Premarital counseling and The Marriage Thing
Hey guys,
I've been busy getting the website up with more information, easier to navigate and with information on the premarital counselors we have available. We're hopefully going to have a big blast to thousands of premarital counselors in a few weeks and will have a lot more listings for you.
There are so many reasons to do premarital counseling. An article is coming soon but two biggies to me:
1 - it's shown to reduce your DIVORCE RATE!
2 - many people who show up in marriage counseling could have actually worked on their problems an adverage of 6-7 years prior and avoided counseling altogether by having the tools they need to listen, communicate and problem solve. Small things fester, build and eventually the negativity towards the spouse outweighs the positive and you're stuck. Add our intense consumer culture that makes us feel like we can get, deserve, and should have "only the best" of everything in life - including a new spouse if we're "tired" of the old one.
3 - if you feel you have great communication (like my husband and I did), it's still a useful thing to talk about things that might not have occured to you and to get some validation for the path you're on in your relationship. It's NEVER a bad idea, in other words.
Have any of you experienced what I did while engaged? The negative talk about marriage, the "entrapment" talk, the "ol' ball and chain" remarks? It is so hard to be at the height of your happiness with someone, excited to spend the rest of your life with them and all you see are the negative remarks in the media and with friends.
The realty, let me assure you, is that marriage can be an amazing thing. Those of us in wonderful marriages don't talk about it because we are either too private, not smarmy people who dribble on about this sort of thing, or nobody asks. I just sit in amazement at the nasty comments friends make about their spouses and think, "wow, I wouldn't want to be married to that person!" "That person" either being my friend who is capable of being so disloyal to her husband, or to the spouse for the way my friend describes him...probably with great inaccuracy and not mentioning her role in the argument.
One of my very favorite questions to ask a newlywed is "how is married life going?" No matter if they were living together for years or began their daily lives together after the wedding, almost everyone is shocked at how different it feels emotionally. Different in a GOOD way.
For those of you in Colorado or Minnesota planning your wedding, I am now a blog moderator for http:www.go2wed.com which is a wedding planning guide filled with tons of useful information including beatiful, free wedding websites, planning guides and even discount cards for great wedding vendor deals.
And I just have to laugh - when we launched our website/program a year ago I told all sorts of journalists how easy my wedding planning was. I guess I had amnesia because there were SO many small and big problems that I just forgot about until delving back into wedding vendor experiences, family things (which I can't really write about for interpersonal boundary reasons) and all the things my husband and I had to navigate without any guidance in the wedding world.
-Elizabeth
I've been busy getting the website up with more information, easier to navigate and with information on the premarital counselors we have available. We're hopefully going to have a big blast to thousands of premarital counselors in a few weeks and will have a lot more listings for you.
There are so many reasons to do premarital counseling. An article is coming soon but two biggies to me:
1 - it's shown to reduce your DIVORCE RATE!
2 - many people who show up in marriage counseling could have actually worked on their problems an adverage of 6-7 years prior and avoided counseling altogether by having the tools they need to listen, communicate and problem solve. Small things fester, build and eventually the negativity towards the spouse outweighs the positive and you're stuck. Add our intense consumer culture that makes us feel like we can get, deserve, and should have "only the best" of everything in life - including a new spouse if we're "tired" of the old one.
3 - if you feel you have great communication (like my husband and I did), it's still a useful thing to talk about things that might not have occured to you and to get some validation for the path you're on in your relationship. It's NEVER a bad idea, in other words.
Have any of you experienced what I did while engaged? The negative talk about marriage, the "entrapment" talk, the "ol' ball and chain" remarks? It is so hard to be at the height of your happiness with someone, excited to spend the rest of your life with them and all you see are the negative remarks in the media and with friends.
The realty, let me assure you, is that marriage can be an amazing thing. Those of us in wonderful marriages don't talk about it because we are either too private, not smarmy people who dribble on about this sort of thing, or nobody asks. I just sit in amazement at the nasty comments friends make about their spouses and think, "wow, I wouldn't want to be married to that person!" "That person" either being my friend who is capable of being so disloyal to her husband, or to the spouse for the way my friend describes him...probably with great inaccuracy and not mentioning her role in the argument.
One of my very favorite questions to ask a newlywed is "how is married life going?" No matter if they were living together for years or began their daily lives together after the wedding, almost everyone is shocked at how different it feels emotionally. Different in a GOOD way.
For those of you in Colorado or Minnesota planning your wedding, I am now a blog moderator for http:www.go2wed.com which is a wedding planning guide filled with tons of useful information including beatiful, free wedding websites, planning guides and even discount cards for great wedding vendor deals.
And I just have to laugh - when we launched our website/program a year ago I told all sorts of journalists how easy my wedding planning was. I guess I had amnesia because there were SO many small and big problems that I just forgot about until delving back into wedding vendor experiences, family things (which I can't really write about for interpersonal boundary reasons) and all the things my husband and I had to navigate without any guidance in the wedding world.
-Elizabeth
posted by Elizabeth Doherty Thomas at
9:08 AM
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