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I began an argument in three previous articles on why pre-engagement counseling makes more sense than pre-marital counseling. You can read those articles here: Center Stage, Trust the Process, and Asking the Right Questions. While I do believe in pre-marital counseling, I offer a few reasons why it makes sense to put your relationship under the microscope before the proposal.

Capture the Flag

Have you ever played capture the flag? The rules are simple: Two teams hide a flag within agreed upon boundaries of a playing field. The challenge is to locate and steal your opponents’ flag without being tagged and thrown into jail. If you find the flag and make it back to base, your team wins.

Capture the flag is a lot like pre-engagement and pre-marital counseling.

Here is the reality: your relationship has red flags. They are present. Not green or blue or yellow ones. Red ones. At the beach, lifeguards use red flags to represent danger. One red flag waving in the ocean breeze warns swimmers to use extreme caution. The current is strong, and the surf is high. Only the strongest swimmers should even consider immersion in the water. Two red flags signify to everyone, even say Michael Phelps with floaties, to stay completely out of the water.

A wedding, aside from the ceremony and reception, involves two people extremely skilled in self-protection who stand at an altar mouthing phrases about sacrifice and love but who actually anticipate getting their own needs met in and by the other. Welcome to life in reality rather than life as it was meant to be. Our self-centered perspectives often blind us from the issues we need to see. Given the inevitable that your relationship has red flags, your options heading into marriage are as follows:

Denial: Let’s pretend there are no red flags.
Overly Ambitious: Let’s find and get rid of the red flags.
Minimization: Let’s say the flags are white or green or pink or blue. Anything but red.
Reality: Let’s hope to expose and deal with the red flags as much as we can before marriage.

It would be blissful to enter marriage after having disposed of any relational cautions or concerns. It is not going to happen. In capture the flag, the game rules state hidden flags must partially show. It would not be fair for one team to bury a flag five feet deep in the ground. Uh oh. In the realm of emotions we often lay our secrets and true selves beneath mountainous dirt piles of shame and guilt. We are skilled at burying our red flags. I mean really skilled. Malcolm Gladwell says it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master something. Our shame has been burying aspects of our identity for our whole life (and unfortunately it takes a relationship to illuminate and expose them). 10,000 hours computes to 416 days. Thus if you are twenty years old age, you have under your belt at least 173,200 hours of practice. You are beyond mastery.

Timed or Untimed Capture the Flag?

If counseling is about capturing the flags, and a dating couple wins as flags are discovered, the real question before marriage becomes this: Would you rather play timed or un-timed? Traditional pre-marital counseling becomes a timed game of capture the flag. You basically get four to eight sessions to find and deal with red flags. Hopefully they surface. You spend the sessions in a hunt for red flags and if the time runs out, you get married anyway. Then the game continues, except the bullets become real.

In pre-engagement counseling, the game of capture the flag is un-timed. I recall Gandalf’s warning to Frodo in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Gandalf urges the young hobbit ring bearer about the severity of his task and the evil which hunts him. Regarding the ring, Gandalf warns, “It wants to be found.” When it comes to the red flags in the relationship, most often the opposite rings true. They do not want to be found. Certain things do expose them, however. Conflict, communication, and life events all provide context for our red flags to peak out from under rocks. An un-timed process of pre-engagement counseling provides more opportunity for real life to expose caution signs. For a race car driver, “stop” or “yield” signs are an annoyance. For a couple who seeks wisdom on whether to commit their lives to one another, a “stop” or “yield” sign is a gift.

I have a friend who jokes that the goal of pre-marital counseling is to get the couple to delay the wedding. His point has some merit. Any married or divorced person who has lived authentic marriage will stress the importance of choosing the right mate. In thinking about marriage, the goal needs to be: how can we best set ourselves up for success?

Pre-marital and pre-engagement counseling are both forms of capture the flag. If you are in a dating relationship headed toward marriage, seriously consider whether you want to play capture the flag and whether you want to play it under the constraints of time.

First published here: Start Marriage Right

I began an argument in a previous article on why pre-engagement counseling makes more sense than pre-marital counseling. You can read the previous article here: Center Stage and Trust the Process. While I do believe in pre-marital counseling, I offer a few reasons why it makes sense to put your relationship under the microscope before the proposal.

The Right Questions in the Right Order

It is important to answer the right questions in the right order. There are natural and healthy questions which arise in dating. Engagement comes with its own different questions. Let’s compare some hypotheticals from each camp.

Questions in the dating phase: Are we good friends? Do I enjoy doing the same things as her? Would he be a good father? How does her theology affect the way she makes decisions? Do I respect his character? Would I be excited to follow him if his job took us to Nowheresville, Kansas? (No offense to Kansans. It is just so flat and, with the exception of Wicked, The Wizard of Oz and all those flying monkeys left a bad impression on me.)

Questions in the engagement phase: There are the practical questions. Where will we live? How will we derive income? Will we use birth control? And there are the wedding questions: Who will marry us? Where will we marry? Who should we invite? What is our budget?

