Four Reasons Why Counseling Can Restore Your Marriage
According to the American Psychological Association, 40 to 50 percent of married couples in the United States end in divorce. In fact, rates of divorce are the highest within the first three to four years of a marriage. What’s more, of the 50 percent of marriages that end in divorce, they happen within 12 years of getting married.
It seems as though time has changed attitudes toward marriage. In the 1950s, the median age for married men was 23 for men and 20 for women. In 2004, those numbers grew to 27 for men and 26 for women. Couples who dated for at least three years before their engagement were 39 percent less likely to get divorced than couples who dated for less than a year before tying the knot.
The reasons for divorce vary greatly, but the top five reasons are:
- Communication Problems
- Infidelity or betrayal
- Financial problems
- Abuse
- Loss of Interest
One of the biggest reasons as previously mentioned is infidelity. According to the Journal of Family Issues, infidelity is the leading cause of divorce at 21.6 percent. Additionally, couples therapists say that 50 percent of their case load is due to infidelity.
If you feel you and your spouse are having martial troubles, marriage counseling may be a big help if you’re wanting to avoid divorce. Maintaining marriage can take work, but it’s up to both sides to put in the effort. Despite your best efforts, working at improving your marriage can take some skills that the average couple doesn’t have.
That’s where a marriage counselor comes in. Here are four benefits of going to marriage counseling:
- Communication: By going to marriage, you and your partner can learn how to communicate your needs openly without showing resentment or anger.
Ultimately, you need to be able to communicate your issues, desires, wishes, goals, etc., openly without fear of hurting your spouse or being hurt. Counseling will teach the two of you what you need to do to have engaging, constructive dialogue that’s not going to result in conflict and hurt feelings. - Conflicts: Another benefit of counseling is that you and your spouse can learn how to resolve conflict in a peaceful manner. That includes having an open line of communication when conflict arises and you and your partner working together to resolve an issue.
- Working through issues: One of the biggest reasons that marriages fall apart is that one or both people often internalize issues and things that are bothering them, figuring that in time their partner will change or that things will work themselves out.
Oftentimes that doesn’t happen however and couples need to learn to process and learn to work through unresolved issues. Thankfully, marriage counseling offers an environment for couples to let everything out and express what makes them unhappy.
Getting issues out in the open, with a counselor there to act as a mediator, you and your partner should be more willing to work together to solve problems, rather than push them aside or ignore them. If you find in counseling that your spouse is unwilling to work through issues, you may consider leaving the marriage without feeling guilty, but ideally counseling should provide an environment to find common ground. - Better understanding: If marriage counseling is successful, then you and your partner will have gained a better understanding of one another. You’ll know more about who you are as well and what your needs are. It could be that you and your spouse are able to reach common ground on many issues, simply by expressing yourselves and verbalizing all the things you were afraid to say for fear of being rejected or hurt.
Counseling isn’t for everyone, but if you and your spouse commit yourselves to working on and improving your marriage, you can grow together and make your marriage stronger than it ever was before. Ultimately, the goal of marriage counseling is to work through relationship problems, save relationships and restore marriages. By putting the time in, you and your spouse can grow together and restore your marriage together.
