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Welcome to the 9th day of #LoveBlog! Today’s topic is Counseling. You can find the rest of this month’s prompts at the original post. Dan and I received a free Couple Checkup in exchange for this post. All opinions are my own.
Next month, Dan and I will celebrate our 3rd wedding anniversary. This summer will mark 6 years since our first date. Where has the time gone?!
I never expected marriage to be this wonderful. Marriage is basically living with my best friend, acting ridiculously silly, cuddling all the time, and leaning on each other when the low parts of life hit us.
Choosing the right partner makes marriage easier. Compatibility obviously varies by person and by relationship, but communication is key to any successful marriage. I’m so glad that Dan and I can talk to each other easily.
Sometimes having an outside perspective can spark fresh communication for even the chattiest of couples. Dan and I have now taken Couple Checkup 3 times!
What is Couple Checkup?
The Couple Checkup is an online assessment tool designed to identify the unique relationship strengths and growth areas of dating, engaged, or married couples. Couples receive a 15-20 page report on their relationship and can download a free Discussion Guide, designed to help them learn proven relationship skills. Research has shown this process improves relationships by stimulating honest dialogue, increasing understanding, and empowering couples.
After you and your partner both privately answer a bunch of questions on a scale of Agree Strongly to Disagree Strongly, you receive a report.
The report sections include:
- results summary of strength and growth areas
- detailed breakdown of each area, including specific things we might improve
- map of couple relationship
- SCOPE personality scales
The relationship skills (strength/growth areas) include:
- Communication
- Conflict Resolution
- Financial Management
- Sexual Relationship
- Spiritual Beliefs
- Roles & Responsibilities
- Family & Friends
There’s not a right or wrong answer with Couple Checkup. Your report doesn’t give a passing or failing grade. Rather, the report reveals both strength areas and areas for improvement. Going through the report together can help a couple talk about problems or concerns that might be difficult to bring up.
How does Couple Checkup help couples?
This is the third time Dan and I took Couple Checkup. Our results this year were very similar to last year. Every single area is a strength… except Spiritual Beliefs.
Like I mentioned last year, this is a flaw in the assessment. The questions ask how you feel personally about spiritual beliefs, not how you feel about the role of spiritual beliefs in your relationship. Dan and I totally agree about the role of our differing spiritual beliefs in our marriage.
Related: Counseling Isn’t Just for When You’re Fighting
Even with our strength areas, Dan and I talked about how we can improve. For example, I worry that he’s not sharing his feelings with me when he actually just doesn’t have feelings to share.
That sounds bad now that I’ve looked over that sentence, but I mean that I worry unnecessarily that he’s suppressing negative feelings that don’t exist in the first place.
We also both wish we were friends with more couples. Technically, lots of our friends are couples, but most of them don’t live anywhere near us.
Finally, we both have concerns about feeling accepted and respected by our respective families. We each have ongoing issues on both sides of our families, unfortunately, and only time and backbones of steel will get us through those.
Which leads me into the SCOPE personality scales. For the most part, Dan and I scored similarly with all the personality scales. However, I might have too much of a pleasing personality. I’m going to take a wild guess and say that stems from negative overreactions from family when I do stand up for myself. Fortunately, this doesn’t affect my ability to ask Dan for what I want or need in our marriage.
When do we stop being newlyweds?
Even though Dan and I have faced some heavy challenges in our marriage, I still feel young. I still feel head-over-heels in love with him. My mother’s death and my problems with Crohn’s Disease would have happened regardless of my marital status. Having Dan as a husband just makes them easier to bear.
We know how to take the good with the bad. In the same day, Dan and I might play Pokémon Go, clean the house, giggle about farts, cook a healthy meal, and walk to Kroger for cupcakes. Because we’re adults.
Life is about balance. So is marriage. Couple Checkup can help you find that balance.
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Built on a solid research foundation, PREPARE/ENRICH is the leading inventory and skill-building program. Now they offer an easy at-home assessment for couples at any stage of relationship. The Couple Checkup is designed to help couples build a more satisfying and intimate relationship. PREPARE/ENRICH is a sponsor of #LoveBlog2017.
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Brita Long is the pink and sparkly personality behind the Christian feminist lifestyle blog, Belle Brita. While her first love will always be Paris, she lives happily with her husband Daniel Fleck in the Atlanta area.
