The Rev. George Young doesn’t wring his hands when an engaged couple get old feet and decide to cancel their nuptials.

“I don’t care about invitations and reserving a space. You can turn back,” said Young, pastor of Holy Temple Baptist Church in northeast Oklahoma City and a consultant with the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative.

Kim Kimberling, president of Family Christian Counseling, said much the same. “I would rather they do it on that side than get married and divorce. Sometimes there are some red flags that are there, and people just go ahead,” he said.

Young, Kimberling and other advocates of premarital counseling see the hoopla regarding “runaway bride” Jennifer Wilbanks of Gainesville, Ga., as a prime opportunity to promote the merits of in-depth counseling and classes for couples.

Like Wilbanks and her would-be groom, John Mason, many marriage-minded duos spend hours planning lavish fairy-tale weddings and not enough time discussing issues related to their “happily ever after,” said Donna Edwards, a Christian counselor and executive director of Living Well Ministries. Couples need to put more into the marriage than the wedding event, she said.

“The wedding has become just a day of celebration instead of a day of commitment,” she said.

Young said, “The wedding lasts a total of 30 minutes tops, and you don’t do anything about the marriage that is supposed to last forever.”

Young said he once counseled a couple who had selected another pastor to marry them. After several counseling sessions in which the couple disagreed on several major issues, Young told them he would not conduct their wedding if he were asked. Young said the couple married anyway and, two months later, the young wife called to say they were getting a divorce.

That scenario is the kind Young, Edwards and Kimberling try to prevent. They invest much of their ministry efforts toward helping couples create healthy, lasting marriages.

Thorough premarital counseling sets up a sturdy foundation for a good marriage, they said. With these sessions behind them, most couples go on to have their dream marriage as compared to simply a dream wedding. And more churches and other faith-based organizations are offering such counseling and/or classes, they said.

Edwards said the sessions offer couples vital tools for dealing with such issues as finances, communication and conflict resolution. Most importantly, they can derail a divorce before the marriage occurs.

“Premarital classes help couples focus on the relationship and get a more realistic picture of what happens in the marriage,” she said.

Often, potentially troublesome issues don’t come up before counseling, she said.

Edwards, who conducts premarital classes at Putnam City Baptist with her husband, Ed, said she’s had a few couples take the sessions and call off their weddings. Most, however, realize that “it is one of the most teachable times” of their lives, she said.

“They are realizing there are some important issues they can get out on the table. That doesn’t mean they won’t come up once they are married, but it means they’ll have some tools to address them.”
Shawn Crawley, faith sector coordinator with the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative, said premarital counseling fits hand in hand with the initiative’s goal to decrease the state’s divorce rate and equip couples with the tools needed for long-lasting marriages.

“It’s far better on the front end, to build the anticipation on the one hand and to avoid the disappointment and hurt on the other,” he said.

Such counseling sessions often enable couples headed for the altar to “see past the rose-colored glasses, to identify a place where they’re different,” he said. “They get the tools they need, and they can work on them in the good times so they’ll have them in the bad times. It’s just the definition of prevention.”

Tom Beddow, a marriage and family therapist and director of counseling and family ministry at First Baptist Church in McAlester, said premarital counseling often boils down to homing in on a couple’s expectations and appropriate ways to resolve conflict.

“It’s so important to know what we expect in anything,” he said. “Unmet expectations will create a lot of conflict.”

Kimberling teaches the 11-week course titled “A Cord of Three Strands: Preparing for a Marriage of a Lifetime” at least three times a year at Crossings Community Church. He said he’s had at least 700 couples go through the class in the eight years it has been offered.

He said many couples don’t get premarital counseling because they don’t realize it is available, they have time constraints, or they have fear and anxiety about such sessions.

However, the reasons to participate in premarital counseling outweigh any perceived drawbacks, he said.

“We have so many divorces. You’ve got to have a foundation from the beginning,” he said