The question recently came up as to whether or not pre-marital counseling helps with affairs.
If you are not married to your partner, then pre-marital counseling could potentially help you in dealing with an affair. A big part of what makes it potential is the focus of the pre-marital counseling.
If the focus is on you accepting the promiscuous lifestyle of your partner, then you won’t be dealing with recovering from an affair or learning how to reduce them from happening. Instead, you will be learning how to accept your partner and their ways without any conditions.
Although talk about ‘unconditional’ acceptance sounds like something good, it does not provide a solid foundations for marriage relationships, since these require commitments.
With those commitments come conditions. Unconditional acceptance amounts to no accountability. Putting it simply “Unconditional Acceptance=No Accountability”. There is a time and place for ‘unconditional acceptance’, but it is not in a marriage relationship.
If on the other hand, the counseling focuses on ‘accountability’ and improving communication, it could be very helpful in overcoming an affair. Just knowing about the dangers of affairs and reducing the risk is often not enough to keep them from happening.
Many people who have affairs already know that what they are doing is not morally acceptable. Sure there are some social areas where affairs are not given a second thought. They are considered ‘no big deal’, yet in the areas that matter the most, affairs are not acceptable.
Pre-marriage counseling can alert you to possible areas of conflict in your relationship along with opening up new avenues of communication. You will need good communication in order to recover from an affair.
Pre-marital counseling also helps you know what to talk about and solve conflicts. Conflict solving is always a good skill to develop, especially within families.
Knowing you can solve your issues with each other will reduce the possibility of one of you having an affair to either avoid an issue or as a solution to an issue. Using an affair to solve a problem never actually fixes anything. Affairs disrupt communication and make all your relationships messy.
Using pre-marital counseling for a second marriage to reduce affairs is a good decision. In such cases, one or both of you have been married before, so you are familiar with some of the issues that need attention.
Clarifying each of your positions on affairs and how they will be dealt with makes sense. It is not a matter of giving pre-approval to an affair happening, it is a matter of setting clear boundaries and making the expectations clear.
Best Regards,
Jeff Murrah
