Arranged marriage

Arranged Marriage counselling

Couples entering an arranged marriage have unique challenges that family and friends may be unable to help them navigate. Our clinic has over 20 years of experience in helping those individuals deal with some of the common challenges arising from an arranged marriage.

Common Issues:

  • Impact of Long-Distance Dating before Marriage: Long-distance dating is a common aspect of many arranged marriages. The long-distance dating does not allow adequate time together, interacting and making decisions together to learn about who each other is. When couples move in after marriage, they will have a lot of practical learning to do.

  • Mismatch of expectations: Common in arranged marriages are couples that spend time talking together for 3 to 6 months, but upon moving in together and living together, the reality and expectations clash often resulting in a lot of conflict. Helping couples become aware of expectations to discuss and negotiate is an important step for a successful marriage.

  • Sexual Disappointment: Couples’ lack of sexual experience and discomfort in discussing their sexual expectations leads to disappointment, pain, and unsatisfactory sexual experiences. High levels of hurt, rejection, and disappointment along with the inability to talk about their wants, needs, and desires for sex lead to conflict, hurt, and misunderstanding

  • New Country Living: In an arranged marriage, it is common for one person to move to a new country to be with their spouse. The couples often underestimate the difficulties for the person moving to the new country and underestimate the challenges for the relationship. The person moving may face difficulties in getting meaningful employment, making friends, and dealing with strong feelings of loss and loneliness from being away from friends and family from their country of origin.

Therapy Helps Couples Speed up Adjustment period for Marriage, setting a Strong Foundation

Common Issues Addressed in Therapy:

Developing Tools to Addressing Adjustment Period of Marriage:

  • Facilitating communication and agreements
  • Help to understand past conflicts, fights, and hurts that occurred before entering into therapy but are affecting the couple
  • Clarifying expectations of roles and responsibilities

Giving tools to clarify expectations of the husband and wife for their life:

  • Processing their expectations of married life and helping them work through the new reality.
  • Giving couples tools to deal with the feelings that come from seeing how the person is in reality
  • Tools to adjust to one another’s decision-making style, emotional regulation, and needs for autonomy (time together vs time alone)

Helping couples speed up communication style to get support and understanding:

  • Helping couples to better understand each other from an emotional standpoint
  • Helping couples to better identify and article their needs to facilitate negotiations of agreements around finance, sex, household chores, weekend activities, in-laws, friendships, clean standards

Tools for Addressing Sexual Intimacy:

  • Sexual education
  • Tools to increase couples awareness of their sexual intimacy needs and be able to talk about in a way that feels safe and supported
  • Helping couples to work out their needs and agreements for sex and intimacy

Financial Planning:

  • Giving couples the tools to work through their feelings and needs around money and financial planning
  • Tools to help couples form and keep agreements around finance