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August 19, 2026

How to Divorce-Proof Your Marriage Before It Starts

Published by WaltLarimore at August 16, 2026

Or, an alternate title could be: Investing in Stay-Married Insurance Using the CEMENT Plan. This is written for engaged or seriously-dating couples, but can certainly be used by couples early in marriage.

Introduction: Why a Plan Matters

Not one person I have ever counseled before marriage planned to divorce. Not one. Yet, those who choose not to apply the principles in this article have a significant chance of seeing their marriage end in a very sad or even traumatic fashion. The Coalition for Divorce Reform have estimated this risk to be 40 to 50 percent for first marriages, with even higher rates for second and third marriages, if current social trends continue.

No matter the actual percentage, I suspect you would do almost anything to prevent that possibility, right? Of course!

Researchers and marriage scholars have repeatedly observed that most divorces can be traced to a handful of recurring causes — money, alcohol or substance use, sexual problems, immaturity, jealousy, unreasonable expectations, problems with in-laws, and irresponsibility. The encouraging news is that many of these causes can be discovered and dealt with before the wedding.

After publishing The Honeymoon of Your Dreams in 2007, the chapter on premarital preparation generated more requests for talks than any other. To make the principles easier to teach and remember, I developed an acrostic — CEMENT — for premarital preparation.

The image is simple: a marriage is only as strong as the foundation poured before the wedding. CEMENT is that foundation. When the cement is wet — before the wedding — you can shape it. After the wedding, the cement begins to set, and habits, expectations, and patterns become much harder to change.

This article combines the CEMENT framework with the substance of that original chapter, and updates the resources for today’s engaged couples, pastors, mentors, and counselors.

The CEMENT Plan at a Glance

CEMENT stands for six essential investments every engaged couple should make before saying “I do.” I sometimes call these six investments stay-married insurance — and like any good insurance policy, the premium paid up front is small compared with the cost of going without.

C = Counseling, premarital — professional sessions, including an MMPI for each future spouse and a frank conversation with a Christian counselor about all previous sexual activity or issues.
E = Education, premarital — books read together, weekend conferences, and a small group for engaged and seriously-dating couples.
M = Marriage Mentor — a happily married couple who meets with you once or twice a month.
E = Evaluation, premarital — a validated assessment such as SYMBIS or Prepare/Enrich.
N = Numbers — a financial course such as Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University or a Crown Financial Ministries class.
T = Talk — learning to communicate (talk) with each other and with the Lord; getting on the same page spiritually.

The remainder of this article unpacks each letter in turn, integrating the medical, theological, and practical wisdom from The Honeymoon of Your Dreams and adding updated resources couples can use today.

C — Counseling, Premarital

Find a pastoral-professional or a faith-based counselor who will walk with you and your fiancé through a series of in-depth premarital sessions. The very best premarital counseling combines a validated inventory (more on that under the second “E”) with multiple feedback sessions — typically six to eight 60- to 90-minute meetings — over the six to twelve months before the wedding.

Two specific elements I strongly recommend

An MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory) for each future spouse. Administered and interpreted by a licensed psychologist or psychiatrist, the MMPI screens for personality patterns, mood disorders, and traits that — if left unaddressed — can quietly undermine a marriage. The goal is not to disqualify anyone; the goal is awareness, healing, and realistic expectations.
An honest conversation about all previous sexual activity or issues. Both individually and together with a wise counselor, fiancés should disclose past relationships, pornography use, abuse history, and any sexual concerns. Secrets carried into a marriage have a way of detonating later. Better to confess, repent, forgive, and heal before the wedding than to be ambushed afterward.

Whenever a bride and groom are together, six people are actually present: the two as they see themselves, the two as they see each other (idealizations included), and the two as they really are — as only God can see them.

Professional premarital therapy attempts to discover much truth about underlying motivations, hidden personality issues, and unrealistic expectations. Sometimes it leads a couple to break or postpone the engagement. More often, it strengthens their commitment as they understand each other better.

A real-life example

I once had a patient I will call Sally. Sally grew up with a father who was severely abusive — physically and verbally — and very controlling. Like many women with similar histories, Sally was unconsciously drawn to men who were controlling and abusive, because she had blind spots and a deep, unmet longing to “fix” her father. When she and her fiancé Jack went through professional premarital counseling, Sally was shocked to discover that Jack — whom she had idealized as kind — was actually a controlling, sociopathic con man who would have been a disaster for her after “I do.” Sally’s “people picker” was broken. Counseling not only helped her call off the engagement but also began the deeper work of healing her own heart.

