Most couples who come to me before the wedding arrive in the best mood of their lives. They are in love, the venue is booked, both families are behaving, and the whole thing feels like it is running downhill. That is exactly the right time to do this work and exactly the reason almost nobody does it. When everything is easy, sitting down to examine it feels faintly disloyal, like you are inviting trouble in.
Here is my honest position after years of sitting with couples on both sides of the wedding. A good courtship makes a good marriage. The engaged couples I work with are not fixing anything, they are front loading conversations that would otherwise get had in year 6 at high volume, usually at midnight, usually with a baby in the next room. It is the cheapest, easiest work in my entire practice, and it is the work almost nobody books.
Infatuation is not a character flaw, but it is a poor planner
Most courtships, at the point somebody proposes, are running on something closer to a very good crush than to a tested partnership. That is not an insult. That chemistry exists for a reason and it does a real job, which is to bond two people strongly enough that they will take on the risk of building a life together in the first place.
The problem is what it does to your judgment while it is running. It smooths over differences, it makes ordinary friction feel charming, and it produces genuine confidence about questions the two of you have never actually discussed. Then it cools, because it always cools, and the couple who never got around to the discussions has to have all of them at once while also being exhausted and possibly holding a newborn. The cooling itself is normal and I wrote about it separately in how desire fades naturally. What is not inevitable is being unprepared for it.
Your friends will not raise this with you. Your parents mostly will not either, because at this stage everyone around you has agreed to be delighted. Somebody outside the family, whose job is not to be delighted, sees things the room cannot.
What I am actually doing here
I am not looking for a reason you should not get married. In years of doing this I have told very few couples anything close to that. I am making sure that the two people signing up for this have answered the same questions the same way out loud, rather than each assuming.
The questions worth answering out loud
There is no mystery to what these are. They are the ordinary, unromantic, load bearing questions of a shared life, and the reason they cause so much trouble later is that both people quietly assumed the answer was obvious, and quietly assumed different answers.
What we actually cover
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How much do we each owe, and who knew about it before this conversation
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Whose money is it once we are married, and what does a joint account really mean for us
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How many children do we want, when, and what happens if that turns out to be hard
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Who does what at home, said out loud, rather than defaulting to how each of our parents did it
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Whose career moves the family, and does that answer change later
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How much do our families get to be in this marriage, and who says no to them
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What do each of us believe, religiously or otherwise, and what are we raising children inside of
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What does each of us expect physically and emotionally, which almost nobody has said plainly
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What does a real fight look like for each of us, and what did it look like in the house we grew up in
Notice how few of those are about romance. That is deliberate. Romance is the part you already have covered. The failure mode in marriage is not usually a lack of love, it is two people discovering in year 4 that they signed different contracts, and neither of them ever lied.
The money one deserves a specific note because it is the most predictive. How the two of you plan and argue about a wedding budget is a live preview of how you will handle money for the next 30 years. If it is already tense now, over a single event, with both families watching, that tension does not evaporate at the altar. If your assets or your debts are wildly different, having a plain conversation about accounts and about what came before this marriage is not unromantic. It is the single kindest thing you can do for the version of you that exists in 10 years.
Very few marriages fail because two people stopped loving each other. Plenty fail because they never checked that they were signing the same contract.
Matthew W. Hoelscher, PCC
Compatible does not mean identical
Couples get anxious in these sessions when they find a difference, so I say this early. You are not supposed to agree on everything. If you are a runner your partner does not have to run. Differences in taste, hobbies, temperament and pace are not warning signs, they are the reason two separate people are interesting to each other for decades.
What matters is the size and the location of the difference. Miles apart on money, on children, on faith, on where you will live, or on what a marriage is for, those are not preferences. Those are structural, and structural differences do not dissolve. They can absolutely be worked with, but only if both of you are looking straight at them rather than each privately betting the other will come around after the wedding. That bet has a terrible record.
Differences that make you interesting
Differences that need a plan
One of you is social, one recharges alone.
One of you wants three children and one is not sure about any.
Different hobbies, different friends, different taste in everything.
