Couples who complete a premarital education program face roughly 31% lower odds of divorce than couples who skip it, according to a large, random household survey published in the Journal of Family Psychology by researchers Scott Stanley, Paul Amato, Christine Johnson, and Howard Markman. That’s not a small edge. It’s the kind of number that should make premarital counseling standard practice rather than the thing engaged couples roll their eyes through because an officiant or a set of in-laws insisted on it. Instead, most couples still skip it entirely.
The reluctance isn’t irrational on its face. Sitting across from a counselor a few months before a wedding, working through finances, in-laws, and how you’ll fight fair, can feel like homework assigned during the most celebratory stretch of your relationship. A lot of couples treat it as a box next to the cake tasting and the seating chart, something to get through rather than get something from. But the research on what premarital preparation actually does to a marriage keeps landing in the same place: it works, and it works by more than a little.
A meta-analysis of premarital prevention programs published in the peer-reviewed journal Family Relations, led by researchers Jason Carroll and William Doherty, pooled outcome data across multiple studies and found an average effect size of 0.80 for participants. In plain terms, the researchers wrote that the average person who went through a premarital program ended up better off afterward than 79% of people who didn’t, with about a 30% increase in measures of relationship success like communication skills and conflict management. Those are the exact mechanics that later show up as lower divorce odds: couples who learn to name a problem calmly in year one are less likely to be blindsided by the same unaddressed problem in year eight.
Why So Few Couples Actually Go
Despite that track record, most couples never sit through it. A 2020 study in Psychology, Public Policy, and Law by researchers at Brigham Young University put a number on the gap: only about one-third of couples participate in any form of premarital education or counseling before marrying, even though 40 to 50% of first marriages and roughly 60% of second marriages in the U.S. still end in divorce. The same researchers found that state-level policies designed to promote premarital education haven’t meaningfully moved divorce rates, largely because participation stayed too low and inconsistent for the intervention to reach the couples who needed it most.
That gap between what works and what people actually do says something about how couples plan weddings versus how they plan marriages. Engaged couples will spend months comparing venues and tasting cake flavors, decisions that matter for one day, but treat a few hours of structured conversation about money, family, and conflict as optional. The programs that show the strongest results aren’t secretive about their content. They walk couples through practical skills: how to bring up a complaint without it turning into an attack, how to talk about debt and spending habits before they’re sharing a bank account, how to set expectations around extended family involvement before the holidays force the issue.
None of the research suggests premarital counseling is a guarantee. Plenty of couples who go through it still divorce, and plenty who skip it build lasting marriages without a single structured session. What the data actually shows is a shift in odds, not a promise, the same way seatbelts don’t prevent every crash but change the numbers meaningfully for the people who use them.
The couples who benefit most seem to be the ones who go in willing to be honest rather than performative, treating the sessions as a real diagnostic rather than a formality to survive before the honeymoon. Given the size of the effect researchers keep finding, the more surprising statistic might be how many couples still walk past it. A few hours of uncomfortable conversation before the wedding is a small price against odds this favorable, and the research on that trade keeps saying the same thing every time someone runs the numbers again.
