130. Why Traditional Premarital Counseling Doesn't Work & What You Actually Need Before You Say ‘I Do’
Meet the Host
Five years ago, after achieving my degrees and teaching as a professor, I was feeling proud that I had checked everything off my life list. But, I wasn’t satisfied in my marriage.
Today, I’m a relationship coach on a mission to resurrect the side of you that got lost in your marriage. Millions of people around the world soak up my content for advice on how to have a more satisfying relationship.
Three months of premarital counseling just isn't enough for the lifetime of your marriage.
And in this episode, I'm going to take you through what most premarital counseling entails, why it doesn't work, and what you actually need for a healthy marriage.
I share 5 tools and strategies you need to have set up before you get married, that go beyond traditional premarital counseling.
I want you to be fully prepared and equipped for a successful marriage.
Click the link to listen, and let me know what you think - I’d love to hear from you!
If this episode hits home and you’re ready to work with me, book a call so we can chat. On the call, you’ll share what’s going on, what you’ve tried, and I’ll share how I can help. Can’t wait to connect!
P.S. This podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp®. Get professional support at a fraction of the cost of in-person therapy. Sign up today and get 10% off your first month - click the link to get started!
BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/karinafdaves
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/karinafdaves/
Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@karinafdaves
Personal Website: https://www.karinafdaves.com
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqlt...
Amazon Storefront: https://www.amazon.com/shop/karinafdaves
Episode Transcript:
Karina: Amigos, welcome back to the Relationship Reset with me, your host, Karina F. Daves marriage expert, speaker and podcast host of this dope podcast. Today we're doing an episode called why traditional pre-marital counseling doesn't work and what you actually need before you say I do. The reason why I'm doing this episode is because I've coached plenty of clients that are engaged, just got married, or are going through premarital counseling and just feel like something is off. What I want to remind you of is that three months of premarital counseling isn't going to be enough for a lifetime of your marriage that you're committing to saying I do to. And in this episode, I'm going to take you through what most premarital counseling entails, why it doesn't work and what you actually need.
And recently I actually coached a good friend of mine on how to coach her therapist on how to get the most and best experience out of her pre-marital counseling. All right, so here goes.
So traditional marital counseling is going to cover the top F's that I call, which are going to be your faith, right? What do you believe in? How are you spiritually aligned? Your family dynamics. Do you get along with your in-laws and whatnot? ⁓ Your finances, right? ⁓ Are we going to share accounts? What do we believe in as far as money and spending and saving? And then another F for me is our future, right? ⁓ and not just our future, but future careers. Do you plan to climb the corporate ladder? Do you want to be a stay at home dad one day? What is it that your future entails? Do you want to live abroad? ⁓ for example, one of the things in my husband's future was that he wanted to professionally drag race, which by the way, if you've been following me for a long time, he does. ⁓ and so in premarital counseling, y'all are going to go through those F's and the questioning around them. And so the problem is that you are going to leave counseling, knowing your shared values, checking off the boxes of how compatible you are. But the problem is going to be that you are most likely going to leave understanding the what, but you're not going to know the how.
And what I mean by that is you are going to feel very aligned. This is my person. This is who I'm deciding to marry. God definitely matched us. We are equally yoked, but you are not going to be equipped. You are not going to have the tools necessary and why that is. And I want to go through why most premarital counseling and where it falls short are these four areas.
Number one is that it pretty much stays in the feelings. And so it's an opportunity, which super valid for everybody to talk about how they feel, right? How did you grow up watching money being spent? How did you grow up watching love being displayed in your household? And when we think about, just say the money example of how did you grow up watching ⁓ money or how'd you grow up around money? You're not asking the question or you're not making the statement. Okay, based on that. And because of that, and because of the values you watched growing up, here's how you're going to set up a shared budget system now. That is the tool that you are going to now take into your marriage. so think about it this way. You're going to spend a significant amount of time talking about your beliefs, but very, very little time building up the habits on how to shape those beliefs when you once you get married.
Number two, most premarital counseling is very past oriented. And so a lot of couples, and I'll mainly say husbands, don't wanna go to premarital counseling because they're tired of bringing up the past. They don't wanna talk about things that we've already gone through that we've already decided we're gonna move on from. ⁓ They just feel like it's over, right? ⁓
A lot of times, premarital counseling or therapy will leave you in a position of, know, this is how you were raised, that your partner's coping mechanism is silence and yours is yelling. And then that's it. You don't necessarily learn conflict resolution tools. You don't necessarily learn. Okay, so their coping mechanism is silence. Okay, now what will we do if we start arguing and they give me the silent treatment. What would we do then? Can you give us the tools of how to break through the silent treatment? Because the reality is that overnight he or she is not gonna stop being or stop using the silent treatment. And so we're going to have to build a marriage in the beginning where I'm going to have to break through that. Can you give me the tools through that? You understand?
