Marriage Mentoring

What are some benefits of Marriage Mentoring?

Do you and your spouse have mentors for your marriage? Forging a friendship with a couple who has been married longer than you can be a great way to gain support and insight into married life. It’s important for you and your spouse to connect with another committed couple that’s passionate about marriage–and about guiding the two of you toward lifelong love.

Marriage mentors can help during all three seasons in your marriage:

• Prepare: the engagement season, plus the early years of your marriage when you’re working to launch lifelong love
• Repair: a season that involves navigating tough situations, ongoing conflict, traumatic events, or big life changes
• Enrich: a season where you’re ready to take your marriage to the next level, whether you’ve been stuck in a rut or are just ready to take the next step forward toward a more fulfilling marriage

You receive objective feedback

Even in the best of marriages, we can drift without realizing it. We don’t remain still. We either move toward something or drift backward. We all have blind spots. And the deceptive thing about someone with blind spots is they are blind to their blind spots. That’s where having an objective 3rd party such as a mentoring couple provide objective feedback is so valuable. They can hold up a mirror to your relationship that allows you and your spouse to see your marriage as it is—not what you think it is. If we don’t have truth-tellers in our lives, we will grow complacent and stagnate, holding onto mindsets, bitterness, and behaviors that are not fruitful for our marriage or us as individuals.

You get the benefit of experienced wisdom

I’m guessing you haven’t experienced everything in your marriage yet. Neither has your mentor couple, but they probably have experienced more than you so that they have a different perspective than you do. We all carry baggage into our marriages that comes from our previous experiences and family of origin. Chances are, we have believed lies about ourselves and have hung on to our baggage because we’ve been carrying it around so long it just feels comfortable. An experienced mentor couple can help identify those lies and reveal the truth about you found in God’s Word. A mentor couple isn’t perfect. They are just further down the road in their marriage so that they can help you navigate some of the potholes and prevent you from getting sidetracked by taking wrong turns. You get to benefit from both their successes and failures!

You have someone who cares for you and your spouse to be your advocate

Sometimes we think our ideas and solutions are best. Having a mentor to bounce these ideas off of can provide valuable insight into how your spouse may receive your idea or solution. A mentor couple can look at a scenario from a different angle, and get a glimpse of what it might be like to be on the other side of you. This is vital information to have so you can tweak your plan accordingly, finding new ways to express love, honor, and respect to your spouse that you may have never thought about. A marriage mentor couple can help you see where there may be problem areas in how you’re relating to your spouse—whether intentionally or unintentionally.

It’s proven to increase marriage satisfaction.

Couples derive great benefit from connecting with an experienced mentor couple. The quality of their communication improves, their parenting becomes more effective, their decision making becomes more cohesive, they handle conflict more constructively, and their future looks more optimistic and hopeful.

“69% of couples involved in marriage mentoring indicate the quality of their own relationship improves”

(Dr Edward Gray, TWOgether Pittsburgh)

It reduces divorce

The Vanier Institute goes further by saying that “marriages overall have a 59% success rate. Couples undergoing marriage preparation or pre-marriage counseling and mentoring have a success rate of 80-90%”.

So marriage mentoring can increase the likelihood of couples staying together by 44%!

“Couples on the brink of divorce who enroll in marriage education with follow-up mentoring increase their chances of staying together from virtually 0% to 70%.”

(Marriage Savers).

How do I find a Marriage Mentor couple?

We’d encourage you to look around at the people already in your lives. Is there an experienced couple in your church, neighborhood, or other social circles that both you and your fiancé admire and would be comfortable meeting with? You might consider participating in a marriage-related Sunday school class or attending a premarital retreat, where you’ll meet other couples (who are one step ahead of you) who are committed to investing in not only their marriage but possibly other’s marriages as well. Talk to your pastor to see if he might be able to recommend a couple. If you don’t currently attend a church, check with one or two in your area to see if they offer anything along these lines. Or, you can explore the options below.