Getting married is considered by many as taking a huge next step in a romantic relationship. Beyond the formal and legal requirements, getting married is a signal of making a deeper, lifelong commitment to another person.

Not only are you pledging your lives to one another whether the waters ahead are calm or choppy, but you’re doing so in a public way that invites accountability from the various communities you’re part of.

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Harnessing the benefits of premarital counseling

In one sense, getting married is easy – you must be of age, persuade someone to marry you, and make sure you satisfy any other legal requirements before it’s official. However, staying married and doing so happily is another thing altogether, as that requires the growth and exercise of certain relational skills, such as conflict management.

One of the things that Christian premarital counseling in Flower Mound can do to help a couple that’s looking to tie the knot is to prepare them for what lies ahead and help them set a solid foundation for a lifelong commitment.

You can have premarital counseling that flows from a Christian understanding of relationships and marriage, but there are also effective ways of doing premarital counseling that don’t rely explicitly on a religious understanding of marriage and life.

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What is premarital counseling, and how does it work?

Premarital counseling, as the name suggests, is a type of counseling that is aimed at couples who are on the path to getting married. When you and your loved one have decided that you want to deepen your commitment to one another, probably the last thing you want occupying your mind is counseling.

Aren’t things going swimmingly, evidenced by the fact that you’ve decided to take your relationship further? And won’t premarital counseling only serve to complicate things when your energy will likely now be taken up with wedding planning and all the matters incidental to getting married? Far from being an inconvenience, as we will see later, premarital counseling is a vital building block for a healthy marriage.

You can do premarital counseling on an individual or group basis. In this case, “individual” means you and your partner will meet with your counselor together for your sessions. Each session is around an hour or so, and you meet regularly (weekly, for instance) for around 8-10 weeks.

This period will vary depending on the slate of questions covered and if further work is needed. You can also meet in a group setting with other couples on the journey to getting married. Thanks to the technology available to us, premarital counseling can take place in person as well as online.

The content of premarital counseling will vary slightly, but the main aim is to help couples dig deep, uncover, and revisit the ideas and impressions they may have formed about marriage before they tie the knot. We all come to marriage with past experiences of it, such as whether our parents were divorced, happily or unhappily married.

Those experiences and expectations shape us in ways we may not even be aware of, and the job of a premarital counselor is to help a couple explore different aspects of marriage so that they are prepared for their life together.

And so Christian premarital counseling in Flower Mound involves discussing important aspects of a marriage, including financial planning, role beliefs and expectations in the marriage, how to make decisions as a couple, family relationships, if children will be in your future (and how many of them you want, including how you wish to raise them), resolving conflict, intimacy issues, settings goals together, cultivating healthy communication, and setting healthy boundaries for your marriage.

Your counselor will guide a conversation between you two around these topics, helping you by providing you with tools for effective listening and problem-solving.

Benefits of premarital counseling in Flower Mound

Christian premarital counseling may seem like a romance buzzkill, but it can provide you with valuable insight into yourself, your loved one, and your relationship. Not only does it help you to know how best to love one another and deal with difficulties in the relationship, but premarital counseling sets the stage for you to ask and explore questions you might otherwise not have asked, or presumed you knew the answer to.

Some people only find out later that their spouse never wanted children, or they don’t want the same number of children – it can be heartbreaking and a huge challenge to find this out later in the relationship.

Whether it’s understanding each other’s love languages, unearthing a bit more of each other’s family history, or exposing expectations around various areas of your life, premarital counseling helps a couple get on the same page and develop tools that will help them in their relationship.

Premarital counseling is associated with lower divorce rates, with some research indicating that those who attend premarital counseling are better off than 80% of couples who decided against counseling. Because of the tools you develop and the insight you gain, premarital counseling is also associated with lower relationship conflict and a higher quality relationship. Some of the benefits of premarital counseling include:

  • Helping you understand one another and your expectations better
  • Assisting you to develop an understanding of your conflict styles and growing your conflict management skills
  • Helping you set goals and clarify boundaries
  • It helps a couple uncover potential problems before they escalate

Cultivating an appreciation of one another’s gifts and strengths

If you’re thinking of getting married, or you’ve already decided that you want to get married, you may be wondering whether premarital counseling is for you. Anyone can benefit from premarital counseling, but some groups can be particularly vulnerable to the pressures of married life, and so need a toolkit to help them navigate it.

Though divorce rates have been in decline, divorce is all too real, and you need to strengthen your relationship both before and after you get married. If you’re planning to get married, you should strongly consider premarital counseling.

Some of the characteristics that are connected to higher rates of divorce include:

  • Getting married young
  • Not having higher education such as a college degree
  • Having parents who divorced or who never married
  • Having a child together before marrying
  • Having a personality that’s highly reactive to stress and emotion
  • Having a prior marriage that ended
  • Having differences in your religion or race
  • Having sex with or cohabiting with someone other than your mate
  • Having an extremely low income or being in poverty
  • Cohabiting before being married or getting engaged
  • Having poor communication and conflict management skills

This in no way suggests that if you aren’t in these groups, you don’t need premarital counseling, nor does it imply that if you carry any of these risk factors your future marriage will result in divorce. These risk factors for divorce are in some cases dynamic and can change, while others are more static and can’t be altered. But even the factors that you can’t change aren’t necessarily the end of the story.

For example, if your parents got a divorce or perhaps, they never got married, that typically will weaken a person’s views of commitment in marriage; however, you can control your own beliefs about marriage and your level of commitment to your partner. What has happened in the past does not set your future in stone, and one way to overcome these risk factors is premarital counseling.

Building a godly marriage through Christian premarital counseling in Flower Mound

It’s not always obvious to people what the Christian purpose of marriage is. Nor is it evident what resources exist within the Christian faith to help people have healthy marriages. Biblical wisdom about relationships coupled with the training that a counselor receives to understand the complex dynamics of human relationships makes for a potent combination. You can make this available to you and your future spouse so that your marriage starts on the right footing and with a strong foundation.

Through Christian premarital counseling in Flower Mound, you can come to understand what God’s purpose for marriage is, develop a biblical understanding of how to relate to one another in marriage (such as the role of forgiveness and accountability within a marriage), and receive healing for past hurts that need to be overcome.

Your counselor will create a safe space for you to explore your relationship and begin building a Christ-honoring marriage. If you want to begin your journey toward a strong, joyful, and godly marriage, do not hesitate to contact us at Flower Mound Christian Counseling to find a premarital counselor who will partner with you on your journey.

Get connected with a Christian Counselor
Please contact our reception team at
(469) 333-6163

Schedule an Appointment