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Sara blogs at Mrs. Imperfect about letting go of perfect and embracing your quirks and messes. She writes about marriage, self love, and mental health. She is a writer, book lover, traveler and crafter, with an interest in the arts, history, and psychology.
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Ivanna is a registered nurse with a large dose of colorful creativity. She writes at Provocative Joy while working overseas with Mercy Ships. Ivanna enjoys the art of head wrapping and the thrill of thrifting. She writes about living intentionally in community and in marriage, and the challenges of making a difference no matter which country she’s in.
Loading InLinkz ...Enter the #LoveBlog2017 Giveaway!
I am so excited to include a giveaway for this year’s #LoveBlog! It started 02/01/2017 and runs through the end of the month. US residents only. I love my international readers, but international giveaways are more difficult to manage legally.
I will verify the winning entry myself before emailing the winner during the first week of March. If the winner doesn’t respond, I’ll start the process over again. Today’s sponsor, PREPARE/ENRICH, is giving away a free Couple Checkup!
Have you ever taken Couple Checkup? How do you and your significant other discuss issues?
I love that you’ve done the checkup multiple times! We’ve done it once, last year and it was eye-opening, in a good way! I love what you said, “Choosing the right partner makes marriage easier.” I couldn’t agree more!
One day I will write a blog post called, “Life is Hard. Marriage Shouldn’t Be.” Because I think when people say marriage is hard, they actually mean one of two things.
1) Marriage takes effort. But putting forth effort is not the equivalent of doing something difficult.
2) Life is hard, and once you’re married, anything that hurts your spouse hurts you too. But that doesn’t make marriage itself hard.
I plan on waiting until I’ve been married longer before I write this, though…
I couldn’t agree more! I thought I was the weird one because I think marriage is quite easy…
This is a great insight. Our first year of marriage was quite challenging, but most of that honestly was because life is hard (or frankly, because life sucks sometimes).
I just have to laugh because I didn’t know my ironic premarital counseling session was a Couple Checkup when I wrote my post about it! But now that I see examples from your report, I know for sure that was what we did, but with a psychologist trained in interpreting PREPARE/ENRICH results. My mother gifted it to us in addition to the pastoral counseling we were doing.
Looking back, it could’ve been more helpful if we knew ourselves better and if our counselor was a better fit for us. He was kind of weird haha. I’ll have to give the Checkup another try!
Oh, it’s cool you did the training with a facilitator! PREPARE/ENRICH has a different assessment if you’re working with a facilitator.
But yeah, having a weird counselor probably doesn’t help much. Luckily you can do Couple Checkup on your own! Also it asks a few background questions on your stage of life. I’m curious to take it again after we have kids.
My answer to the title question is that no, I don’t think you can stay newlyweds indefinitely. My guess is that you’ll be newlyweds a lot longer than most couples, though, just as Jill and I were.
That probably means I also can’t just celebrate my 29th birthday a second time this summer…
In all seriousness, thank for the compliment. That means a lot coming from you!
I love feeling in love, even though I know marriage and love are so much more than just that feeling. I’m pretty happy it’s lasted almost 3 years so far. 🙂
My father was 29 for many years. (He was a school teacher, and it was his none-of-your-business answer if students asked his age.)
When I was in the 3rd grade, my teacher told my class she was celebrating her 30th birthday.
An embarrassing number of years passed before I realized that wasn’t likely if her youngest son was older than I.
I think it’s wonderful you guys are in constant communication and looking for ways to even improve upon strengths. Communication never lacked in my marriage, but expression of negative emotions certainly did. I look forward to trying out Couple Checkup in the future!
We got another Couple Checkup free this year too and I was planning on writing about it today but we didn’t get around to taking it in time 🙁
You got me until I start reading more… “Christian feminist” ugh! There is no such thing. God tell us who we are on his word and that should be enough.
Dating in the 21st Century is different and complex, Alot of relationships, courtships and marriages these days are built on weak, fake foundations, lies and infidelity these recent days.
I wasn’t sure my spouse was having an affair due to alot of bad advise from friends and family members. He was in a work environment where there were a lot of ladies, i had to check to make sure and also get some closure. I was not able to get this done till I met some sort of Investigator on the Web. I was able to clone phone information and get remote access to his devices in great time. You can get more of this testimony by mailing benitasherAToutlook Mail as i cannot share much information on here.