Very different money habits, or debt one of you has not fully disclosed.
One is tidy, one is relaxed about it.
Different expectations about whose career the family follows.
Different politics on things that never touch your week.
Different answers on faith, and on what the children are raised inside of.
What the sessions actually look like
This is not a class and there is no workbook to complete. We sit down together, I ask the questions above and quite a few that come out of your specific answers, and my job is mostly to notice the moments where the two of you say the same word and mean two different things. That happens constantly and it is invisible from the inside.
Practically, most engaged couples do this in a small number of sessions rather than an open ended arrangement. A 50 minute session is $175, a 90 minute session is $315, and there is a 3 session package at $700, which is what most couples in this position end up using. Sessions happen at my office in Kendall or over video, and video works fine for this. Plenty of engaged couples are planning a wedding from two different cities.
If you want the wider picture of how I work and who I take, I laid it out in who I actually work with. Engaged couples are one of my favorite groups precisely because nothing is broken. A couple with goodwill still in the bank can cover ground in three sessions that a couple in crisis needs most of a year for, because neither of them is bracing.
How the work usually runs
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A free 25 minute call first, for first timers, to work out whether this is worth your time at all.
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Session one is the map. Money, children, work, families, faith, and what each of you is actually expecting.
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Session two goes at whatever surfaced in session one, which is almost never what either of you predicted.
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Session three is conflict. How each of you fights, what you saw growing up, and what you will do differently on purpose.
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After the wedding, most couples do not need me again for years. Some come back at the first baby, which is a smart time to.
The one skill I care most about
If I could only give an engaged couple one thing, it would not be a shared financial plan. It would be a working way to disagree.
Every couple I see in real trouble years later got there through the same accumulation. A hundred arguments that were never really about the thing, that ended when somebody got tired rather than when anything was resolved, and that left a small deposit of resentment each time. Nobody notices deposit number 14. Everybody notices the balance at year 8.
The other thing worth knowing before the wedding is what each of you saw growing up, because that is the template you will both reach for under pressure without ever deciding to. One of you came from a house where a raised voice meant nothing and everyone was fine by dinner. The other came from a house where a raised voice meant three days of silence and somebody sleeping in a different room. Neither of you thinks of that as a belief about conflict. Both of you will act on it the first time something real goes wrong, and each of you will read the other's reaction as a character defect rather than as a different childhood.
Learning that while you still like each other is enormously easier than learning it in the middle of a bad season. If you want a preview of the mechanics, I go through them in conflict resolution strategies, and the plainer version of saying a hard thing well is in how to improve communication in marriage.
Talk it through
If you are engaged and any part of this landed, do the easy version first. Book a free 25 minute call. It is for first timers, it costs nothing, and it is the lowest effort thing on your entire wedding list.
Questions couples ask
We are not having problems. Is this still worth doing?
That is the ideal condition, not a reason to skip it. Couples with no crisis move faster than anyone else because nobody is defending themselves. Almost everything engaged couples cover with me takes a few hours now and would take months to untangle later, once the same subject has picked up five years of resentment.
How many sessions do engaged couples usually do?
Most do three, which is why the 3 session package at $700 exists. Some do a single 90 minute session because they already talk well and just want the questions asked properly. A few keep going for longer when something structural surfaces, and that is a decision we make together rather than something I sell you up front.
Do you do this over video, or do we have to come in?
Either. My office is in Kendall, and video sessions run in all 50 states and DC. Engaged couples are frequently in two different cities while they plan, and this work translates to video with no real loss.
What if the sessions bring up something serious?
Then you found it now, at the cheapest possible moment, instead of in year 6. That is the point of the exercise and it is a success, not a failure. I will say plainly if what surfaces sits outside coaching. Abuse of any kind, an active addiction, or an untreated mental health condition belongs with a licensed professional, and I will tell you so rather than coach around it.
Do you push any particular religious view of marriage?
No. I ask what each of you believes and whether the two of you have actually compared answers, especially about how children would be raised. Plenty of couples I work with have real faith, plenty have none, and a few have two different ones. My job is to make sure it is discussed on purpose rather than assumed.