If you had a whirlwind romance and got married before you really got to know your spouse, you may have difficulty adjusting to married life. Ordinary things like sharing housework, cooking meals, or deciding which church to go to could become battlegrounds when you're surprised by your spouse's behaviors. Marriage counseling could be a big help, especially early in your marriage before you develop bad habits or build up anger and resentment. Here's how marriage counseling can help you as a newly married couple:
Provide Topics For Discussion
You may not even realize how much your life has to change once you get married, and a marriage counselor can point out the life situations that need to be discussed and planned. If your short dating period revolved mostly around romantic dates and fun times rather than deep discussions, you might not know much about your spouse. You may not even be clear about how your spouse feels about children. When you go to marriage counseling, you'll probably have homework to do over the next week between sessions.
This homework might involve bringing up specific things such as how to handle finances, household responsibilities, desires for kids, and how to deal with in-laws. Getting clarity helps avoid unnecessary surprises, and having a third party is helpful for guiding the discussions so they don't get heated and cause hurt feelings.
Teach You To Listen And Compromise
Learning how to make your feelings and wishes known is important so you don't hide hurt feelings. However, listening to your spouse is also important so they feel heard and understood. Even if you communicate well, you may disagree on many things, and that's where learning to compromise becomes important. This is often hard to do when you're used to living alone or living with siblings that you argue with all the time rather than working out compromises.
Teach You The Importance Of Trust
A marriage counselor can teach you some of the most important fundamentals of marriage, such as honesty and trust. Broken trust, as happens with infidelity, is often hard to come back from in a marriage. By learning in advance what you should do to protect your marriage and how you should react in times of crisis, you'll have a framework for dealing with any problem that arises. That doesn't guarantee your marriage will last a lifetime, but the better you are at interpersonal relationships and dealing with problems, the better you'll be as a marriage partner.
Marriage counseling is often only a few sessions, so it's not an overwhelming investment in time or money, but the insight you receive is valuable and could save your marriage. By getting good advice and working hard to follow it, your marriage can get off to a solid start and be strong enough to stand up to disagreements and problems when they arise.
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