Premarital Counseling

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Premarital Counseling When a couple crosses that essential line from dating to engaged, they start to create plans for their wedding day. Visions of dresses, cakes, flowers, bachelor parties and honeymoons fill their minds as they prepare for the ceremony. Sadly, so much time and energy is spent preparing for their wedding that couples sometimes forget to prepare for something even more important-their marriage. This is why premarital counseling is so essential. As soon as the wedding they dreamed of is behind them, a young couple marrying in 2008 can anticipate to have sixty or seventy years together as a married couple. Throughout that time, conflicts will arise, circumstances will change, children will arrive and leave, and even a couple's deep values will shift. Premarital counseling can give a couple the tools to navigate these problems as they arise, and to maintain a marriage powerful, wholesome, and exciting. Some of the locations that premarital counseling assist a couple prepare for include: 1. Communication. Couples will learn skills like assertive speaking and active listening. This skill set goes beyond simply liking to speak to one another; it entails learning constructive methods to ask for what you would like and to get issues resolved in ways that leave both partners satisfied, and also the marriage stronger than ever. 2. Expectations. Everybody goes into marriage with strong suggestions about what marriage should be like, but those ideas occasionally conflict with their partner's ideas. Premarital counseling can help uncover deep-seated expectations of marriage so that they can become a source of strength rather than conflict in a marriage. 3. Role relationships. Will the spouses play traditional household roles inside the marriage, or will they determine roles based on skills and preferences? A surprising number of couples makes assumptions about these roles without ever discussing them. 4. Family members of origin problems. For much better or worse, the households people had been raised in influence the families they will make. Premarital counseling helps a couple identify the patterns set by previous generations so that they may choose or reject those patterns consciously. 5. Parenting. A couple can't anticipate each parenting decision they will need to make, but premarital counseling assists them to bring values, hopes, and expectations into the open and discuss how those will influence their child-raising. 6. Money. Couples often go into a marriage with out having a frank discussion about debt, income, savings, investments, giving, and the values that underlie every of these. Premarital counseling offers a couple a chance to discuss these problems openly, also as to learn abilities like budgeting, monetary goal-setting, and prioritizing. Many couples obtain premarital counseling from the clergyperson who performs their ceremony. Others go to counselors who specialize within the skills required for marriage. Anybody planning to marry should check the specifications of their religion or county to see whether premarital counseling is mandatory for them.


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