How Premarital Counseling Can Save Your Marriage Before it Starts

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The days leading up to a wedding are packed full of visiting venues, tasting dishes from different caterers, selecting a cake, and finding the perfect gown to walk down the aisle in. In the flurry of activity, the most important to-do item is often overlooked — premarital counseling.

Dating and engagement are often times of infatuation. You love your partner’s loud laugh and the way he has a laid-back attitude toward life. Your heart melts a little when he smiles at you. Every moment together is thrilling and you feel like life with him will be a dream come true.

Fast forward to three years into marriage and you suddenly notice stark differences between yourselves, the things you once thought were adorable about your spouse annoy you, finances are putting a strain on romance and communication becomes a strenuous activity.

Why You Should Seriously Consider Premarital Counseling

Once you say your vows at the altar, there’s no going back. If you are going to spend the rest of your life with someone, shouldn’t you take the time to discuss in detail your desires and mindsets? Some couples wed because they make each other happy, but what happens when those feelings fade?

A Christian counselor at Newport Beach Christian Counseling can help you gain a larger perspective on your relationship. A counselor might reveal to you a blind spot that’s been overlooked during the dating and engagement season. Agreeing to go to counseling can help you begin building your marriage on Christ’s solid foundation.

5 Reasons Why Pre Marriage Counseling Should Be Required

Matthew 9:6 tells us that when a husband and wife get married they become one, “So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

But becoming one isn’t always as seamless as it sounds. Two people living independent lives are suddenly thrown into a marriage where decisions and actions must be discussed and agreed upon together. Premarital counseling can help you ease into those early days of navigating married life.

The following is a list of five reasons why premarital counseling should be a top priority for seriously dating or engaged couples.

1. Identify conflict resolution styles

Chances are you and your partner have different views on how to resolve a conflict. Maybe you grew up in a household where your dad had an angry outburst, gave the silent treatment and then once his mood passed everything went back to normal. The conflict was never appropriately addressed. On the other hand, maybe you saw your parents address conflict immediately and openly.

Finding common ground with your future spouse on how to best solve conflict will give you a leg up in marriage. Conflict is inevitable when you are in a relationship. Maybe the wife needs thirty minutes of alone time to collect her thoughts and the husband is adamant about addressing the conflict immediately.

A middle ground can be reached to make sure both people are resolving the conflict in a healthy, beneficial way. Counseling gives you a safe place to create a plan before the conflicts arise.

2. Ask the hard questions in a safe place

Counseling sessions are known to bring the critical but tough questions to the table. The questions force you to plunge below the surface of your relationship and uncover your personal beliefs that may have been minimized during dating.

When you are blinded by wedded bliss you might forget to ask about when to have children, how to discipline the kids, who will provide financially, how will you split household chores, what church will you attend, and how to manage finances effectively.

3. Take the opportunity to grow in love

During the Passover Festival, Jesus knelt before his disciples and, in an act of true humility, washed their feet. “It was just before the Passover Festival. Jesus knew that the hour had come for him to leave this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.”

In John 13:1, the words “he loved them to the end” jump off the page. The same statement can be applied to marriage. Spouses are called to love like Jesus which means loving each other to the end.

Love is more than a feeling. Feelings fizzle out, but commitment provides a place for your love to grow and flourish. You don’t want your love to be like the leaves on a tree. As soon as the wind blows and hard times hit, the leaves vanish. You want a love like the roots of a tree.

The hurricane winds may come and bend your marriage, but it won’t break it. Roots mature over years of marriage, but the roots grow a little deeper during premarital counseling. It takes effort and energy to continue to grow those roots past the early stages of romance.

4. Marriage lasts the rest of your life

Brides and grooms spend countless hours and dollars to host the wedding of their dreams. Pinterest helps brides plan their perfect wedding and the wedding industry responds with sky-high pricing. If you want to put that much time and money into one day, wouldn’t you want to invest into the days that follow?

Marriage is definitely worth celebrating, but not at the expense of life after marriage. Premarital counseling makes sure you are both on the same page before racing off to your honeymoon. You can walk down the aisle with more confidence knowing you invested time into the important topics that will shape the future you share with your spouse.

5. God honors marriages that glorify Him

God is the author of our lives and the designer of marriage. Marriage will refine you and mold you in new ways. You will experience the valleys and the mountaintops with your spouse. A marriage blessed and strengthened by the Lord can withstand the storms. Marriage is a high and difficult calling, but everything our Lord calls us to He also empowers us to accomplish.

Get Wisdom from those Around You

A Christian counselor at Newport Beach Christian Counseling can equip and empower you to step into marriage knowing your spouse on a deeper level. Marital love is an expression of humility and self-sacrifice that brings honor to our Heavenly Father.

Your marriage can be an example to others of Jesus’ love for the church. If you are engaged to be married or seriously dating, consider investing some time to experience the benefits of premarital counseling.

