The effects of premarital relationship enrichment programs on marriage strength: A narrative review article

Abstract

Background and Purpose: Strengthening marriage relationship includes a body of programs focusing on boosting the couples' common understanding, honesty, trust, empathy and coordination. Premarital consultation along with the couples' relationship enrichment can result in their improved relationship. The current study aims to analyze the studies conducted on consultation programs for marriage relationship enrichment and marriage strength. Methods: The current study is a narrative review performed using key words related to advanced search in database like Pubmed, Google Scholar, Web of Sciences, Magiran, Iran Medex and SID in the past 20 years. After recovering 57 papers, 10 Persian ones along with 25 English papers directly related to this issue and cited by famous authors many times have been given in the paper's results. Results: The findings show that premarital consultation through promoting life skills, familiarity with spouse selection criteria and paving the ground for accepting gender role in marriage can be considered as one of the critical components of strengthening marriage. Conclusion: Premarital consultation helps human beings to improve their relationship by knowing themselves and their would-be partner, clarifying their expectations from each other, promoting problem solving and getting aware of compatible and incompatible characteristics before marriage. By considering the population policy of Iran and in order to meeting favorite relationship between newly wedding couples, it's suggested to provide suitable premarital counseling packages according to Iranian socio-cultural context.