I'm a big believer in therapy. It's helped me a lot over my life, sometimes dealing with big issues, but most of the time just helping me process what's going on in my life — providing a sounding board and an objective ear while I talk through my issues. When my fiancée and I got engaged one of the first things we agreed on was that we wanted to go to pre-marital therapy. We're now 115 days out from the wedding, and I finally made our first counseling appointment for next week!
Somehow, this step makes the engagement feel more real than almost anything else in the planning process.
We're having about a 14-month engagement (with less than four months to go!) and making the most of this time is vitally important to me. The engagement isn't just giving us time to plan a killer party (though we are doing that); it's about taking the time to be intentional in transitioning our relationship into a marriage.
We've been working on that all year on our own, of course. We've already had all the big talks (finances, kids, family issues, career goals, etc.). We've had conversations about why marriage is important to us and what we want/need from each other.
Truth be told, I don't even know for sure what we're going to talk to our therapist about. Other than bickering about dishes and laundry, we don't fight. Of course there's the occasional disagreement or miscommunication, but we're pretty good at talking things through. Over all, we're cool, we're in love, we don't have any serious relationship issues!
But you see, that's exactly why I think pre-marital counseling is so important. Just because we don't have serious problems doesn't mean we don't have anything to work on. I want to take this moment in our lives — when we are unequivocally in love, when things between us are happy shiny rainbows and we are preparing to make marriage vows — and I want to grasp this moment for all it is worth. I want to take hold of the joy that we find in each other, right now, when we're both at our best and say “Hey, let's work on this, let's make our relationship better.”
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Because there's always improvements to be made. There's always ways we can learn to communicate better, ways we can be more intentional about expressing our love, more accepting and forgiving of each other's short-comings. And it's worth the effort!
By going to pre-marital counseling we are committing to put in the effort to make our relationship the best that it can be. It is an explicit acknowledgement that relationships take work. That we can never take each other for granted or stop putting in the effort to work on our marriage. We are committing to putting in that effort starting now. We are working on our relationship while things are good so that they stay good, and so that if/when we hit bumps in the road we will have a solid foundation for how to work on making thing better again.
I don't expect counseling to be fun or easy (in fact, in my experience, if it's working right it should be friggin' hard!) But I'm really looking forward to our first appointment. To me, this is what being engaged is all about, and I can't wait to take this step with my future wife.
Who else has prioritized pre-marital counseling? Have you already started? What have you learned already? Come, lay down on the offbeat couch, let's talk…
