Premarital Counseling: Honoring Your Love with Sophisticated Partnership
Years of experience mediating both marriage and divorce conflicts of all kinds, has resulted in an understanding of what leads to marital happiness and fulfillment and what leads to marital dysfunction and divorce. In every case, in our experience, the quality of the marriage experience depends on the sophistication with which the lovers approach the project of life-partnership. That phrase, "life-partnership", points to an important understanding. For those entering into marriage, there is nothing you will do in your life that will have a larger impact on you than forming this partnership. In marrying, you leave behind all the other lives you might live and place yourself under the center of gravity of another person. The couple marrying thus becomes a double-star dance, each orbiting around the other, creating between them a third center of gravity, that of their partnership. Together you pursue what we call your Best Happiness in this double-star dance.
It's a poetic image suitable to the exhileration of finding yourself so much in love that you are ready to make this most significant commitment that anyone can ever make. But what we find at Family Tree Mediation is that the cultural wisdom supporting couples in living happy, fulfilled lives based on this commitment is surprisingly unsophisticated. The feeling one gets in our culture is that talk about sophistication in the creation of one's marriage partnership somehow degrades or dilutes the importance of the love you feel for each other. In fact, the artful sophistication of constructive communication and creative planning is a way of honoring the importance of love in marriage. We would say that it is the best way to honor the importance of love in marriage. The thought and value structures, the marriage and life designs, and the communication processes and patterns you create for your partnership together are like the temple you build for your love. It is in this temple that you may together experience your loving partnership's enduring fulfillment. And, it is to this temple that you may turn for guidance, confidence and healing at times in life that involve hardship or challenges to your partnership or well-being.
Our premarital counseling service consists of three two-hour sessions at a cost of $1,500. The curriculum covered includes appreciating the unparalleled scope of the marriage partnership, taking inspiration from sophisticated structures and procedures used in other kinds of partnerships, understanding the role of equality in a healthy marriage, an overview of the constructive communication tool-kit, study of four major marriage partnership projects (Partnership Formation; Money and its Meanings; Community and Careers; and Parenting), a look at navigating conflict and recovering from crisis, a review of the ecology of the the pursuit of happiness from within that partnership, discussion of how to integrate idealism and pragmatism for a secure and fulfilling marriage, and exploration of ways to respect and care for vulnerabilities that arise with sexual intimacy.
We think our premarital counseling service makes a great engagement gift for yourselves or for friends and loved ones about to get married. And we also believe it holds value for couples who are taking important steps toward partnership in a less formal degree, such as moving in together, making career decisions together, or moving to new communities together, as well as for people who are newly married and for couples who have been married for some time but either want to bring new energy to their partnership or want tools that will help them address signs of strain or dysfunction emerging in their partnership. And certainly our service holds value as well for people who have been divorced and want their next marriage to support the happiness of both spouses in a way their last one did not.
If you'd like to purchase our premarital counseling service package, call (650) 762-TREE [762-8733] or email me using the email form on our Contact Us page.
Hank Edson, J.D. CALL: (650) 762-8733
Proprietor of Family Tree Mediation
Serving Redwood City, Atherton,
Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Mountain View,
Los Altos and the wider Peninsula &
San Francisco Bay Area.