Number three, ⁓ most premarital counseling is going to miss the everyday stressor. So you're going to spend a significant amount of time talking about the huger belief systems, the huger aspects of marriage, which again, very, very important. But nobody talks about how do I handle when my spouse comes home from a really hard day and is shut down.
Nobody talks about how do we go through our intimacy dry spells when we're not having sex for two weeks, three weeks, four weeks. How do we talk about our in-laws and the pressure that we feel from each other? And for most couples that decide to have children, how do we talk about our parenting differences? Right? Those are the every day stressors.
And last, couples aren't really taught how to fight. In most premarital counseling, you're mainly taught not to fight, how to prevent from fighting. No, to talk about how, how you will handle being cursed out by your wife or by your husband. And you've only been married for a month and you don't want to call divorce in this household, but you feel pressured to.
Nobody talks about how do I approach my husband on how pissed off I feel that he forgot to ask me if I was hungry for the fifth time. Nobody talks about that. And then again, you don't practice the resolution and that's dangerous for your marriage. One of the things that we do ⁓ in my marriage coaching is we do role play. Why I do role play? Because I can give you a tool, but if you don't know how and when that tool is supposed to be utilized, you won't know how to build your house. So if I am sharing a new tool with a couple, I'll then say, all right, I'm gonna act like the husband. I want you as a wife to implement the tool. I'm gonna be difficult like your husband is. And I want you to try to use that tool on me and let's play it out, but you can pick the topic. What are we talking about here? we're talking about, he wants to go out, have drinks with his, with his boys. All right, let's do that. Then the husband will get to watch his wife try.
Partners very rarely get to watch each other implement, get to watch each other try to resolve. And that's why the common misconception is They don't care. She doesn't care. He doesn't care. They don't even try. When we work together in my marriage coaching, you will absolutely get the opportunity to try. You understand? Okay.
So let's very quickly, I'm talk to you about what couples actually need when you are thinking about premarital coaching and things of that nature and what you need to have set up before you get married. Okay? I want you to think about this as ⁓ one of many steps. This is just the first step of implementation. Okay. ⁓ So what I teach my couples are five things.
Number one, communication systems, right? As I mentioned before, their use the silent treatment, your use of yelling till the dogs come home. ⁓ So we're not just talking about just talking to talk. We're talking about… We're making sure that we're talking with honesty. We're making sure that we're building systems like, know what? We're going to have 15 minutes sinks. You know what? We're actually going to check in with each other weekly and actually not talk about the kids. ⁓ You know what? Here are communication tools when you get triggered. You know what? Here are our tools to communicate when you shut down. Those are your communication systems that you need to build before you get married.
Number two, you're gonna need your money playbook. Now, every single couple is different. ⁓ In my marriage, and I like to share that I got married at a very young age. We were 24 turning 25, and so we were broke. And it's very different for us to have decided to put our money together than I understand other couples that may have gotten together at an older age and have been more ⁓ established, to not believe that their money should be together. I get all of that. So for us, our money playbook is that our money was our money, no matter who was making it. And so you can talk about specifically what account systems do we use? Who's tracking the bills? Who's paying the bills? What happens when somebody overspends? What happens when somebody overdrafts, right?
The next one is very important. What are our family boundaries? How do we deal with the pressures of our family during the holidays. How do we deal with parenting once we have kids? How do we even deal with our cultural differences that we may have, right? ⁓ How do we still act as a unit when all of these things occur?
Number four, this is a big one, resentment prevention. Resentment is so easy to have in marriage when you let time pass by, when you let… too much time passed by. This is actually one of the most slept on topics and ⁓ you and your partner need to identify what are the early signs of resentment in our relationship, right? It may be that one of us is spacier than the other. It may be that one of us starts not to go out with one another, right? Like we don't wanna leave the house. ⁓ You have to figure out how to prevent resentment before you get married.