My son Scott’s experience

My son Scott and his then-fiancée Jennifer used the Prepare/Enrich inventory during their courtship and combined it with eight sessions of professional premarital counseling. Scott told me, “Dad, I not only learned tons about Jennifer, but I learned so much about myself.” Jennifer added, “The premarital testing educated us on some potential areas of conflict, and our counselor worked with us to develop realistic expectations. These sessions also gave us a safe environment in which we could discuss our expectations with a mediator. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have had that help.”

Finding a counselor

If you do not already have a faith-based counselor, several directories can help you find one nearby:

E — Education, Premarital

Read together. Attend a conference together. Sit under teaching together. Engaged couples are highly motivated learners; few seasons of life offer such openness to growth. Take advantage of it.

Books to read together

These five books, in my experience, do the most good when read aloud or discussed chapter by chapter:

Sacred Marriage by Gary Thomas — Thomas’s thesis is that God designed marriage to make us holy more than to make us happy.
The 5 Love Languages by Gary Chapman — A simple, durable framework for understanding how each spouse gives and receives love.
His Brain, Her Brain: How Divinely Designed Differences Can Strengthen Your Marriage by Walt Larimore, MD, and Barb Larimore — Barb and I wrote this to explain, in plain language, how God designed men and women with truly different brains — and how those differences can become a strength rather than a source of friction.
Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts by Drs. Les and Leslie Parrott — Practically a self-guided premarital course, now used by counselors and churches in more than twenty languages worldwide.
The Honeymoon of Your Dreams by Walt Larimore, MD, and Susan Crockett, MD — The book from which this article is adapted, focused specifically on launching the marriage well during the honeymoon and the first year.

Weekend conferences for engaged couples

Weekend to Remember® — FamilyLife (a ministry of Cru) — More than 1.5 million couples have attended these Friday-evening-to-Sunday-noon retreats. Engaged couples are welcome and benefit greatly. Find a location at com/weekend-to-remember.
Engaged Encounter (Protestant and Catholic versions) — A weekend specifically for engaged couples, designed around private dialogue between the two of you on topics presented by a team couple.

Small groups for engaged or seriously-dating couples

Merge (Watermark Community Church) — an 8-week premarital ministry for engaged or “heavily dating” couples. Watermark has trained hundreds of churches across the country to run Merge locally.
re|engage Foundation Groups — for newly married couples in the first year or two after the wedding. A natural “next step” after Merge.
Symbis Together — small-group studies based on Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts

M — Marriage Mentor

Find a happily married couple — at least ten or fifteen years ahead of you — to mentor you through your engagement, honeymoon, and first year of marriage. Do not consider finding one. Do not think about finding one. Do not meditate on finding one. Find one.

Mike and Harriet McManus, founders of Marriage Savers, trained thousands of mentor couples in churches across the country. They teach that a mentor couple offers three irreplaceable gifts:

Unconditional love — a love that grows out of joy in their own marriage and gratitude to God for that blessing.
Time — typically 2 to 3 hours per meeting for six sessions, or 12 to 18 hours total. Compare this to the average pastor’s premarital prep of one or two hours.
The gift of their own marriage — an imperfect but healthy role model: a walking parable of keys to marital success and pitfalls to avoid.

Goals of a mentor couple

To facilitate honest discussion of the issues your premarital inventory surfaces.
To model and help you develop healthy communication and conflict-resolution skills.
To help you learn to find your own solutions to your own problems.
To help you build a budget and set shared financial goals.
To encourage your spiritual growth — individually and as a couple.
To share their own marital wisdom, including their mistakes.

What a mentor couple is — and is not

A mentor couple is not a counselor. They do not need a perfect marriage; they need a healthy, honest one and a willingness to share their journey. The strongest mentor couples are those who understand that a strong marriage requires great effort and a continual reliance on God as a third partner.

Why mentoring works

Over a recent decade, 288 engaged couples were mentored at the McManus’s church. Fifty-three of those couples — more than 18 percent — decided not to marry. At first glance that looks alarming. But studies show that couples who break an engagement after taking a premarital inventory have scores almost identical to those who marry and later divorce. In other words, those 53 couples avoided a bad marriage before it began. Of the remaining 235 who did marry, only seven divorced within ten years — a divorce rate of about 3 percent. That is stay-married insurance with very high return on investment.

