Pre-Marital Counseling

75% of divorcees report lack of commitment as the main reason for their marriage dissolving. 
But couples that pursue premarital counseling have a 30% higher success rate.

          So, you’d like to get married?  You’ve heard that premarital counseling during your engagement is a good idea. And it is: couples that pursue premarital counseling have a 30% higher success rate. But not all pre-marriage counseling is created equally.  There are a lot of misconceptions surrounding it, and many churches’ classes simply don’t offer couples enough. How can a couple cut through the confusion and make sure you cover the premarital counseling topics that matter most? By focusing on these 9 essential areas, you’ll have a much better picture of yourself, your potential spouse and where you need to focus.

#1 Your spiritual foundation: This is Premarital Counseling 101: are you both followers of Jesus?  In other words, do you not only believe the core elements of the Christian faith (1 Cor 15.1-5), but are you both sincerely trying to follow Jesus in your daily lives? 
#2 Your families of origin: My wife and I have spent sessions with couples about the families they grew up in, looking for strengths but also un-examined assumptions that could affect their marriages.
#3 The meaning of marriage: Next to actually being Christians, nothing is more important than what God says about the purpose of marriage.  Our vision for marriage will shape who we choose to marry, and, what we’re aiming for.  It’s easy to settle for someone who’s merely ‘compatible’.
#4 Your spiritual intimacy: Knowing Jesus and what marriage is all about are critical starting points, but freely sharing your life in Christ together is incredibly hard.  In fact, this is still the hardest area for my wife and I, as well as most of our married friends.
#5 Your communication: One survey of mental health professionals found that communication problems are the top factor (65%) leading to divorce.  Seventy percent of experts surveyed said that men most often mentioned nagging from their wives as their chief complaint, while women most commonly mentioned a failure of husbands to validate their feelings and opinions (83% of experts).
#6 Your conflict: Contrary to the commercials on TV where everyone is laughing like hyenas on rooftop beer gardens, real marriage is hard work and involves conflict. Lots of it, actually.
#7 Your view of money: Scripture gives real freedom, but it’s important for couples to have basic agreement in this area.  Since we spend money constantly, it’s going to come up all the time.
#8 Your future: Both of you have a (often unarticulated) vision for how your life together will unfold.  There’s no way you can know everything that’s coming in your future, but it’s important to have alignment around big decisions like how much you’ll both work, how many children you’d like to have, and where you’d like to live.
#9 Your physical intimacy and sexual history: This includes things like previous relationships, and how physically and emotionally involved they were. And, whether there are – or recently have been – significant sexual struggles like pornography, masturbation and setting appropriate physical boundaries.

Here are some sample questions we like to ask couples to think about and meditate on.

1: How do you define time well spent?
2: What are the signs when people are in love?
3: What does this marriage cost you?
4: What do you have to give up?
5: How do you feel about giving that up?
6: How do you define time well spent?
7: What feels like a waste of time to you? 
8: Do your partner's needs always come first? (This might be a good or bad thing)
9: What will sustain you when your partner screws up?
10: Does your theology matter in dealing with conflict?
11: Do you feel your partner is committed to you? How?
12: Do you know your partner is committed to you?
13: How important is it to know they are committed to you?
14: How does this line up with feeling God is committed to you?

Christ Will Never Leave His Wife

          Staying married, therefore, is not about staying in love. It is about keeping covenant. “Till death do us part,” or, “As long as we both shall live” is sacred covenant promise — the same kind Jesus made with his bride when he died for her. Therefore, what makes divorce and remarriage so horrific in God’s eyes is not merely that it involves covenant breaking to the spouse, but that it involves misrepresenting Christ and his covenant. Christ will never leave his wife. Ever. There may be times of painful distance and tragic backsliding on our part. But Christ keeps his covenant forever. Marriage is a display of that! That is the most ultimate thing we can say about it.

Finding Common Interests And Hobbies

         Developing common interests and hobbies can decrease conflict in marriage and strengthen the idea that you and your spouse are a team.
“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.'” — C.S. Lewis
         It’s a common theme for many married couples—he likes to do “guy stuff” like playing sports, collecting baseball cards, or going hunting. She likes “girly stuff” like scrapbooking, sewing, or blogging about bargains. When it comes to movies, he’s a Saving Private Ryan fan while she loves any film with the phrase “based on the novel by Jane Austen” in the credits. Where dining is concerned, he could eat meat and potatoes at every meal, while she enjoys sampling cuisine from all over the world. And on it goes. Certainly, some of these activities speak to the innate differences between males and females. There’s nothing wrong with husbands and wives having different likes and dislikes based on their unique personalities, talents, and experiences. It would be a serious mistake, however, for couples to assume that every moment of free time should be relegated to “his interests” and “her interests,” and never the twain shall meet.
         When husbands and wives get too caught up in “doing their own thing,” they are missing out on critical opportunities to connect with one another. Developing common interests and hobbies can decrease conflict in marriage and strengthen the idea that you and your spouse are a team. Having common hobbies can help couples deepen their sense of intimacy, connection, and especially friendship.
         When was the last time you thought about your spouse as your friend—someone you enjoy spending time with and with whom you can engage in mutually satisfying pursuits? If husbands and wives have a firm grasp of their roles as partners, lovers, or parents, but fail to understand what it means to be friends, they are missing out on a key component of marriage. The Bible places the concept of friendship front-and-center in the depiction of romantic love found in the words of Solomon: “This is my lover, this my friend”

Cycles of Intimacy vs. Cycles of Isolation

         Now, here’s the tricky part: When men feel disconnected, they often try to get physical intimacy via the route of recreational intimacy (let’s do something fun together and maybe we will end up in bed together), whereas women, when they feel disconnected, often try to get emotional intimacy via the route of intellectual intimacy (let’s talk about something and maybe we will end up sharing our feelings). Both spouses feel the disconnection but are trying to solve the problem in opposite ways. Further complicating the matter, men often do not feel like talking or sharing their emotions if they do not feel physically intimate. And women often do not want physical intimacy if they do not feel emotionally intimate. 
                            “Shepherding your spouse in these areas is the key to feeling this sort of genuine, robust connection".
          Here couples can easily find themselves in cycles of isolation, more and more demanding that their own intimacy needs be met before they are willing to meet their spouse’s. This is where the Christian commitment to love one another, even when it hurts (John 13:34–35; Galatians 5:13; 6:2; Ephesians 4:2, 32; 1 Peter 4:8–10), can help the couple move from cycles of isolation to cycles of intimacy as they lovingly put each other’s needs before their own. Shepherding our spouse in these areas, even when we ourselves feel out of touch, is the key to feeling this sort of genuine, robust connection. This type of connection does more than give us warm and fuzzy feelings for a moment. It helps ground us in the intimate love of the one in whom our connection is eternal and unfailing: God himself.