 

Photos
“Forgiveness,” courtesy of David Nunez, unsplash.com, CC0 License; “Committed,” courtesy of Zoriana Stakhniv, unsplash.com, CC0 License; “To have and to hold,” courtesy of Jon Asato, unsplash.com, CC0 License; “Jesse & Terry,” courtesy of Vanessa Porter, Flickr Creative Commons, CC by 2.0 

Rediscovering God’s View of Marriage

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In society today, we’re bombarded by various opinions, agendas, and worldviews. We’re constantly fed messages by social media, politics, the news, and the neighbors next door. Sometimes in the midst of the many voices, we lose sight of truth. Let’s take a few moments to get back to the basics, particularly pertaining to God’s view of marriage. If you’re looking for guidance on this topic, Newport Beach Christian Counseling can offer support and help you gain a clearer understanding of God’s plan for relationships.

What Does the Bible Say About God’s View of Marriage?

In Mark 10:8, we read that a marriage means that two people have become united as one flesh. So in a Christian marriage, does this mean the spouses do not retain individual identities? Does the Creator of the universe ask us to sacrifice our individuality when we take our marriage vows?

The short answer is “no.” Marriages do not flourish when spouses become so enmeshed that their individual personalities are lost. Each one of us is a unique person with our own goals and desires and that doesn’t change we get married.

A healthy marriage requires two partners who experience personal growth along their growth as a couple in intimacy and love. This is a difficult task and requires a careful balance. There has to be individual development along with an increasing bond with one’s spouse.

Do we see this tension in Scripture? Let’s look at Paul’s metaphor of the body and apply it to the unity of a Christian marriage. In 1 Corinthians, Paul describes the fellowship of believers functioning together as one body made up of many individuals. A body made up of only one member, like a foot, wouldn’t function effectively.

Rather, the entire body must work in sync and each part has to have its own purpose and identity (1 Cor. 12:12-31). The body of Christ is made up of all of these different parts working together towards the same goal.

Differentiation and Christian Marriage

We can apply this principle not only to a church community but also to a married couple. This will help us understand Jesus’ teaching that “two become one” in the covenant of marriage. I believe this means that by cultivating intimacy with our spouse, we became more fully united to them, as opposed to being “blended” with them. The most fruitful, godly marriages are made up of two people who are committed to personal growth and growth as a couple.

In his marital help book Passionate Marriage, Dr. David Schnarch describes this process as differentiation. Differentiation is the process of becoming yourself more fully as you engage in relationships with others, and particularly with your spouse.

Differentiation is the balance between the drive for personal growth and the desire to fellowship with others (55). This process should not make anyone into a loner. Instead, it makes our emotional bonds deeper and helps us develop holistically and healthily as individuals. It gives us an integrated “self-in-relation” that is unaffected by our circumstances.

Ultimately, differentiation allows us to grind off our “rough edges” and be ourselves more fully while we learn to love our spouse more (51).

Schnarch also describes the background of the word differentiation. It’s rooted in biology and refers to the process by which cells develop. All living cells originate from the same matter. As time passes, the cells differentiate—meaning, they take on their own individual properties. At this point, each cell “performs separate but related functions.”

Does this remind you of how Paul describes the body in 1 Corinthians? Schnarch adds: “The greater the differentiation, the more sophisticated and adaptive the life form” (62)—in other words, the more well-differentiated a life form is, the more it can adjust to challenging circumstances.

In the same way, people who are well-differentiated are secure in their personal identity, instead of relying on others to define them. When they are in a relationship, well-differentiated people can navigate conflict effectively because they have a grounded sense of self (55).

On the other hand, people who lack differentiation draw their sense of identity from those around them. They require validation from others in order to feel at peace with themselves. This is called developing a “contingent identity” (59).

People who have formed a contingent attachment lose their sense of self apart from their relationships. This causes them to have a great fear of changes in their relationship or in their partner’s emotions or moods.

How Christian Marriage Counseling Can Help You Differentiate

Differentiation is not a destination that can be reached overnight. Instead, it’s a journey toward a healthy sense of self, both individually and in relation to others. It’s a difficult process that requires a lot of work, including some decisions that may be uncomfortable.

This isn’t the easiest way to work on your marriage, but it is incredibly fruitful and will enable you to enjoy a much more fulfilling relationship with your spouse.

Becoming well-differentiated is a nuanced process, which means that it involves subtle complexities that can be confusing. How can you grow as a person and bond with your spouse at the same time? How can you develop a more grounded sense of self while still being “one flesh” in your marriage?

These questions are complicated, and there are no one-size-fits-all answers. If you think you need to work on this process in your marriage, a Christian counselor Newport Beach can help you wade through some of the complexities.

Whether you are just starting out or have been married for years, a qualified Christian counselor at Newport Beach Christian Counseling can provide you with the guidance and support you are seeking. Please do not hesitate to contact us for more information about setting up an appointment with one of our marriage specialists.

Photos
“Out for a Walk,” courtesy of Vladimir Kudinov, Unsplash.com, CC0 License; “Reconciled,” courtesy of Priscilla du Preez, unsplash.com, CC0 License; “Committed,” courtesy of freestocks.org, unsplash.com, CC0 License; “Field gazing,” courtesy of unsplash.com, pexels.com, CC0 License