Where to find a mentor couple

Marriage Savers — Mike and Harriet McManus’s ministry has trained mentor couples in over 1,000 churches and helped more than 200 cities and counties adopt Community Marriage Policies, which have measurably lowered local divorce rates.
Communio (community-based marriage ministry) — A newer national ministry helping churches build mentor-couple programs and strengthen relationships in their communities.
Watermark Resources can help you find a Merge mentor-couple near you.
SYMBIS can help you find a trained facilitator in your area.
Prepare/Enrich can help you find a trained facilitator near you.
Your own pastor. If none of the above is available locally, ask your pastor to recommend a couple. Or simply ask a couple you respect — most are honored to be asked.

E — Evaluation, Premarital

A validated premarital inventory is one of the most cost-effective investments an engaged couple can make. Done well — administered six to twelve months before the wedding and followed by multiple feedback sessions with a pastor, counselor, or trained mentor couple — an inventory will surface issues that would otherwise raise their ugly heads on the honeymoon or in the first year of marriage.

The four leading instruments I recommend today, listed alphabetically:

1. FOCCUS© Pre-Marriage Inventory

com — Now in its 4th edition, FOCCUS (Facilitating Open Couple Communication, Understanding & Study) is a 151-item inventory with optional supplemental items for interfaith couples, cohabiting couples, remarriage couples, and couples with children. Since 1985, more than one million couples have completed a FOCCUS or REFOCCUS inventory. It is mentor-friendly: the FOCCUS Facilitator Manual lists each item on the left with helpful follow-up questions on the right, making it ideal for use by trained mentor couples as well as professionals.

2. Prepare/Enrich

prepare-enrich.com — One of the most widely used premarital and marriage assessment for over 45 years, built on a research base of more than 500,000 couples. Premarital research shows that couples who go through Prepare/Enrich reduce their risk of divorce by about 31 percent. The assessment customizes itself to your relationship stage and structure and is administered through a trained Facilitator; use the Facilitator Finder to locate one near you. It is the inventory most often used in the Atlanta area and meets Georgia’s premarital-education requirement for the marriage-license discount.

3. RELATE

relate-institute.org — A more than 200-item online assessment developed by relationship researchers at Brigham Young University. RELATE evaluates four broad areas (individual, couple, family-of-origin, and contextual influences) and generates a detailed report. Useful as a self-administered tool, though I still recommend pairing it with counseling or a mentor couple.

4. SYMBIS (Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts)

symbis.com — Developed by Drs. Les and Leslie Parrott, the SYMBIS Assessment is now the most widely used premarital system in existence, with more than 1,000,000 couples and 100,000 pastors and counselors trained as facilitators. It is built around the New York Times bestseller Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts and produces a personalized report covering personalities, love life, fight types, talk styles, and deepest longings. Find a facilitator at symbis.com.

A note on choosing

Any of these four inventories, used with a trained pastor, counselor, or mentor couple, will serve you well. SYMBIS and Prepare/Enrich are the two most widely used in evangelical Protestant settings today; FOCCUS is the standard in most Catholic dioceses and is the inventory Marriage Savers favors for mentor couples because of its mentor-friendly facilitator notebook.

N — Numbers

Money is the number-one cause of marital conflict — and one of the most preventable. A premarital financial course gives the two of you a shared vocabulary, a shared plan, and a shared set of habits before the wedding. As one young groom told me, going through financial training before marriage “was huge for helping us to establish our first-ever budget. Four years into it, it has provided a solid base and guideline. Without dealing with financial issues and philosophy before our marriage, we would have had many, many more problems both during our honeymoon and our marriage.”

Two proven courses for engaged couples

Financial Peace University (Dave Ramsey / Ramsey Solutions) — A nine-lesson, biblically-grounded course taught in churches, online, and via Ramsey+. The average graduate is debt-free in two years or less. Find a class near you at the FPU class finder.
Crown Financial Ministries — Biblically-based financial training in small-group, online, and self-paced formats. The MoneyLife Personal Finance Study and CrownMoneyMap are particularly useful for engaged and newly married couples.

Additional resources

If you cannot find a class locally, do not skip this step. Watch the videos, work through the workbook together at the kitchen table, and build your first budget before the wedding. The discipline you establish now will outlive any honeymoon souvenir.

