Premarital counselling aims to help people reach an objective assessment of how well they are likely to get on with a prospective partner in married life, by looking at a number of their own characteristics and those of the person they may marry.
That assessment should rest on what the two people share with each other in purposeful one-to-one conversations about their beliefs, values, hopes, expectations, tastes, way of life, worries, aspirations and anything else that matters to them.
Psychologists have shown that the way people interpret this information shapes their decisions more than the information itself. And that interpretation is strongly influenced by a person’s earlier experiences in their family, among friends, through the media and in the wider society they live in — and, of course, by their personality.
Premarital counselling helps people look at the important factors and make their choice freely and with open eyes — away from the pull of passion and excitement, from indifference and lack of awareness, and from the unconscious fears and avoidance that lie behind so many poor marriage choices.
Past experiences
Experiences that can have a troubling effect on the choice of a partner include:
– Witnessing or taking part in parents’ constant arguments that end badly.
– Repeated physical, emotional or sexual abuse in childhood or adolescence.
– Being exposed to parents’ repeated sulking, separations and leaving home.
– Growing up amid a cold emotional relationship between parents.
– Having parents who are addicted, delinquent, abusive, domineering, neglectful or belittling.
– Having learned the wrong lessons about what a healthy marriage looks like: secrecy, lying, excessive focus on material things, power-seeking, suspicion, controlling behaviour and so on.
– Growing up in a family that did too much for you, or that neglected and rejected you, so that responsibility, cooperation and empathy for others were never nurtured.
The premarital counselling process first helps people see how their past experiences have shaped their current expectations and worries about marriage, so that they can recognise and manage the harm those experiences may do; then it helps them look at the same things in the other person, realistically.
What reliable premarital counselling looks like
Premarital counsellors should hold a master’s degree in family counselling, rehabilitation counselling or clinical psychology with a family specialism, and a practising licence from Iran’s Psychology and Counselling Organization.
These counsellors use specialist interviewing methods, questionnaires, scales and other objective or projective tools to assess personality traits, interests and tastes, values and mental health.
Remember that a specialist marriage counsellor will never try to make the decision for you. Their job is to help you take responsibility for this important choice yourself, and to choose what is good for you. It takes a few hours of meetings, once a week: each of the two people shares with the counsellor their account of the conversations they had with the other during the week, and together they plan the next step and the next conversation. In these sessions the results of any tests taken may also be discussed with the couple, so that they can talk about them with each other.
A fundamental principle in helping people choose a spouse is that everything learned from either person remains confidential. On grounds of professional ethics, and for technical reasons too, counsellors have no right to pass this information to anyone else. Instead, they should help the two people exchange it with each other directly, through purposeful conversations.
Exceptions
The only exception, where the counsellor must pass information on to the other person, concerns personality disorders, drug and stimulant addiction, and severe mental disorders in which the person affected has no insight into their problem or cannot take responsibility for managing it.
Dr Bahman Bahmani, PhD in counselling, associate professor and faculty member, University of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation Sciences