Congratulations! Getting married is one of the biggest steps you’ll take in life. Most couples spend months preparing for the wedding. Pre-marriage counselling gives you space to prepare for the marriage itself, while it’s easier to do that together.
Consider pre-marriage counselling if:
- you’re getting married and want to do this thoughtfully
- you want to have the bigger conversations now, while they’re still easier
- you want to learn how to handle conflict before patterns set in
- you come from different backgrounds, faiths, or family styles
- you’re remarrying and want this time to look different
Understanding Pre-Marriage Counselling
Pre-marriage counselling is different from couples therapy. You’re not coming in because something is broken. You’re coming in because you want to build thoughtfully, and doing that deliberately tends to produce a better result.
Most couples already know this instinctively. You’ve probably talked about where you’ll live, whether you want kids, maybe even pets. But there are conversations that tend to get postponed: how you handle conflict, what you each expect from marriage, what happens when your family-of-origin patterns show up in your shared home.
Pre-marriage counselling creates time and space for those conversations, with a therapist in the room to help them go well.
Pre-marriage counselling can help you understand:
- where your strengths are as a couple
- where the growing edges sit
- how your personality and attachment styles fit together
- where your expectations of marriage came from
- what your likely friction points will be
- how your family-of-origin patterns might shape your marriage
By doing this work before the wedding, you give yourselves a head start. Most of what comes up later in marriage was already there in some form. Pre-marriage counselling helps you see it while it’s easier to talk about.
How Pre-Marriage Counselling Can Help
Pre-marriage counselling can help you:
- Assess your strengths and ‘growing edges’ as a couple
- Build a strong foundation of intimacy and trust, and know how to reinforce it throughout your marriage
- Learn tools for communication and conflict resolution that last
- Understand your personality similarities and differences, including the challenges they may bring and the ways you complement one another
- Explore your experiences of marriage and family in your childhood and how they shape your expectations
- Have real conversations about the areas that tend to go unspoken: finances, leisure activities, relationships with family and friends, sexuality, relationship roles, partner style and habits, spiritual beliefs, and parenting expectations
The hard conversations will happen eventually. Pre-marriage counselling is a chance to start them on your own terms.
Our Therapeutic Approaches
We draw on a range of evidence-based approaches, grounded in a flexible, collaborative, and client-centred way of working that adapts to what is most helpful for you.
This allows us to shape our work around your needs, experiences, and goals, drawing from different therapeutic modalities as needed. Learn more about our approach to care.
Gottman Method
The Gottman Method is the most well-known approach to couples work. It comes from decades of research with real couples over time. For pre-marriage, it’s especially practical. The focus is on the small habits that protect relationships. Easier to build those habits now than to try to repair them later.
Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT)
EFT looks at what’s happening emotionally underneath the conflict. Most couple struggles, it turns out, are really about attachment. Wanting to feel close to your partner. Wanting to feel safe with them. Pre-marriage is a good time to figure out how your attachment styles fit together.
Prepare/Enrich
Prepare/Enrich is a research-based assessment designed specifically for couples preparing for marriage. You each complete an online assessment, and then work through the results with your counsellor. It tends to surface conversations you might not have thought to have, and gives a concrete starting point for the work. For couples who want structured guidance, it’s often a good fit.
Attachment-Based Therapy
Attachment-based work goes back to how each of you learned to connect, long before you met. Those early patterns tend to show up in your relationship now, usually without you noticing. Understanding how your styles fit together can shift how you handle the hard moments.
Solution-Focused Therapy
Solution-focused work is practical. We start with what’s already working in your relationship and build from there. It suits pre-marriage because the goal is preparation.
Narrative Therapy
Narrative work looks at the stories you each bring into the relationship. Stories about love. About family. About what a marriage is supposed to look like. Pre-marriage is a good time to notice which of those stories are yours. And which ones you want to write together going forward.
If you’re preparing for marriage, now is a good time to have the harder conversations in a supported space. Book when you’re ready.
Meet Some of Our Counsellors Who Offer Pre-Marriage Counselling
Alissa Caskey
Rebecca Bonham
Eskay Ilori
Cathy Underhill
Participating in premarital counselling can effectively prepare you and your partner for married life. It helps identify core beliefs, set realistic expectations, plan for the future, and navigate how your lives will merge. Pre-marriage counselling fosters a deeper understanding of your partner's beliefs, values, motivations, and daily routines. It also provides a space to discuss key aspects of marriage, ensuring both partners have a clear understanding of what to expect, while also recognizing each other's strengths and areas for growth. Just as you’d consult a wedding planner for your big day, pre-marriage counselling can help you design a strong foundation for your life together.
Kerry Bezzanno
Now that you’ve planned for the wedding, let’s help you plan for the marriage. In providing couples premarital preparation prior to the big day, I help couples lay the groundwork for the days and years to come. I support couples transition through the ‘honeymoon phase’ and gain the resources for building the foundation of a strong, long-term partnership. In our work together, I provide tools for exploring shared values, reaching comprise when navigating conflict, as well as exploring personality styles and communication. Together, we’ll identify and build on strengths to foster deeper connection while pinpointing challenge areas to prevent them from becoming more engrained patterns over time.
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Frequently Asked Questions About Pre-Marriage Counselling
Most couples find it useful to start 3 to 6 months before the wedding, when you have time for real conversation without wedding planning crowding everything out. But anytime is fine. Some couples come in a year out. Others come in the month before because something specific is on their mind.
No. We see couples who are planning to get married but haven’t set a date, couples who are engaged, and couples getting remarried. We also see couples who aren’t planning to marry but are preparing for a similar kind of long-term commitment.
The process and number of sessions varies between couples and therapists who offer the service. Some couples do 4 to 6 sessions focused on specific topics. Others go deeper over more sessions. Your therapist will talk with you about what makes sense for where you are.
That’s often the most useful thing to bring into the work. Pre-marriage counselling isn’t about eliminating differences. It’s about building the skills to navigate them together. Better to know what you’re working with now than to discover it under more pressure later.
Yes. Our work is affirming and available to any couple preparing for long-term commitment, regardless of the structure of your relationship.