During the initial session both you and your partner will individually complete the FOCCUS questionnaire, which covers the following areas:

1. Lifestyle Expectations: Couples explore their shared values, beliefs, and goals. This helps you and your partner ensure you both have a clear understanding of what marriage means to you, and how you envision your life together.
2. Friends and Interests: Understanding how maintaining friendships and pursuing individual hobbies is important for personal fulfillment and well-being. Developing a balance of alone and couple interests enriches the relationship.
3. Personality Match: Identifying similarities and differences in each of your personality types to explore how your personalities interact and accept the others style.
4. Personal: You and your partner learn about each other’s personalities, communication styles, and emotional needs. This insight can prevent misunderstandings and foster empathy in the relationship.
5. Communication: Skills for effective communication provide you and your partner with the tools to enhance your ongoing relationship. Exploring the importance of active listening, expressing needs and concerns constructively, will avoid common pitfalls like blame and defensiveness.
6. Problem Solving: Learning about differences and how to build and strengthen your relationship rather than causing harm. This might include negotiating, finding compromise, and maintaining respect even during disagreements.
7. Religion, Spirituality, and Values: The key bonders which constitute the day-to-day glue of the marriage.
8. Parenting: Facilitating discussion and decision making about parenting, shared hopes, fears, and expectations for each other as parents.
9. Extended Family: Recognising the influence of your family of origin. The relationships, reflections, and perception in which you were raised are the foundation on which you create your new family.
10. Sexuality: Developing an understanding of a healthy sexual relationship.
11. Finances: Seeking an understanding as individuals regarding financial management in a day-to-day context and future planning.
12. Readiness to Marriage: Understanding the motivation, compatibility, and the approach to the future.

Following the initial session, the FOCCUS practitioner will then facilitate collaborative discussion with you and your partner regarding areas in which key differences were identified. By exploring these areas, pre-marriage preparation sessions aim to equip you and your partner with the tools and understanding needed to navigate your relationship with resilience and harmony. We recommend that FOCCUS is completed over a series of three sessions, with the initial session consisting of the survey, and the second and third sessions identifying and discussing key differences with the aim of establishing shared expectations.

Fee Structure: $185 (Inclusive of up to three sessions).