Premarital Counseling or Couple's Retreat?

We were thinking about premarital counseling as well. Just lots of people recommended it. I️t never crossed my mind to do a couples retreat. I️ think we’ll look into that after we’ve been married.

We did couples' counseling, and I recommend that over every thing.

The worry I have over "retreats" is - who is running them? Are they licensed mental health professionals? If they aren't, I would be very concerned with their value and legitimacy.

Your best bet is to find the local university or community center and see if they have student counselors who may have a sliding fee.

Yes!!! We are going to do couples counseling

We kind of did both. Our retreat was one day a "mini marathon retreat", which was 8 hours and the counselor's and pastor did all the talking. We had a few 10 -15 minute sessions where we would answer questions on the page. Then we were encouraged to go over the book periodically, once the retreat was over. We had a lot of conversation after that mini retreat and maybe a month or so afterwards, but then we went back to how everything was lol. For premarital counseling, we had 7 one hour sessions where we did all of the talking and we learned more about each other. We still use what we learned from premarital counseling than the mini retreat. I highly recommend the counseling over the retreat because it's more personal. Also doing the retreat we were at a table with 3 other couples, so once they answered their questions, they kind of just started side conversations with the rest of us, so we never got to dig deep into our answers. Premarital counseling on the other hand was so emotional and I became a better communicator with my FH. We have been together a little over 4 years.

We are getting married in church, where both of these things are required. We were not looking forward to couples counseling but it has actually been REALLY fun!!! We discuss things that I wouldn't even think of as a topic, and are totally free to communicate as we normally would. It makes me feel like I can be so so honest. There are people who say they feel "safe" with their SO and I wasn't sure what they meant before but now I do!


We're doing the couples retreat in a few weeks and hopefully it's also surprisingly rewarding 😇
My best friend took our advice and did counseling (outside of church) and I feel it led her and her husband to write the most beautiful vows from their deeper understanding of themselves and each other!