You've got the ring and the dress. You've set the date, and perfected
the seating chart. But, before you walk down the aisle, you might want
to make an appointment for you and your fiance to stop by a wedding
therapist.
There may not be deal-breaking issues preventing your
union, but psychotherapist Annie Block Pearl warns that joining lives
with someone -- even if you've previously lived with them -- means major
changes that could lead to problems past your wedding day.
"I
realized that people, when they get married, they get involved with the
gown, with the planning, with the flowers and how everything is going
to look, and don't think as much as the incredible transformation they
are going through in their lives," she told CBSNews.com.
Pearl
emphasizes that wedding therapy -- which is a branch of couples
counseling -- isn't just for people who are constantly fighting.
Instead, she likes to call it "premarital counseling," since the t-word
carries such a negative connotation. Clients range from people who are
embarking on the marriage journey for the first time to people who have
had multiple marriages and don't want to make the same mistakes as they
did with their previous spouses.
Where a wedding therapist comes
in is to help couples manage and negotiate what they want both for the
big day and for the rest of their lives. Couples need to understand that
they are going to still be two separate people, but they will have to
collaborate together. While it's easily said, it doesn't mean that the
situation is simple.
"What people don't tell you in advance is
that planning a wedding and combining lives tends to be an
extraordinarily stressful thing," New York clinical psychologist and
wedding therapist Jocelyn Charnas told CBSNews.com. "Nine times out of
10, it comes with stress and anxiety, and it can be very difficult to
manage that."
Part of what makes getting married so difficult is
that two people are bringing their own personal cultures and rituals and
are expected to become one unit, Pearl explained. Families impart their
own traditions and history, and partners need to compromise and find a
new way that combines both people's beliefs. Charnas said this is
especially hard today, since a lot of couples are getting married later.
They've been their parents' children for a long time, meaning those
values are very deeply ingrained. "They're in their mid-30s, and they're
making this decision to separate individually for the first time," she
explained.
"When you marry someone, you don't just marry them:
You really marry who they come from as well," Pearl added. "You need to
embrace their family's role in their life. It's not a transition that
occurs naturally and easily."
Often times, people will take out
their stress and anxieties over these issues by over managing their
weddings. Charnas has had couples fight over the difference of one word
in the wedding invitations, and she tries to get them to understand that
it's not about the minutia but perhaps other issues they want to
address.
What it boils down to for most couples is that they
need to get a reality check on their expectations. It's important to
know what each person wants from a husband or wife, what kind of
lifestyle they want, what kind of family they want, where they seem
themselves living and what they see for themselves in the future.
"Even
if they've lived together for a while, they still may not be concurrent
with one another with these pictures," Pearl explained.
She
pointed out the example of her mother, who told her that one of Pearl's
friends wasn't going to have a successful marriage because "she's not
making dinner for her husband every night." While that is what Pearl's
mother expected the role of a wife to be, it wasn't the vision the
newlywed couple saw for themselves.
Pearl said the number one
topic that most couples often need to work out revolves around children.
While most people will discuss whether they want kids before the big
day, couples sometimes don't bring up how many children they want or at
what age they want to have them. Whose religion they and their potential
offspring are going to follow or if they even want to have a religion
is a close second.
Charnas said money and finances -- from who
is going to pay for the wedding to how much is appropriate to spend on a
wedding to later concerns including joint accounts -- tends to be the
number one issue for her clients. Family planning is their second major
concern.
"You'd be surprised how many couples don't have those conversations before they get married," Charnas admitted.
Both
therapists emphasize that the goal of wedding therapy isn't to solve
problems, but more importantly to stop potential issues from growing
into big deals. Charnas pointed out that the problem isn't if couples
fight -- because all couples will fight -- but how they deal with the
issues they have a divergent opinion on. Wedding therapy gives couples a
solid foundation on how to sort through their differences.
"Think
of it as preventative medicine," she said. "We go to the dentist not
only when we have a tooth ache, but twice a year to get our teeth
cleaned. Think of it as preventative psychology."