The Case for Premarital Counseling

Dear TEAMS,

I had the sad event a couple weeks back to hear that a sweet friend of mine was struggling with circumstances in her marriage.  It was such a tragic thing to me, really, in that I attended that wedding several years ago and everyone seemed so very happy and supportive of the union.  We all rejoiced that she was getting married—a true desire of her heart—and that she had found someone who had such similar tastes and passions as she and came from a pastoral family.

What made me saddest of all is that when I was informed of this, I wasn’t surprised.  I’d seen this coming and had hoped against hope the pattern wouldn’t be repeated yet again…not with her of all people!

The culprit that tipped me off?  They both had rejected quality premarital counseling when they got engaged for a number of reasons, not the least of which was pride.

When I speak of quality premarital counseling, I’m not talking about 3 sessions the pastor spends with the couple talking about love, divorce, and the Bible and then the third session is planning the wedding.  No, I’m talking about the down-and-dirty, practical stuff that most couples who are still in the airy-fairy stage of their relationship have not considered could ever be an issue.  Because make no mistake:  the garbage still needs to be taken out whether you are into each other or not.

It is said that most marital difficulties are the result of children, finances or sex.  It has been my experience with your father that all of our difficulties instead have been because expectations were not met (and because of lack of humility—but that’s for another post!).  Sometimes, we didn’t even realize we expected what we did…and that’s where quality premarital counseling comes in.  Quality premarital counseling involves the process of discovering where your expectations lie and where your partner’s expectations lie, and if those two conflict with each other enough to cause frustration or anger.  A highly generalized example would be children:  if you expect to have children, but your partner really doesn’t want to, that’s a problem because one of you will not get what you expect.  And worse, if the person who doesn’t want to have children decides later on that he/she should for the sake of the spouse…it sets up lots of difficulty when said child arrives on the scene and that person who “gave in” realizes the amount of self-sacrifice , time, money, and effort that child takes.

When someone says they don’t need premarital counseling because “they love their fiancé/e and know they always will, so everything will work out” and that “we’ve seen really good marriages and think we have a handle on those work,”  I quietly bite my tongue, because 1) they make a mockery of what God’s infinite love is by equating it to their own, and 2) they are making an assumption that watching is the same as doing, as if watching a lifetime of neurosurgeries would qualify you to perform one.  To think that a human being’s love is enough to ”make things work out” when 2 of the kids individually simultaneously vomit and get diarrhea that explodes out of their diaper, all while another child is panicked because he can’t find his shoe and the dog is whining at the door to go out, and your spouse has had a horrific day and can’t stand coming home to no dinner and the house mess from tending to sick kids all day and you cannot wipe your nose that is literally dripping on the carpet from your allergies…well, let’s just say that you’ll see how far human love really goes and how no amount of watching has prepared you.  You will also see how valuable the conflict resolution part of your premarital counseling was.

My friend is now in a marriage that she has had to lay down all of her dreams of having children, dreams of how she would spend time with her husband building relationship in specific ways, and dreams of vocational pursuits that might never come true, all so that she can Biblically show her husband an example of submissive love.  For now and what appears to be the next several years, that is her lot in life.  Can God change all this and do the impossible?  Absolutely, and I pray that He will.  Will God be redeeming this situation and growing her even deeper in her relationship with Him through it?  Hallelujah, yes—much to her credit of deciding to accept her situation and apply Biblical wisdom to it.  But her wide-open eyes could have been opened earlier and perhaps different decisions been made, all for the want of a little quality premarital counseling that was shunned by two prideful hearts that believed they knew what they were doing even though they’d never done it, and that their love was equal to God’s and could fix anything.

Love,