T — Talk

The single most powerful predictor of long-term marital satisfaction, across decades of research, is the quality of a couple’s communication. Money, sex, in-laws, and parenting are all important — but how you talk about them is even more important. The T in CEMENT stands for talking with two parties: with each other, and with the Lord.

Talking with each other

Communication skills are learned, not inherited. Every couple I have ever counseled — including Barb and me — has had to learn them deliberately. Premarital counseling, a mentor couple, and the books and conferences above will all give you tools, but practice is what makes them stick. A few foundational habits worth establishing before the wedding:

A weekly “state-of-the-union” conversation — 30 to 60 minutes, no phones, on the same evening each week, where you talk about the week’s wins, frustrations, and decisions.
A daily check-in — even five minutes — to share what is on your heart.
A rule of repair — when (not if) you wound each other, the offender apologizes specifically and the offended forgives genuinely. Couples who repair quickly stay close.

Talking with the Lord

Get on the same page spiritually before you walk down the aisle. Discuss — frankly and prayerfully — your beliefs about God, the authority of Scripture, the local church, prayer, giving, raising children in the faith, and how you will worship together. Spiritual mismatch is one of the most painful and most preventable causes of marital distress.

Practical suggestions:

Pray together out loud, at least briefly, every day of your engagement. If you cannot pray together while engaged, you will not magically start after the wedding.
Read a short Scripture passage together each day. A daily devotional designed for couples can help — for example, the free YouVersion couples and marriage reading plans available on any device, with hundreds of plans for engaged and newly married couples.
Choose a home church together and begin attending as a couple before the wedding, not after.
Discuss tithing and giving openly. Decide, before the wedding, what percentage of your combined income you will give and where you will give it.

A warning about unwillingness

If one of you is not willing to do this work — to talk, to pray, to invest in counseling, to read the books, to meet with the mentor couple — pay attention. As one wise person has written:

When a young man is irresponsible and unwilling to work before marriage, the chances are extremely good that he’ll continue the same pattern of behavior after marriage. In the same way, the young woman who has shown no sense of personal responsibility before marriage will likely also be unwilling to do her part in maintaining the home after marriage. If you’re planning to marry such a person with the expectation of changing him or her, it is very likely that you’re in for a sad disappointment. Regardless of how sincerely one may promise to change after marriage, it is very unlikely that such a person will suddenly alter the habits of a lifetime.

Better to discover this before the wedding than after.

A Final Word — and a Picture

Recently, my friends Edna and Charles celebrated their sixtieth wedding anniversary. Edna was stunningly beautiful, with her silvery hair and peacock-blue silk dress. The sparkle in her eye offered a glimpse into the heart of a woman far younger than her current years. They were so cute, and so obviously still in love, staying by each other’s side and holding each other’s hand throughout the evening. When asked for the secret of their marriage’s longevity, Charles replied with a charming grin: “We’re still on our honeymoon.”

Oh, that we could all be so blessed! There is great joy in a balanced, loving relationship centered on God’s divine design for husbands and wives. The CEMENT plan is not magic. It is simply the application — before the wedding — of the same wisdom that has held marriages together for thousands of years. Pour the cement well. Pour it deeply. Pour it together. And then, by God’s grace, build something that will last.

For Thought, Discussion, and Prayer

Use these questions individually first, then together with your fiancé, your pastor, your counselor, or your mentor couple.

C — Are we willing to invest in professional premarital counseling, including an MMPI for each of us and a frank conversation about all previous sexual activity?
E — Which two or three books will we read together before the wedding? Which weekend conference will we attend, and when?
M — Who is our mentor couple? If we do not yet have one, who could we ask this week?
E — Which validated assessment (Prepare/Enrich, SYMBIS, FOCCUS, or RELATE) will we take, and who will walk us through the results?
N — Which financial course will we complete together before the wedding, and when will we sit down to build our first budget?
T — How and when will we pray together, read Scripture together, and worship together — beginning now, not someday?
And finally — how and when will we put each of the above on the calendar?

Resources at a Glance

Premarital Assessments

Counseling Directories

Mentor-Couple Ministries

Weekend Conferences

Financial Preparation

Books for Engaged Couples

Daily Devotional Resources

YouVersion Bible App — couples and marriage reading plans

©2026 by Walt Larimore, MD. Adapted and updated from Chapter 3 of The Honeymoon of Your Dreams (Regal, 2007), co-authored with Susan Crockett, MD. Permission granted for use in articles, sermons, and pastoral teaching with attribution.

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