Premarital counseling

I loved premarital counseling. We learned about each other’s love languages, personalities, and how the two relate.

We are actually doing ours with our Priest. I cannot wait. I heard that premarital counseling is a MUST and helps out sooooo much. So I am so excited. Please let us know your experience and how and if it helped you

We did ours with a secular therapist and it was really good! The best thing we learned was that it is super helpful to have someone listen to both of us and help us meet in the middle on issues we repeatedly struggle with. For us, we didn't really have any major issues to work through at the time but I think it opened us up to marital counseling if the need arises in the future. If nothing else, I think this is a great benefit of doing it!

We're doing it through our pastor and it's been great so far! We don't really have any major issues, but it's still helpful to explore how to handle conflict and communicate better with each other. Plus it saves us some money on the marriage license Make the most of it, be honest and do the homework!

For premarital counseling, we met with our Rabbi, who is my cousin-in-law and is officiating our wedding. It was good because we went over some wedding details with him that we wouldn't have known to do ourselves. Before the appointment, we had gone to a Judaica shop to pick out our ketubah (Jewish marriage contract). They gave us a form for our Rabbi. He helped us fill it out. He gave us homework, such as to find out our parents Hebrew names for the contract. If they didn't know how to spell them in Hebrew, he figured out the spelling for us.

He also went over how the ceremony would run and offered us tips on it. A piece of advice he gave us is to have white wine at the ceremony to avoid staining my dress! I wouldn't have thought of that had he not said something, because there is a part of the ceremony where we drink wine together.

It was very helpful to hammer out the details of our wedding with our officiant. He's been helping us to stay on top of things regarding the ceremony. With so much going on, that has been very helpful. I babysat his kids the other day (FH came at the end) and when he came home, he asked if we had heard back from the Judaica shop about our ketubah. Now I have to email them to find out if it has arrived.

My pastor offered this to us but we declined. However I see the appeal to it. It's like an unbiased third party helping you guys see any issues or helping with underlying issues beforehand

I suggested the idea of pre-marital counseling to my FH a few months ago. I told him it wasn’t coming from a place of concern. Rather, I wanted to give us the best foundation possible. My view was that even if we don’t get much out of it (and I didn’t feel that would be the case), it certainly wouldn’t hurt anything to go.

We had had our first session a couple weeks ago and I felt exactly the same as you. I had been really looking forward to it leading up to the appointment but then a few hours before I got really nervous. Fortunately we both really ended up liking the counselor we chose. She’s warm and friendly and so easy to talk to. It’s expensive, but I’m so glad we decided to do it! Just go in with a positive attitude and remember that you’re making a great decision for a healthy marriage.

Thanks great advice and feedback I needed to heard tht! I will keep an open mind 😰☺️☺️

I have been on the fence for doing this at all. Seems like everyone thinks its worth it.

I'd really like to but unfortunately it's not covered by our insurance and we're atheist so there's no free version for us, making it out of budget currently. We hope to do it later when money isn't as tight.
Overall we do a lot of researching online on topics typically covered and talk amoung ourselves.
Older couple's in our lives said it was good for the first year and leading up to it but didn't feel like it was important so we're not worried.