The Kind Of Person Who Needs Premarital Counseling

The kind of person who needs premarital counseling is likely not someone to envy.  Some people might genuinely benefit from this type of counseling, but it is far from impossible for someone to adequately prepare themselved for marriage with nothing more than reason, introspection, and communication with their potential spouse.  Counsel from others is not a special ingredient to promoting an ideal dating relationship--and the same is true of romantic relationships during engagement and marriage.

Someone who is not intelligent enough to understand the conceptual nature of marriage and their own personality to at least a basic extent is not ready for a serious dating relationship, much less a formal marriage.  If a person needs others to prompt reflection about even the most foundational truths about marriage, such as it being about the partners themselves before it is about family or that conflicting personality types make for a very unstable marriage, they are not capable of the independent reflection and competent decision-making called for in a serious romantic relationship.

Marriage is not about relying on others outside of the marriage to do something as foundational as pointing out that rationality, mutuality, openness, and compatible personalities are absolute requirements for a marriage that is likely to flourish.  By the normal age of physical sexual maturity alone, everyone has already had plenty of time to contemplate their own selves, their ideal romantic partner, and how reason and morality relate to these things.  No one is without excuse for not considering these things at least somewhat.

If both partners are not aware of their own standing with respect to the marriage, they are not in the right ideological or introspective state of mind for marriage in the first place.  Outsourcing the identification of potential relationship problems or the clarification of how to communicate to a romantic/marital partner accomplishes little beyond robbing one of opportunities to directly reflect on key truths as early as possible.  Indeed, a partner lacking the initiative or intellectual structure to seriously contemplate the relationship is not a promising candidate for marriage.