Oh, the things that distract us from preparing for marriage. You know, like that itty bitty detail of planning a wedding. Honestly, choosing the gorgeous invitations, beautiful flowers, and the perfect white dress is massively time consuming! It's absolutely mind-blowing how the list goes on and on and on and on...creating a wedding website, registering, choosing bridesmaid dresses, selecting a menu...I know, I know, I'm preaching to the choir. However, with nasty statistics on divorce growing ever more prevalent (the dreaded 50%), AND the divorce risk being highest within the first two years of marriage, numbers seem to suggest we are insufficiently prepared for "until death do us part".
You have probably become a master at preparing for your wedding. But how do you prepare for marriage? Sure, most of us are cohabitating so we feel like we've given married life a test-run, but is that enough? For some maybe, for some maybe not.
How many of us enter marriage thinking we'll be contributing to the divorce statistics? We don't. Similarly, I've bought 6 giant golf umbrellas in the event it rains on my wedding day. It's probably worthwhile to have a plan for "rainy" married days too.
I'm a big advocate of pre-marital therapy. A good pre-marital counseling program will acquaint couples with six common areas of conflict that often lead to divorce. In therapy, we call these “toxic subjects” because they can become toxic for couples to discuss. These issues often include:
- Money & Finances
- Sex
- In-laws
- Child-Rearing
- (Gender) Roles & Expectations
- Religion
Statistically, those couples weather the storms of the first year of marriage better than couples who did not participate in pre-marital counseling. In fact, research has shown that pre-marital counseling helps to decrease the incidence of divorce by as much as 30 percent. Have you considered pre-marital counseling? Which of the big 6 are your "hot buttons"?
