Premarital counseling
Premarital counseling programmes are intended to help couples to learn about themselves and to provide them with specific information through couple formats. It is a personalized training, which aims at the couple’s relationship building insights and communication skills. The goal of premarital counseling is to enhance the premarital relationship so that it might develop into a more satisfactory and stable marital companionship. A premarital counselling programme offers the couple an occasion to re evaluate and confirm that the partner is the person that he or she wants to marry.
The people who wish to marry enter into a contract before marriage. The time between their entering into a contract and marriage is called the period of engagement or ourtship.
The engaged need to prepare for their marriage and so they may come for help.
Research shows that couples who engage in marriage preparation find the experience highly valuable. Many couples report that they get more than they expect. Couples stated that focusing on communication, commitment, conflict resolution and children was most helpful.
Couples who engage in premarital preparation “feel a higher sense of partnership and report a higher level of adjustment to married life than couples that did not receive marriage education”.
Marriage education can help set expectations for what is normal in relationships. It allows couples the opportunity to discuss important issues related to their future marriage and teaches them skills that actually aid in divorce prevention and serve to help create healthy, satisfying marriages.
The aims of Premarital Counseling
- Enhancing of the communication skills of the couple
- Developing friendship and commitment to the relationship
- Developing couple intimacy
- Developing problem solving skills
- Focus on developing positive communication
Goals of Premarital Counseling
- Build an in depth relationship with the couple
- Providing correction – correction of faulty information concerning various areas of family life.
- Providing congruent information
- Help couple to become realistic about future.
- Create an atmosphere that relieve fears and anxieties
- Opportunity for spiritual growth
- Help in making decision
Elements of Compatibility
Compatibility means how well the intrinsic characteristics of two people fit. Compatibilitybetween individuals can also determine how easily a relationship can be established. It is a matter of becoming and developing as well as being.
- Adaptability and flexibility
- Empathy
- Ability to work through problems
- Ability to give and receive
- love Emotional stability
- Similar family backgrounds
- Similarities between the couple
- Communication
Factors that lead to Incompatibility and Conflict
The following are the factors that lead to incompatibility and conflict:
- Reduced family functions
- Less kinship orientation
- Decline in economic cooperation between couples
- Overemphasis on the rights of the individual
- Decline in the legal opposition to divorce
- Growing consumerist tendencies and commercialization of social relationships
- Loss of sense of values in society
- Increased promiscuity
Results of Premarital Counseling
- Premarital counseling will give an adequate understanding for the couples regarding various factors involved in marriage.
- Premarital counseling describe as fulfilling and continuing process from premarital, couple, marital and family counseling.
- Premarital counseling is considered as a preventive aspect and helps to reduce
the number of problems that are about to happen in marriages.