Marriage Doesn’t Resolve Your Internal Struggles – Try Premarital Counseling
Too many couples stumble into marriage blind, hurt, immature, lonely, broken, and loaded with the emotional baggage of past unhealthy relationships and traumatic childhoods. They mistakenly believe that marriage will magically fix all of their personal issues and resolve their internal struggles.
It seems we are living in a time where people think that marriage will melt all their troubles away. After all, love will find a way, won’t it? Not always.
Unfortunately, the reality is that every issue you had before marriage will still be there after you tie the knot and getting hitched may complicate matters even further.
If you are lonely now, then marriage won’t make you feel less lonely. If you are immature now, you will still be the same immature person after the vows have been spoken. If you’re financially irresponsible, then you will likely be adding even more monetary challenges to your life that you have little hope of managing. Likewise, anger issues you haven’t confronted will still flare-up and make it difficult to communicate and resolve conflicts with your spouse.
The point is, marriage is not the cure-all for conflicts or personal issues you may think it is, but it’s likely to exacerbate any problems you currently have in your life.
You may hope things will change. Hope is great, but it doesn’t make for a successful marriage if you don’t take steps to learn how to resolve conflicts and communicate with your significant other. Issues going into a marriage will hang about until you decide to fix them, and you can do that by taking part in premarital counseling.
It’s the one thing couples madly in love don’t want to do or see no point in it, but that doesn’t make it any less important or worthwhile.
What Do You Gain from Premarital Counseling?
We often wish we could have the benefit of hindsight before we made an important life choice. Premarital counseling is like being able to take advantage of hindsight before you commit. You will open your eyes to the issues currently affecting your relationship. When you become aware of a problem, you can then you can take steps to fix it.
Knowing what you are getting into and what you expect to gain from marriage is an important step. Likewise, understanding your partner’s viewpoint about marriage and their expectations will prevent any nasty surprises from cropping up during the honeymoon. When you’re informed before the marriage, you can make intelligent decisions with the clarity that is almost equal to the experience gained from hindsight.
Premarital Counseling Benefits
Merging two lives into one can become a boiling pot of emotions, challenges, thoughts, beliefs, and relationship problems bubbling to the surface in a hot steamy mess if you don’t properly prepare.
Marriage won’t make the problems disappear. There will always be ups and downs in a marriage, but if there a pre-existing issue, the downs can be a lot more frequent than the ups. It will become even more difficult to deal with the challenges you were facing before the wedding.
The issues you are currently facing mean that it’s essential for you to seek counseling now, so you can identify what is most important to both of you before you take the plunge.
Premarital Counseling is a Pre-emptive Relationship Intervention
You shouldn’t be making marriage the goal. Instead, marriage is the first step towards building a long-lasting, healthy, strong, and loving partnership. Think of premarital counseling to be a form of early intervention that can save you years of relationship struggle.
Imagine how much lower the divorce rate would be if people went into a lifelong commitment with their eyes opened wide through premarital counseling. It can show you how to strengthen your relationship through effective communication, create realistic expectations, and teach effective conflict resolution. It also provides an opportunity for you to reveal your values and beliefs about marriage and important matters like finance, children, parenting, and family.
Here are eight more benefits about why premarital counseling is so important:
- If you or partner suffered child abuse, it will affect the marriage.
- If you have domestic violence in your past, it will affect the marriage.
- Differing views of infidelity can also impact a marriage.
- Unspoken expectations can also affect the marriage.
- Automatically assuming you know what the other needs will impact the partnership.
- If you or your partner have issues with expressing frustration or anger, the marriage will be affected.
- If you or your partner have communication issues and shutting down is a go-to coping mechanism, it will influence the marriage.
A lot of couples are resistant to the idea of premarital counseling because they fear what may come to the surface will be disturbing enough to get the wedding canceled. However, isn’t it better to get these issues out in the open before the wedding? They will come out eventually, so dealing with them now is the prudent course of action.
Dealing with issues now will make your relationship stronger, so don’t make the mistake that many couples make by skipping premarital counseling. It’s an investment in both your futures that will pay enormous dividends as you continue to share your life.
Do you want your marriage to be healthier, happier, and stronger? Of course you do. Take the next step and discover how you can both start working towards a brighter future together. Click here to find out how: Couples Counseling