handle money, particularly if one part of the unit out-earns the other? Will you be combining finances? How much will you put away for retirement, vacations, property purchases? Who will be in charge of paying the bills or maintaining the hypothetical budget spreadsheet that doesn’t yet exist? What if someone wants a motorcycle? What is a reasonable amount of money to spend on skin care products, anyway? So. Much. To. Discuss.

RELATIONSHIP GOALS: What do you both value? Are those values aligned and what are your hopes and dreams for the future? People grow and change over time. You have a dream of buying a lavender farm. He wants to be a digital nomad living in an RV. How do we build a bridge to the center? 

TEAMWORK: What are your expectations for who should be doing what around the house? His mom was an enthusiastic housekeeper who meticulously did everything inside, except water the flowers. His dad did everything outside including car maintenance and snow shoveling, except he came in every afternoon at 4pm to take out the trash. HER mom was a diagnosed hoarder who got a prize from Dominos for ordering 100 pizzas in a year. This couple may have different expectations about what running a household together involves, don’t you think? Worth discussing.

In addition to gaining insight into yourselves and each other, and developing healthy communication and relationship skills, premarital counseling invites you to get into alignment about many, many things. In this stage of premarital counseling, the counselor works with you to establish more long-term goals and agreements that perhaps have not yet been established — but need to be.

One of the most fascinating aspects of this stage, from both the counselor’s perspective and, oftentimes, the couple’s as well, is when previously unsaid expectations arise. Maybe one person just never had the chance to talk about some down-the-road vision for their shared life together, but now they have the opportunity to discuss it in a collaborative, productive and positive way. 

Then, once that expectation is out in the open and addressed in counseling, it won’t turn up as a demand years down the road and cause a conflict seemingly from out of nowhere. (“But, my lavender farm!”) This type of alignment generates a kind of inoculation around the possibilities that come with circumstances of a marriage dramatically changing.

Going through this exercise now, not only sets up long-lasting agreements and cohesive understanding of expectations, but the building of bridges to a happy middle ground, and practice for the creation of agreements about new wants and needs that might turn up.

5. Building New Systems

This stage is similar to the creating agreements stage, but it’s a time when you and your partner come to agreements on how you will handle various operational aspects of a marriage. For example: creating a budget, establishing boundaries, and doling out household chores and other responsibilities. Slightly boring? Yes. (Unless maybe if you are a spreadsheet warrior who loves org-charts.) But these practical systems are vital to create. Especially if you are a spreadsheet warrior who’s about to marry someone who has no idea what day the trash truck comes.

6. Building a Toolbox

In this stage of premarital counseling you’ll develop particular skill sets that you can rely on when their relationship gears need a little greasing to help it all run smoothly again. The counselor examines the ways in which you and your partner can check in with each other about your feelings, how they can communicate effectively to avoid issues growing into conflict, things like that. 

The best premarital counselors don’t use a cookie-cutter approach. For every couple, their toolbox will be a little different, curated to their particular communication skills, level of emotional intelligence, mutual understanding, and other aspects. 

In this stage, the couple also learns how to anticipate possible problems arising and say things like: “Remember how in the past I said that when you’re stressed you seem to shut down? This is one of those times and I just wanted to check in and see if we can have an open conversation about how you’re feeling right now.”