You and your partner have reached a wonderful point in your relationship. You’ve spent amazing moments learning about each other and more amazing moments embracing the realization that you want to spend your lives together. Commitment is just around the corner and you couldn’t be happier about it.So, why on earth do you need to work with a therapist before you make your partnership official? You may feel that you are a perfect couple now, but issues you haven’t anticipated are bound to arise. An experienced and impartial therapist can help you expand the list of issues you will likely encounter and work through them with you before they become a problem. The list is long and unique to each couple, but some common issues include:
- Money. You may have worked through basics like whether to combine your money or keep separate accounts, or who is responsible for which bills. But, what about bigger issues like how to handle a large purchase that one of you wants and the other doesn’t, or when and how vigorously to set money aside for retirement.
- Kids. No doubt you’ve decided if you want children and how many, but what happens when you and your partner disagree about how to handle a rebellious preteen or how important religion should be in their lives.
- Expectations. You and your partner grew up in different families, probably different neighborhoods. As a result of the experiences you had as children, you each have built-in, perhaps even unknown, beliefs about the way things should go on in your relationship. Who takes care of the cars? Is it OK for friends or family to just drop in or should they wait for an invitation? Whose job takes preference when there is a conflict?
- Sex. Intimacy is probably pretty sweet right now, but how do you navigate the upheaval if one of you begins to lose interest or strays or wants to get more adventurous than the other? Sex can be a very hard thing to talk about, and yet it’s likely to be a conversation you will need to have eventually.
- Relationship. How prepared are you both to stick with this relationship? If you have different levels of commitment, how can you agree on what you expect of yourselves? Childhood experiences of neglect or abuse carry over into adulthood, making it difficult to hold onto relationships. The more you both understand about that situation the likelier you are to make this relationship last.
- Hidden issues. There are experiences, fears, and feelings that are etched into us at the cellular level. The deeply buried emotions just don’t come up in any ordinary conversation; we may not even be consciously aware of them. A skillful therapist can help each of you share the things that lie deep and can sabotage your future together. When you have shared those hidden parts of yourself, you can then learn how to support one another through your deficits.
If you chose pre-marital therapy you can expect:
- Short-term counseling, five to seven sessions.
- You may each be asked to fill out a questionnaire so you can compare your perceptions of where you are.
- The counselor can also use your responses to assess the strong and weak areas of your relationship.
- Guided by your counselor, you will be encouraged to have a deep and honest conversation about what each of you appreciates in your relationship and any concerns you have.
- Together with your counselor, you will come up with a plan for a healthy relationship and marriage.
With the help of pre-marital therapy, you can avoid the tendency to ignore or brush your issues under the carpet until it’s impossible to ignore them. Learning communication and relationship skills before marriage can ease you through those hard times and help keep your marriage strong.
Click here for more information on Couples Therapy.
