The Conversations You Have Not Had Yet

Premarital counseling has an image problem. It sounds like a formality — something an officiant requires, three sessions, a certificate, a box ticked on the way to the reception.

That is not what this is, and if that is all you need, you do not need me.

What premarital counseling is actually for is the set of conversations you have not had. Not because you are avoiding them. Because you are in love and busy and organising a party for a hundred people, and because the questions underneath are hard to ask without sounding like you are having doubts.

You are not having doubts. You are getting married. Those are the ideal conditions for asking.

What comes up

Money, first and most reliably. Not the balance — the beliefs. One of you grew up in a house where money was discussed openly and one of you grew up in a house where it was not discussed at all, and you have never compared notes on which of those you are about to reproduce.

Family. Whose holidays, whose expectations, and what happens the first time your mother is wrong about something and your partner is right.

Children — whether, when, how many, and who is actually going to absorb the cost of them in hours and career.

Sex, which almost nobody raises unprompted and which is a great deal easier to talk about now than in year six.

Faith, if it is part of your life, including the version where it is part of one of your lives more than the other.

And how each of you behaves when frightened, which is the one that actually predicts things. Everybody is charming when it is going well.

PREPARE/ENRICH, and where it fits

I use PREPARE/ENRICH, a structured assessment that surfaces the things you did not know to bring up.

Where it lands in the work depends on the couple. For some it belongs early and gives us a map on the first day. For others it is more useful once we have met and I have some sense of what is actually live between you. I do not run it to a fixed schedule, because couples do not arrive in a fixed condition.

What it reliably does is find the assumption neither of you knew you were making. Couples turn up with a list of what they think their differences are, and the assessment routinely produces something that was not on it. Not a catastrophe, usually. Just something each of you had quietly taken for granted that the other one does not share.

Then we work through what it found with Emotionally Focused Therapy underneath — which means we are not cataloguing differences, we are watching what happens between the two of you when one comes up.

The couples who think they do not need this

Most of you. You get along, you communicate well, everyone says so.

That is not a reason to skip it; it is the reason it works. Premarital counseling is not damage repair. It is the only point in a relationship where you get to have these conversations without a grievance attached to them. In ten years, “how do you want to handle your mother” is a conversation with history in it. Right now it is just a question.

I am also not going to tell you the wedding industry’s version, which is that this guarantees anything. It does not. What it does is make sure the things you find out about each other, you find out on purpose, in a room with somebody whose job it is to slow the conversation down.

The practical part

Emotionally Focused Therapy and PREPARE/ENRICH, couples only. In person at my office in Webb City, MO, ten minutes from downtown Joplin. Sessions run 100 to 110 minutes — the mini-intensive, the only format I offer — at $180, private pay.

More about how I work with premarital counseling in Joplin, MO.

If faith is central to how you are approaching marriage, I also do Christian premarital counseling.

I answer my own phone and I call back within four hours.

Call or text 417-768-9089 · shira@radicalrelationshiptransformation.com