Abstract
With the divorce rate at approximately 50% for first marriages and even higher for those previously married, authors Elena Lesser Bruun and Anne Ziff offer a comprehensive, nine-chapter guidebook for clinicians helping premarital couples swing the odds in their favor. Marrying Well: The Clinician’s Guide to Premarital Counseling provides vivid examples from the authors' clinical work as well as couples counseling strategies. Clinicians seeking to learn more about this new field of premarital counseling would be well prepared after reading this work. Bruun and Ziff discuss marriage within a 21st-century cultural context. Nothing is missing here and the authors touch on even the stickiest of interpersonal issues: parenting, money, and sex. Ziff writes, “Our role as clinicians in premarital education and counseling is to guide couples to better understand themselves and to thereby make informed decisions about the marriage they are contemplating” (p. 2).
As premarital counseling is a relatively new field, the authors included a background chapter on the development of the field and a brief discussion on the history of marriage. This chapter shares how the history of marriage was fraught with myths which the authors promptly dispelled. For each myth, the authors presented the actuality. Every type and form of marriage we see today existed previously in time, including prenuptial agreements, arranged marriages, divorce, and polygamy. There is, indeed, nothing new under the sun. In light of these findings, the authors do not assert that any one form of marriage is better than another and they are critical of counselors and therapists supporting an idealized, rather than a realistic, personalized model of marriage. It is this fluidity that is necessary for clinicians to best guide the couple in their relationship, as opposed to holding to an antiquated model of marriage that may not have worked as well as it is remembered. The gap between the ideal and the realized is the space in which clinicians are to work, according to Bruun and Ziff, focusing the couples on the strengths of their relationship, and their power and ability to marry well, on their own terms.
Bruun and Ziff are passionate for marriages to succeed; they repeatedly emphasize the “need to prevent serious problems before marriages take place” (p. 12), and they show us, as clinicians, how best to guide our couples. This guidance most often takes the form of asking the correct questions, so that each member of the couple can assess if marriage is indeed the next, best step, or if both members of the couple would be better served by dissolving the relationship. Instead of the traditional definition of marriage as successful if it is stable and endures over time, the authors ascribe to a more contemporary understanding of marital success which includes improvement and satisfaction.
Satisfaction is possible within the marital context when each spouse has a good understanding of the other and when the couple can work together on common goals. Leading couples to that point (and beyond) is the clinician’s job. Bruun and Ziff detail the questions clinicians might ask the couple to understand who they are as individuals within their relationship. For each type of couple that presents to counseling (first marriage, previously married and/or blending families, anxious couples, etc.) the authors provide a clinical example and their suggested structure for working with such a couple.
The heart of this text covers the common premarital problems, individual factors that predict a satisfying marriage, and couple predictors for a satisfying marriage. Problems such as race and ethnicity, gender, or finances, are handled by Bruun in a historically and culturally appropriate way. She encourages clinicians to not assume an understanding of the person or persons within the couple based on a label, given the diversity of beliefs, cultural practices, and values. Whether working with the problem the couple has identified or gently debating whether to broach other issues brought to light within the premarital counseling and education process, Bruun includes helpful points for counselors and therapists to encourage the couples' effective communication and setting and maintenance of healthy boundaries. The individual and couple predictors provide a point of departure for clinicians, helping the couple to move forward, as prepared as possible, into life as they have imagined. The chapter on eight premarital stages serves as a compass, helping both the couple and the clinician to examine the pace and progress of the relationship.
Bruun and Ziff close their book with a proposal about how to “redesign” marriage and a charge to clinicians to track the couples with whom they work for research purposes. We still need to know: what is the long-term effect of premarital education and counseling? Are the couples who participated in premarital counseling experiencing successful marriages? Marrying Well: The Clinician’s Guide to Premarital Counseling is an easy read and very practical. Bruun and Ziff have accomplished a resource appropriate for professionals and advanced students alike.