I believe it's extremely important the couple know up front that counseling is beneficial even though they hate homework and feel ready for marriage already. I want them to know they might disagree with what I say and that they won't always leave happy campers. This is especially true for non-Christian couples. So this is how I open up our first session together.
What were your expectations for premarital counseling?
The purpose of these sessions is to see if you are ready for marriage. It is to test your relationship with each other, with parents and with God. There will be times you will walk away in frustration or anger. That’s okay.
Marriage is for the rest of your life. It’s important that you understand just how long that is and how big a commitment you are making to this person. Contrary to popular belief, not everyone who gets engaged gets married. Your honesty and perseverance through these sessions and the homework assigned will go a long way in this journey for marital preparation.
“To me it seems that we are living in an important and uncertain age, and the institution of marriage is most assuredly in an uncertain state. If 50-75 percent of Ford or General Motors cars completely fell apart within the early part of their lifetimes as automobiles, drastic steps would be taken. We have no such well organized way of dealing with our social institutions, so people are groping, more or less blindly, to find alternatives to marriage (which is certainly less than 50 percent successful). Living together without marriage, living in communes, extensive child care centers, serial monogamy (with one divorce after another), the women’s liberation movement to establish the woman as a person in her own right, new divorce laws which do away with the concept of guilt—these are all groping toward some new form of man-woman relationship for the future. It would take a bolder man than I to predict what will emerge.”
—Carl Rogers, counselor, 1972.
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