Finding the right premarital counseling

Finding appropriate premarital counseling is the most difficult things we’ve dealt with in this whole wedding planning business. I made so many calls and did so much research, it began to feel like maybe it wasn’t worth it. A lot of people get married without premarital counseling – maybe we should skip it and skip all this ridiculous work it is taking just to set it up! But I decided to think of it as a test. We want to do the work it takes to make a marriage last, and the first step is to find good premarital counseling, no matter how many times I want to rip my hair out during the search.

Mike and I don’t want faith-based counseling. Our spiritual beliefs are similar, and I think believing in a higher purpose is helpful in a relationship, but we don’t want our counseling to be about God’s (or anyone else’s) purpose and roles for us in that relationship. We want to learn about each other, how we relate to each other, how we best work together, etc. But living where we live, a strongly religious and conservative part of the state, it was nearly impossible to track down secular counseling.

We started by going through the list of counselors in our area on the Prepare-Enrich website. The majority of them were listed as clergy or as having some sort of religious affliation. I compiled a list of those that seemed to offer secular counseling and started sending emails. I heard from several, but after a few days of communication, we realized we couldn’t work within their schedules.

Mike has work and class every day, Monday through Friday, from 6am to 9pm right now, and nobody offered weekend hours. He’s done with class at the end of April, but because I work over an hour from home, I can’t do anything in the middle of the day. Guess what. No evening hours either.

I sent out another round of emails, and then waited. Eventually I heard from someone who said they offer evening hours, so I called and the receptionist answered the phone with the name of a Catholic-based nonprofit in town. Um… I said I had the wrong number and hung up. Then I emailed the counselor and asked what was up. Turns out she is from said Catholic organization, but assured me they can do secular counseling. I called again, and after one of the most painfully inefficient phone calls of my life, we had our first appointment scheduled.

Through Prepare-Enrich, you take an online assessment, then have four appointments with a counselor. Our counselor, a different one than I originally communicated with for some reason, called me to discuss how the assessment would go. She asked which assessment we wanted – Catholic, Protestant, Jewish or Interfaith.

“Um, well we actually wanted secular counseling…”
“Oh. Ok. Who referred you here?”
“Blah blah blah. Here’s the whole convoluted story. Can you do it or not?”
“Well, I think so. I’ll just have to figure out if there’s a secular assessment to send you.”

Apparently they don’t do this a lot. I was a little nervous about the quality of counseling we were going to get based on the absurb process it took to get to this point, but after taking the assessment, I’m confident we’ll address some of the topics we hoped to address.

But my goodness, what a pain in my ass to get this all set up! On the assessment, there were many questions related to the stress of wedding planning, and when Mike and I conferred later, we discovered we had both easily answered “no stress” to every single one. This wedding planning has been fun and easy for us. The only thing that caused any real stress was finding damn premarital counseling!

It’s done though. Our first appointment is at the end of the month. So I’ll stop stressing now. (I’ll also stop complaining unless it turns out the whole experience sucks!)

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