While the practical ones matter, and the questions about the ceremony/reception feel significant at the time, they pale in comparison to the questions which lead us to decide whether or not to spend the rest of our lives with someone. In the moment, practical questions about the wedding and immediate life afterward feel momentous. They take center stage. But two, five, or ten years down the road, your wedding pictures will gather dust in the attic of your second home. Then it will be the questions about compatibility and friendship which will matter most. Furthermore, the engagement fairies have been known to sprinkle on couples pixie dust which takes away the ability to be objective. I don’t really care if he plans to hunt every weekend; how great will I look in this dress! Okay, maybe a bit extreme, but you get the idea.

The questions that arise in dating are of higher priority compared to the questions about the wedding and immediate life afterward. The dating questions become simpler, too, when one considers they do not have a deadline attached. Ever notice how a deadline changes your perspective? A friend of mine cannot function without a deadline. The intrinsic stress creates an atmosphere which allows him to produce. In college he would wait until the night before a paper was due to sit down at his computer. He graduated with a 4.0 and today carries the same mentality as a professional. Such a strategy might succeed at work. But I would not recommend strategic procrastination when it comes to choosing a spouse.

You do not want to still be answering the essential questions while you are engaged. Pre-engagement counseling offers the opportunity to define and answer the most important questions with knowledgeable help.

Are We Best Friends?

As an additional note: Of all of the questions which need to be answered prior to engagement, I am becoming more and more convinced the most important is this: Are we best friends? I don’t have any statistics to quote. I have no prescription for how you can tell. I do have hours of experience with couples. While every couple has their own trials, the ones founded and bonded in friendship seem to sail the often choppy seas of marriage with more ease. I am not saying attraction does not matter. It does. If friendship is the boat in which you float, attraction is the wind in the sails. In an attempt to shed light on the importance of friendship, ask yourself this: If we were not attracted to one another, would we still be friends?

Ask and answer the right questions in the right order. Pre-engagement counseling is the chance to subject your relationship to the fire, to answer essential questions before the deadline of a wedding can swoop in to steal your attention.

First Published Here: Start Marriage Right

I began an argument in a previous article on why pre-engagement counseling makes more sense than pre-marital counseling. You can read that article here: Center Stage. While I do believe in pre-marital counseling, I offer a few reasons why it makes sense to put your relationship under the microscope before the proposal. Process over content is one of these reasons.

Process over Content
Premarital counseling is often structure driven. Let me explain. Many counselors have a road map laid out for pre-marital counseling. The trip might look something like this: First you meet as a couple, then as individuals for one session. You each take a personality test or two. The final five sessions focus on topics designed to cover essential conversations such as finances, sex, family dynamics, and kids. I like to make sure couples experience a conflict together in session as well. A road map provides a solid structure to cover the hot topics which contribute to most divorces.

The pitfall in such a structure-driven undertaking is that good counseling is process driven. And the process takes time. What do I mean by process? Process has more to do with the way we talk rather than what we talk about (content). It is like taking apart a wristwatch to study and alter the mechanisms and how they function rather than adjusting the clock face. Out of our own personalities, experiences, choices, and family history, each of us has a systematic way in which we relate. In a relationship, our style of relating interweaves with another’s. Without our knowledge, we learn a dance. The steps of the dance become so ingrained we often follow the same moves regardless of the situation. So whether you and your significant other are discussing directions to a party, how to cook filet mignon, or car repairs, your dance, or process, plays out as the foundation for how you communicate.SMR-ad-freePremarital counseling needs structure. It is important to discuss the hot topics which often lead to the demise of a marriage. A wise counselor can pick up on a couple’s process through structured conversation. My experience, though, is the deeper process takes more time than four to nine sessions. To uncover the dignified and depraved stories of our hearts beneath layers of self-protection takes energy and commitment. A few sessions of premarital counseling, especially when content driven, rarely has time to take down your defenses, much less deal with the glorious ruins hidden underneath.

It is the difference between helpful and transformational. The starry-eyed gaze of premarital couples often blinds them from the gravity of the choice ahead of them: commitment for a lifetime. To send a couple into marriage with a few structured conversations might be like a carpenter who goes to build his first house. On his way out the door, a colleague hands him a few extra tools. The novice looks the tools over. Some of them he has seen before; others he has not. While he would like to take the time to receive instruction on how to use each one, punctuality demands that he hurry off to the job site. He begins to build. His colleague’s tools, the ones he can figure out how to use, are indeed helpful. Contrast this carpenter with the man across town who subjected himself to an apprenticeship prior to launching his own business. This man was not just given new tools. Rather he underwent a deeper transformation through his apprenticeship which offered knowledge, skill, and practice into who he became as sole proprietor and the work he completed in his new business.

Traditional premarital counseling can be helpful, but rarely lacks the time, energy, and commitment to be transformational. I have premarital couples leave my office after eight sessions and tell me what they received was beneficial. And I believe them. On the other hand, though, I have walked alongside married couples who have told me their weekly counseling over six months (or more) has transformed their marriage. Granted, other factors play into the equation. Still, I am convinced honoring a couple’s process, giving it time and space to surface and become malleable, creates the best chance for connection and deeper transformation in the foundation of the relationship.

First Published Here: Start Marriage Right