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Ever After

Elegant Wedding, Fall/Winter 2003

Getting a little counseling before marriage can keep couples primed for the challenges down the road

“People spend lots of time and money preparing for their marriage day, but not for their marriage,” says Dr. Rita DeMaria, director of the PAIRS (Practical Application of Intimate Skills) program at the Council for Relationships in Philadelphia. Your dress, your cake, your flowers and bridesmaids’ dresses—all are scrutinized down to the last buttercream rose and embroidered flounce, but what about your relationship with your fiancé?

You may have fallen prey to what DeMaria calls the “myth of naturalism,” the belief that if you love someone, everything else comes naturally. “But most couples are not equipped the way they need to be,” she adds. And if you require some training for your career, driving a car or scuba diving, then don’t you need to prepare for something infinitely more complicated like marriage and family?

Engaged couples are realizing that counseling is not just for people with problems. According to a University of Denver study, 30 percent of couples receive some kind of pre-marital therapy, whether their church requires it or they seek it out on their own. DeMaria differentiates between therapy and relationship education. The former, which may continue beyond the wedding, is for those with deeper-seated issues, such as a family history of drug abuse or alcoholism. Sessions with a therapist and their partner can help them work through the residue of their personal experience as it relates to their relationship. Education, on the other hand, is for everyone and anyone who is in a committed relationship. “Especially now, because couples are seeking a peer, an equal,” says DeMaria. “That requires more cooperation and negotiation than when couples would just assume traditional gender roles. With peer partnership, everything’s up for discussion.”

Especially when their officiant requires it, many enter into a premarital preparation program with apprehension, but they often come out of the experience knowing something new about their mate and their relationship. “At least one or two light bulbs have gone off at every session,” reports Danielle DiLeo, who, with her fiancé, Pat, has been to three of five sessions with Reverend Susan Cole at the Arch Street United Methodist Church in Philadelphia. During one of their first meetings, Cole asked the couple to introduce each other to her, including what they thought were each other’s strengths and weaknesses. “It was eye-opening,” DiLeo says, “to have someone else explain yourself to you.” Cole encourages these kinds of exercises to show couples that it’s natural for them to take different approaches to the issues they’ll face together. “They’ve noticed the different approaches,” she says, “but they may not understand that it’s due to a personality difference.”

At the latest session, Danielle and Pat drew their family trees and talked about each interfamilial relationship—brother to father, aunt to grandmother, and so on—as well as family illnesses. “When you’re marrying you’re creating a family and also uniting two families,” says Cole. “It’s important for each partner to understand and acknowledge who each other is in a family sense.”

That includes studying each other’s family traditions, which is often a point of contention after the wedding when one person is used to formal and elaborate Christmas, Easter and Thanksgiving celebrations and the other is accustomed to ordering Chinese food and playing Monopoly. “These are things that are helpful for a couple to talk about in front of a third party,” says Cole, who requires that all couples complete these sessions with her before she’ll agree to marry them.

The same basic concepts are covered in Pre-Cana programs, Catholicism’s required version of premarital preparation. Pre-Cana can vary from weekend-long retreats with a few other couples to a few two-hour sessions, offered once a week, with hundreds of other brides- and grooms-to-be. The program run by Reverend Vincent Genovesi at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia is a weekendlong session for a maximum of 20 couples. On Friday night, the couples fill out “inventories,” marking “agree,” “disagree” or “uncertain” next to 200 statements ranging from whether or not they want kids to who will be the one stay home and raise them.

The inventories are scored, and the couples will review their answers a few weeks later with whomever will be officiating at their wedding. From Friday to Sunday, Reverend Genovesi, along with a married couple, leads workshops and presentations on communication, conflict resolution, finances, sex and intimacy, and the notion of marriage as a sacrament. “We get them thinking about day-to-day married life,” says Reverend Genovesi. “They’ve been so focused on preparing for the wedding that they forget they’re going to be married to each other for 40 to 50 years afterward.”

One thread that runs through all premarital counseling programs is preparing the couple to merge their finances successfully. “Money is what couples argue about most,” says Margaret Schapiro, assistant director of the Council for Relationships. She runs a workshop that focuses exclusively on money and marriage. “We work with couples to talk about and think about what money means to them and to think of ways to communicate about it,” says Schapiro. “So often, money is really about something else, like feeling competent, having self-worth, self-esteem and security.”

Though it’s a good idea to go through a couples course before you begin to have problems—DeMaria says most couples come in on average after six years of marriage—it’s also important to remember that emotions run high during the wedding planning. Tracey Ellenbogen, a social worker and licensed psychotherapist in Bala Cynwyd, can attest to that. Two years ago, soon after her own wedding, she launched a workshop named Calling All Brides Stress Management. “I thought, I’m a therapist and I’m feeling a lot of anxiety, so other women must be, too,” says Ellenbogen.

One workshop topic that she’s dubbed “Can I live the rest of my life with his dirty socks on the floor?” covers the common phenomenon of women who suddenly obsess over their fiancé’s flaws. “They need to know this is normal,” says Ellenbogen. So is wanting the perfect wedding day, having trouble finding the time to plan that perfect day and even cold feet.

Of course, premarital preparation courses have been known to reveal so much about a relationship that the couple postpones or cancels their wedding—but this happens rarely. DeMaria offers a more optimistic statistic—that couples who go through some kind of premarital education course are 50 percent less likely to divorce. It makes sense, when you think about it as gaining the skills to succeed.

Schapiro compares relationship skills to topspin. “If you start off with good technique, “ she says, “you don’t have to overcome bad patterns.”

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