Pre-Martial Counselling

Your Wedding Band Doesn’t Come with Superpowers

“Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread,

remade all the time, made new” (Ursula K. Le Guin)

What is pre-martial counselling?

Fifty per cent of divorces occur within the first seven years of marriage and some research indicates that couples who receive premarital counselling have a thirty per cent lower divorce rate than couples that do not receive pre-martial counselling. Gaining insight into your relationship health from the start of your marriage commitment is a great idea to keep your love growing strong. Your wedding band doesn’t come with superpowers that make your relationship deeper, stronger, or better, rather, those desirable features are the product of two people consciously working in unison to design and sustain their connection. Most couples experience the highs of falling in love and feeling deeply connected in the early stages of their relationship and, as time goes on, it’s natural for a relationship to be challenged by two individuals and a couple that evolve in parallel. The very nature of life brings us good and bad times, twists and turns, ebbs and flows in love and intimacy, and unexpected changes in relationship connections; some couples can understand and navigate their struggles and bounce back relatively easy whereas others get stuck in misunderstandings and the safety and security of their bond together becomes compromised. Just because there is a wedding on the horizon, this doesn’t make a couple immune from disconnection. If you are a couple that intend to share a surname or even the change in pronouns from I to we and to the concept of husband and wife or spouse can influence various changes; an increase in subjective responsibilities, identity changes, and various social and economic pressures.

Pre martial counselling is about spending quality time together in a therapeutic space that is dedicated to exploring a couple’s relationship health and understanding more about the two individuals that are creating their dynamic together. Some of the topics that we cover in pre-martial counselling are communication, listening, emotion recognition, conflict management, understanding couple interactions, sex and intimacy, friendship, love, trust, and commitment. What folks typically need from romantic relationships is acceptance, closeness, understanding, and to feel loved, appreciated, and important. Pre-marital counselling can also provide the opportunity to explore how you are feeling about being in your relationship and, if there is a need to, we can have conversations about how to recreate and sustain those safe and secure places within the relationship again. Understanding the scientific habits behind long lasting love, desire, and connection could be part of the foundation of your vows. The goal of pre-martial counselling is to help you and your partner gain a deeper understanding of each other and to support your relationship to grow in healthy and mutual directions that makes the glue for an amazing, stable, and unique relationship.

If you would like to explore pre-martial counselling with our Gottman Certified Relationship Therapist, Natalie Slect, please call our office and one of our friendly team members will find you and your partner a 90 minute consultation as soon as possible.