What is Premarital Coaching?
What Premarital Coaching Is, How it Can Benefit Your Marriage, and When You Should Join a Premarital Coaching Program
Photo by sergey mikheev on Unsplash
Premarital coaching is designed for couples recently engaged to be married or who are in a serious relationship and contemplating marriage. Premarital coaching is different from premarital counseling as you will be working with a coach instead of a counselor or therapist. The purpose of coaching is to help the couple learn and develop healthy skills and tools to work through current problems toward future goals. Coaching takes the approach of “where are we going?” and explores current blocks, challenges, and struggles the couple is facing. To better under what coaching is and how it is different from therapy, check out this blog post about relationship coaching.
Premarital coaching is slightly different from relationship coaching as the coach will typically put the couple through a premarital program that has been created prior to the couple’s relationship with the coach. The premarital coaching program will most likely be 4-8 weeks long and will require the couple to meet with the coach weekly or bi-weekly to coach around specific topics designed to help the couple prepare for a healthy, loving, fulfilling marriage. Relationship coaching works specifically around the couple’s current needs and meets the couple where they are - often creating the sessions and/or a coaching program around each couple’s specific needs and desires.
Premarital coaching helps couples better understand each other’s families of origin, and how their upbringings affect the patterns, habits, behaviors, values, expectations, and understandings each individual brings into the relationship. Each premarital coaching program is different but most will typically explore and discuss common responsibilities within the marriage, spoken and unspoken expectations, gender roles and household responsibilities, faith and religion, child-raising, finances, sex and sexuality, extended family relationships, conflict management, communication styles, and future goals including careers aspirations and plans for retirement.
Premarital coaching is usually offered in-person or over the phone and via Zoom or some other form of video chat. The internet has opened up all kinds of possibilities and opportunities for couples to choose from when considering purchasing a premarital coaching program or working with a premarital coach. Premarital coaching is similar to relationship coaching in that it focuses on helping people raise their awareness levels, increase their sense of personal accountability, and creates clarity around what each individual wants and is searching for. These increased levels of awareness and accountability help to improve the quality of the relationship.
Both relationship coaching and premarital coaching help the couple to create clarity and develop a better understanding of their current experiences, discover the goals they want to work towards, and provide the skills and tools needed to reach those goals. Having a better understanding of the relationship helps the couple grow and strengthen their relationship together.
There are many benefits of premarital coaching: creating a happier, healthier, stronger relationship with your future spouse, learning new communication and conflict management tools, establishing a solid foundation for the relationship, and learning how to have potentially difficult conversations in healthy ways in a safe environment. Premarital coaching also provides an opportunity to address issues while learning effective tools to use in the future to better help the couple combat resentment, frustration, and conflict avoidance.
Premarital coaching helps the couple develop intimacy with each other, creates a deeper connection between each other, helps the couple learn and practice conflict management and communication skills, how to address spoken and unspoken expectations, how to work out the couple’s solvable (versus perpetual) problems, learn and share love languages, and how to discuss the couple’s finances while creating a budget that works for the relationship. There are many more benefits to premarital coaching but you’ll need to hire a coach to find out for yourself!
The best time to hire a premarital coach is four to six months before your wedding date. Depending on who you hire or which premarital coaching program you purchase, it will take you approximately four to eight weeks to complete your premarital coaching. You can expect to be coached weekly or biweekly and be done with your premarital coaching at least a month before your wedding date.
When thinking about making the investment for premarital coaching, I’d like to invite you to think of other life changes you’ve made that you’ve studied and prepared for: college exams that you’ve spent hours, days, weeks, and sometimes months studying for, your drivers license that you went to driver’s ed for and sat through your classroom training and then did your own driving and observations for several hours (I think it varies by state but something like 20 hours of driving experience with your instructor is required as part of driver’s ed), big work projects that you spent weeks and months researching, preparing, and presenting to others for, and continuing education that you have to do every so often to keep your licenses and certificates up-to-date. You’ve spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours, and thousands and tens of thousands of dollars preparing for all of these other areas of your life. Areas that you will spend less time in than your marriage. If you’ve spent so much time and money preparing for these other parts of your life, what’s stopping you from making similar financial and timely investments in your marriage? What makes your marriage less important than your job? What’s stopping you from investing in your marriage and creating a solid foundation for it now?
If you’d like to further discuss premarital coaching, please schedule a Discovery Call with me! I’d be happy to discuss how my premarital coaching program can help you before you tie the knot!
—————
Thumbnail Photo by sergey mikheev on Unsplash
