Premarital counselling

Whether you call it premarital counselling, pre-marriage counselling, counselling before marriage or premarital therapy, the idea is the same: the strongest marriages aren't the ones that never disagree, they're the ones that learned how to disagree before the stakes got high, which is the same principle behind couples counselling at any stage. Couples counselling before marriage is preparation, not repair, and research consistently links it with higher marital satisfaction and lower divorce rates.

What we cover before the wedding

What premarital counselling sessions look like

Sessions are guided, warm and practical. Each one takes a key area, surfaces what you each quietly assume, and turns differences into workable agreements. You'll also build shared skills, communication, repair after arguments, decision-making, that outlast the counselling itself. Most couples complete four to eight sessions in the three to six months before the wedding, over secure video from wherever you each are.

Weddings take a year of planning. Marriages deserve at least a few honest conversations.

Pre-engagement counselling

Not engaged yet, and wondering whether you should be? Pre-engagement counselling brings the same guided conversations forward, for couples deciding whether marriage is the right next step. There's real courage in checking compatibility before the proposal, and clarity either way is a gift to you both.

A note on "prenuptial counselling"

Some couples search for prenuptial counselling meaning exactly this kind of preparation, and that's what I offer. If you mean a prenuptial agreement, that's a legal document from a lawyer, not a counsellor, though the money conversations we have in sessions tend to make any legal discussions considerably calmer.

The conversations couples skip

Most engaged couples have discussed the wedding in enormous detail and the marriage barely at all. These are the subjects that reliably cause trouble later and are rarely raised beforehand.

Money, specifically. Not whether you are good with it, but joint or separate accounts, what each of you earns and owes, what counts as a large purchase, whether either family will be supported financially, and what happens if one of you stops earning.

Children as a concrete plan. Whether, when, how many, and what happens if it does not happen easily. Also who adjusts their career, which is the question that produces the most resentment in the first five years because it is almost never discussed in advance.

Extended family. How much contact, how much involvement in decisions, and what you will do when one family's expectations conflict with what the two of you have agreed. This carries particular weight where the families are closely involved by default, which is why I keep a separate page on working with Indian and South Asian couples.

Faith, tradition and how children would be raised. Frequently agreed in principle before the wedding and disputed in practice afterwards.

What each of you thinks a good marriage looks like day to day. Most people have never articulated this, and most assume their version is the obvious one.

What the research says predicts trouble

Long-running observational work on couples found that difficulty is predicted less by what a couple disagrees about than by how they behave while disagreeing. Four patterns carry most of the weight: criticism of the person rather than the behaviour, contempt delivered through sarcasm or mockery, defensiveness including counter-attack, and stonewalling where one partner shuts down entirely.

Any of these can be present in a relationship that is otherwise going well, and they are behaviours rather than character flaws, which means they are learnable in the other direction. Recognising which of the four you each default to under pressure is one of the more useful things to take out of premarital work, and it is what Gottman Method sessions are built around.

The related finding, which is more encouraging, is that a majority of disagreements in long marriages are never resolved at all. Couples who do well are not the ones who solve everything; they are the ones who can stay warm while permanently disagreeing about something.

If problems surface during the sessions

Sometimes they do, and it is worth knowing in advance that this is a good outcome rather than a disaster.

Occasionally the work reveals something substantial: a fundamental disagreement about children, a pattern of control, a level of family interference neither of you had named. Finding that out before the wedding is precisely what the process is for, and the couples who address it then are in a considerably better position than those who discover it in year three, when it arrives through couples counselling instead.

Nothing in these sessions is a judgement on whether you should marry. That is not my call and I will not make it. What I will do is make sure you are both deciding with the same information.

Premarital and marital counselling, one continuous support

The work doesn't have to end at the altar. I offer both premarital and marital counselling, so the same trusted space can continue into the marriage, whether that's a tune-up in the first year, structured CBT marriage counselling, or broader emotionally focused couples work whenever life asks more of you. And if either of you has been married before, my premarital counselling for second marriages and blended families is built precisely for that.