Pre-Marital Counseling | Couples Therapy | Regina Abayev, JD, LMFT
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Pre-Marital Counseling

The foundation
of a lasting
union starts here

The investment you make in your relationship before the marriage shapes everything that follows. This is structured, specific work designed to get your union off to a strong and honest start.

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Pre-marital counseling Hermosa Beach
Why It Matters

Start close
and stay that way

Most people spend more time planning the logistics of their wedding day than the foundation of their union. Pre-marital counseling at this practice is designed to close that gap. We identify the high-risk areas, stress-test the assumptions you are each bringing, and build a concrete framework for navigating the decisions that will define the marriage: money, power, intimacy, family, and what happens when things get hard.

Together we identify the issues most important to address in your relationship, then develop the tools to tackle disagreements and difficult conversations with care rather than shutting down, endless arguing, or defensiveness.

The conversations that feel uncomfortable before the wedding are the ones most worth having before the wedding.

What This Looks Like

Pre-marital counseling in this practice is structured and specific. We identify the live issues in your relationship, the places where your values, expectations, and histories diverge, and work through them directly. You leave with a deeper understanding of each other and concrete tools for navigating difficulty when it comes.

Most couples complete this work in 6 to 12 sessions. The number depends on what surfaces and how much you want to address before the wedding.

6–12
Sessions, typically
A structured process for identifying and addressing the issues most likely to create friction in your marriage, before they have a chance to.
What We Address

The issues worth
getting ahead of

These are the conversations most couples avoid before the wedding. The ones that feel too risky, too uncomfortable, or too far off to worry about yet. This work creates a structured space to have them with care and honesty, before years of avoidance make them harder.

Values, Faith, and Future Direction
Core Values and Faith
Differences in religious practice, spiritual belief, and core values often feel manageable before children arrive. Once they do, those differences become decisions with real consequences. Understanding where you each stand — and how much flexibility exists — is foundational work.
Future Goals and Life Vision
Where do you want to live in ten years? What does success look like to each of you? How do you each define a good life? Couples who have not built a shared vision can arrive at midlife heading in opposite directions without knowing when the divergence started.
Relationship to Work and Ambition
If one person's career requires constant travel or 70-hour weeks and the other expects a present, available partner, the friction becomes unsustainable. These expectations need to be named before they become resentments.
Different Conflict Styles
A pursuer married to a withdrawer will consistently trigger each other in ways that feel impossible to interrupt. Understanding how you each move through conflict — and building tools to navigate it together — is one of the most important investments this work makes.
Money, Power, and Family
Financial Transparency and Beliefs
Money is rarely just money. It carries meaning, fear, and history. Undisclosed debt, different approaches to saving and spending, disagreements about financial risk, and different beliefs about what money is for — these need to be on the table before the marriage begins.
Family Structure and Roles
Who earns, who manages the household, how decisions get made, what happens if one person steps back from their career — the assumptions couples carry about roles and structure are often unspoken and deeply held. Surfacing them early prevents significant conflict later.
In-Law Boundaries
The inability to prioritize the couple over the extended family is one of the most consistent sources of marital strain. If one partner cannot hold a boundary with their own parents, the other eventually feels like an outsider in their own home.
Parenting Philosophy
Most couples agree they want children and have never discussed discipline, religious upbringing, schooling, or how they would navigate a child with significant needs. These conversations are far easier before a child is in crisis than during one.
Intimacy, Connection, and Unfinished Business
Undisclosed Resentments
Most couples enter marriage carrying things that were never fully addressed — a grievance that was dropped, a pattern that was tolerated, a conversation that never happened. Left unaddressed, these do not disappear. They accumulate.
Mismatched Desire and Intimacy
Differences in desire are common and manageable when couples have a shared language for navigating them. Without that language, the gap widens quietly until it feels insurmountable. My doctoral training in clinical sexology means this conversation can happen with real depth and directness.
Unmet Expectations
High-functioning people often carry a detailed internal picture of how life and partnership should look. When reality does not match that picture, the result is resentment directed at the partner rather than the expectation. Making those pictures explicit is part of this work.
The Silent Division of Labor
Resentment here is rarely about who does the dishes. It is about the mental load: one partner carrying the project management of the entire household while the other executes tasks. That imbalance, left unaddressed, becomes corrosive over time.

"The opposite of love is not hate; it is indifference. And the path to indifference is paved with 'unimportant' things that were never discussed."

— Regina Abayev, JD, LMFT

How the Work Is Structured

A structured process
with a clear goal

Sessions are active from the first meeting. My training in the Gottman Method, Relational Life Therapy, and clinical sexology means the full range of what couples bring into a marriage is within clinical scope. Nothing needs to be edited out of the conversation.

01
Identify the live issues
We surface the areas of potential friction specific to your relationship, the places where your histories, values, and expectations diverge, in the context of what the two of you are actually bringing.
02
Address them directly
Each session is structured and active. Some areas require a single honest conversation. Others require real clinical depth. We go where the work takes us.
03
Build the tools
You leave with a shared language for navigating difficulty, a clearer understanding of how each of you moves through conflict, and the capacity to repair when the relationship is under pressure.

Most couples assume their values align until they are forced to make a joint decision about money, family, or what kind of parents they want to be. We get there first.

Future-Proof the Partnership

Build the marriage
with intention

This practice serves couples in Hermosa Beach, Manhattan Beach, the South Bay, and across California via telehealth.

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Other areas of couples work

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