And the last one is crisis scenarios. How will we handle the unexpected? My sister was diagnosed with blood cancer a couple of years ago and I didn't sleep for two years. And before that we had a lot of crisis sees if that's a word. And so we knew how to handle crisis. And in that aspect, my husband knew that I just needed somebody to chicken on me. I needed somebody to let me know that I couldn't cure her cancer. And when she told me she had cancer, I asked that we switch places because I already had a life and I just felt like she was young and hadn't lived as much as she ⁓ needed to. And my husband knew that I felt that way. And through handling the crisis, we also had a one-year-old, which is crazy to me. ⁓
Anyways, that's another episode, but my husband knew all of these things and around that we were able to build ⁓ how do we handle crisis? And we had for a significant period of time, but ⁓ you guys have to make sure that you have systems in place to be able to handle a lot of that crisis. And I want you to understand that many people feel like marriages fail because you're incompatible. But most of the time it's less about the fact that you don't love each other and more so about the fact that you were not equipped. You understand? You'd never learned how to reset after an argument. You never learned how to apologize after you felt neglected, after you felt that you didn't feel connected with your partner. You never figured out how to repair after a rupture. Those are all examples of how you lacked being equipped. You understand that is why the question of do you still love me is irrelevant. Of course we love each other, but the reason why we don't like each other is because we're not handling this marriage right. We're not equipped. We don't have the tools and the strategies. Plenty of times we're seeing marriage from the aspect of these love stories that we watched on television.
But marriage is a thing that God entrusted in both of us to take care of. Marriage is much bigger than me and you. Marriage is just the beginning of the dynasty that God has given us the privilege, not just the privilege, but the free will to build. Marriage is the opportunity for us not to just learn about each other, but to learn about ourselves.
So will we invest in the right avenues, in the right leadership, in the right mentorship, in the right coaching, in the right therapy in order to make sure that it lasts? Will we do that? Or will we continue to see support for our marriage as annoying, support for our marriage as a waste of time, support for our marriage as expensive? Which decision will you make?
What side of the fence are you on? Marriage is more than four hours of people dancing and parting and congratulating you. Marriage is a long life time commitment to not just loving and choosing to love this other person, but to building an entire lineage of generations to come that will have in them the DNA of your love, the DNA of the intelligent moves that you made, the DNA in historical reference to go back on and say, man, Grandpa Terrence and Grandma Karina, when they were in their 20s and 30s, they did this and that led them here and that led that. And I can't wait to do what they did. And I can't wait to do what they did and even better.
Y'all, I just got to pray for us because I got to go pick up my kid. But I want you to know right now that. Premarital counseling is not just a checklist. It's an opportunity to create a system where y'all reconnect, where y'all reset, where y'all rebuild over and over again. And if you and your partner right now are engaged or thinking about getting married or you're already newly married and you feel like premarital counseling isn't going deep enough, I can help you. Go to link in my bio, inside my coaching program, I walk my couples through the real conversations and teach them the tools that traditional counseling leaves out. Okay. Click the link in my bio or ⁓ go to the episode notes and you can book a call with me. So let me pray for you.
Father God, I thank you so much for the gift that you have given us of marriage. Today on this episode, as I was recording, I was able to visibly get a glimpse of the purpose of marriage that you have for us. And it was interesting ⁓ the way that you created it. Right. I recently taught my kids about Adam and Eve again and about how sin entered the world. But then as biblically, you looked at the Bible, you realize how the generations through the lineage of Adam and Eve, came through, break so many barriers, had so many lessons along the way. And so I just pray today to couples that believe that because they come from a certain family background that may be full of alcoholism or drugs or divorce, I pray over those couples and I allow them to see that they have a shot and they have a shot because they have you by their side.
They have a shot because there is biblical references, multiple hundreds and thousands of biblical references that you can succeed that if you just have a little faith, there is such an opportunity to overcome so much. And it's not to say that divorce is horrible or divorces. ⁓ the most baddest thing that they've ever done because I've seen you turn divorce into something so interesting for that person. I just want to offer that even those that are listening right now to the sound of my voice, even if you've been divorced, your story isn't over. Your life isn't over. Marriage is still for you. Love is still out there for you. Thank you, God, for this revelation. And I pray over our children. I pray for our families, I pray for our finances and I thank you for continuing to love us in Jesus name. Amen.
Okay. I love you so much. I got to go pick up my kids. My name is Karina F Daves. I'm a marriage expert, speaker and relationship host of this dope podcast. If you love this podcast, make sure you share it with all of your amigos. Okay. And leave me a review on Apple podcasts. Send me an email at team@karinafdaves.com. I cannot wait to chat it up with you. All right. Talk to you soon. Bye.
