Preparing Your Hearts, Not Just Your Wedding: How Premarital Counseling Builds a Stronger “Yes”
Premarital counseling at Divine Marriage Union is a guided, hope-filled process that helps couples celebrate their strengths, face their challenges honestly, and step into marriage with greater clarity and confidence. It is less about “fixing” couples and more about giving them language, tools, and shared insight for a lifelong partnership.
What The SYMBIS Process Looks Like
At Divine Marriage Union, couples begin by completing the SYMBIS (Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts) Assessment, an in-depth online tool each partner fills out individually. The results are compiled into a personalized report that becomes the roadmap for several premarital sessions together.
In these sessions, your facilitator walks you through key areas such as mindset toward marriage, wellbeing, family background, finances, expectations, personality dynamics, communication, conflict, sexuality, and spirituality. Each section includes customized descriptions, conversation prompts, and practical action steps you work through as a couple.
A Real Couple’s Journey (Meet Emma and Jason)
To protect confidentiality, consider a composite couple, “Emma and Jason,” who recently completed their SYMBIS journey. Their report showed that Emma approached marriage with a Resolute mindset, deeply committed, viewing divorce as “not an option”, while Jason leaned toward a Romantic mindset, seeing Emma as his soulmate and believing love would naturally conquer all. Together, this created strong passion and devotion but also highlighted the need to balance idealism with practical work on the relationship.
Their overall “marriage momentum” score was very promising: a strong foundation of mutual commitment, spiritual alignment, and a stable dating relationship, yet paired with several caution flags that invited honest conversation. They discovered that their shorter dating timeline and only partial overlap in core values meant they needed to be especially intentional in preparing for marriage.
Positive Findings Worth Celebrating
Premarital counseling intentionally pauses to celebrate what is already working well in a relationship. For Emma and Jason, several strengths stood out clearly in their report.
- Strong motivation for lifelong marriage and a shared belief in staying committed through difficulty gave them powerful long-term momentum.
- Both partners enjoyed a high level of support from friends and family for their relationship, which research shows is a major advantage for a healthy start to marriage.
- Their dating relationship had been “smooth and steady,” which suggested they had already practiced compromise and negotiation rather than cycling through constant drama.
- Personality-wise, Emma’s “Deliberating Spouse” steadiness and Jason’s “Achieving Spouse” drive created a complementary team: one more methodical and patient, the other energetic, decisive, and challenge-oriented.
In session, these strengths are named, affirmed, and connected to real-life examples, so couples see how God (for those of faith) and their own choices have already been building a solid foundation.
Challenges That Become Growth Opportunities
The same report also gently surfaced some challenging areas for Emma and Jason, places that, if ignored, could become recurring sources of hurt or misunderstanding. Rather than shaming, the SYMBIS process treats these as invitations to grow.
- Personal wellbeing and past wounds: Both partners carried moderate unresolved issues with their parents, which could lead to being reactive or leaning too heavily on each other to meet old unmet needs. Counseling helped them name those patterns and consider healthier boundaries and support systems.
- Differences in resilience and outlook: Emma’s resilience score was relatively low, tending to see the glass as half-empty and struggling to adjust to circumstances outside her control, while Jason scored high in adaptability and optimism. Sessions focused on how Jason could offer patient encouragement without minimizing Emma’s feelings, and how Emma could receive support while still building her own internal strength.
- Money and debt: Emma reported significant financial debt, while Jason carried some debt of his own; both took finances seriously but needed clear, joint plans. Using the “Money Matrix” from their report, they talked through how each viewed saving, spending, and budgeting, and identified concrete first steps to reduce stress around money together.
- Conflict “hot topics”: Their top likely flashpoints included money, priorities, sex, sleep habits, relatives, and careers. Rather than waiting for blowups, sessions walked them through how to “fight a good fight” on these issues—staying on topic, focusing on facts over attacks, and recognizing when one was withdrawing or becoming too aggressive.
Every couple has both strengths and caution flags; the gift of this process is that you see them early, with structure and support, instead of discovering them blindly after the wedding.
How This Prepares Couples for Marriage
The SYMBIS-based premarital process is designed to be deeply preparatory, not merely informative. Couples leave with a shared language and a set of agreements they can carry into married life.
- It normalizes differences by mapping out personality styles, communication preferences, and conflict approaches, so you understand that your partner is not “wrong”, but instead just wired differently.
- It brings expectations into the light, whether about roles in the home, spiritual practices, intimacy, or time with extended family, and invites couples to make conscious decisions rather than relive their family-of-origin scripts by default.
- It builds practical skills such as listening without interrupting, staying on topic during disagreements, honoring each other’s needs for affection, space, and respect - all things that couples can apply immediately.
- It anchors the relationship spiritually (for couples of faith) by exploring how each person feels closest to God and how they hope to worship, serve, and pray together in marriage.
For couples like Emma and Jason, the most meaningful outcome is often a renewed sense of “we”: a shared vision of marriage, a clearer picture of who they are together, and a realistic confidence that they are not stepping into marriage blindly. Instead, they are choosing their lifelong union with eyes open, hearts engaged, and tools in hand for the journey ahead.
