While you are planning your wedding, with those lovely decorations, gowns and cakes, are you also preparing for marriage?

Many soon-to-be married couples do not undergo appropriate premarital education.

This normally decreases marital satisfaction and increases the likelihood of divorce over time.

Pre marriage counseling can have many benefits for couples that plan to get married, specifically because it raises problems you might have never thought about.

It also requires you to come up with solutions for different issues you might be dealing with at any point in your marriage.

Read on to get a deeper insight of premarital counseling, what it means, and its benefits.

First and Foremost, What Is Pre Marriage Counseling?

Exactly as its name suggests, marriage counseling is a form of therapy that aims to help couples prepare for marriage psychically, ensuring that their relationship is strong and healthy enough to lay the foundation of a happy life together.

While undergoing pre marriage counseling, you and your partner get the chance to understand the different dimensions of marriage, as well as problems that are raised inside of its context.

Problems such as finances, communication, roles, affection and sex, parenting, dealing with anger and time spent together.

It is obvious that all couples have weaknesses, but undergoing premarital education can allow you and your partner to identify yours and work together to eliminate them.

Ultimately you will be able to prevent bigger issues from showing up later in your marriage.

Once you start going through pre marriage counseling, you and your partner will be able to discuss your expectations and decide whether they are reasonable or not.

In addition, this type of therapy is important because it helps couples establish a positive attitude towards all issues that show up in the mean time, understanding their social, financial, sexual and emotional needs and how to fulfill them adequately.

It is a good idea to develop a list of premarital counseling questions before your first session.

Benefits of Premarital Counseling

There are undoubtedly many benefits of pre marriage counseling you might want to consider before truly committing to such a demanding responsibility as marriage is.

1. Creating Positive Marriage Resolutions

One of the primary advantages of premarital education is that you will be able to successfully create positive marriage resolutions once the both of you start discussing different matters with an experienced therapist.

It is very simple to get emotional and push reason to the side when talking heavy-duty topics such as money, sex and children.

When working with a specialist, you will be guided throughout the whole conversation appropriately.

This way you can actually understand what is about to come in your marriage, and how to approach every specific problem that shows up.

This is essential since you and your partner might go off the tangent, thereby not accomplishing anything.

2. Setting Realistic Expectations About Timing

Many married couples have big expectations about timing.  Perhaps you do not want children until two years from now, or you want them during the next couple of months.

Timing can help marriages thrive, and this is why pre marriage counseling will allow you to set realistic expectations about this particular aspect of your life.

You will find it substantially easier to live without feeling anxious or frustrated when that specific matter is brought up in a discussion.

3. Improving Conflict Resolution Skills

All young couples go through conflicts, and if you are truly honest with yourself, then you should definitely admit that there is room for improvements in how the both of you react.

When conflicts show up, reaching a happy solution is important to making your marriage work again.

Yelling at each other is not going to help you, not at all. Through pre marriage counseling, you and your partner will learn conflict resolution skills and how to improve them. Both of you can know what to say or do when difficult situations show up.

A counselor will teach you how to properly communicate so this type of conflicts will never disturb the normal flow of your life as a married couple.

4. Avoiding Toxic Resentments

Resentments are quite common when it comes to marriage, and hanging them onto can eventually lead you to bursting out and having conflicts with extremely undesirable outcomes.

When you undergo premarital education, the therapist you will be working with will encourage you to speak out your shortcomings and dissatisfactions.

This will prevent them from causing massive damage later in your marriage.

Since this is one of the primary causes of early divorce, you might definitely want to consider going through appropriate pre marriage counseling together.

Disadvantages of Pre Marriage Counseling

Of course, there are a couple of drawbacks of going through pre marriage counseling, but not as many or as important to really impact your choice of doing this yourselves.

1. Relying on the Counselor

Many couples that undergo premarital education might have the unhealthy tendency to rely on the therapist to actually solve their issues.

This is a wrong approach, since every counseling session is meant to help couples prepare for marriage, not hire someone to dig up the past and do everything for you.

If you let the counselor to decide for yourself, the therapy will not work.

It will eventually be just a waste of money and time for all of you – but if you dedicate yourself to really understanding and improving your relationship, everyone will be happy in the end.

2. Bringing Up Past Faults

Bringing up past faults to the discussion can be beneficial for improving the bond between you and your partner, but can also cause more harm than good. Potentially making pre marriage counseling disadvantageous.

If you are going to talk about past issues and problems that had caused you troubles, you should be extremely cautious and approach the discussion in a way that will not trigger further arguments.

Pre marriage counseling constitutes an excellent opportunity to find your strengths and weaknesses in your relationship before making the big step.

Do your best to understand each other, learn to communicate more efficiently and prevent potential conflicts from showing up and planting the “seed” of stress.

You’ll surely feel much happier together as time passes.