They are NOT designed to tell you whether or not you should get married, but to help you realize and deal with differences in your expectations, family backgrounds, and personality traits. Ignoring these issues in your marriage could result in serious marital problems.
These are the three premarital tests/inventories that are most commonly used by counselors, pastors, mentors, and marriage educators when working with an engaged couple.
FOCCUS -- Facilitating Open Couple Communication, Understanding & Study
The FOCCUS inventory is considered by many marriage experts to be very user-friendly, affordable, and couple centered. It is an adaptable, research based test with 189 questions. It is widely used in Catholic Pre-Cana programs.The questions focus on communication issues, finances, sexuality, interfaith relationships, and cohabitation consequences.
There are five versions:
- General
- Christian, Non-Denominational
- Catholic
- Alternate for learning-impaired
- REFOCCUS for remarrying couples
PREPARE/ENRICH Premarital Inventory
The PREPARE/ENRICH Inventory has a Christian perspective. Via 195 statements, the inventory targets marriage expectations, personality issues, communication issues, conflict resolution, finances, having fun together, sexual issues, parenting, dealing with family and friends, spirituality, and flexibility.There are five versions available:
- PREPARE for premarital couples
- PREPARE-MC for premarital couples with children
- PREPARE-CC for cohabiting couples with or without children
- MATE for couples who are over the age of 50
- ENRICH for married couples
RELATE - Relationship Evaluation Questionnaire
The RELATE inventory can be used for both premarital education and also for marriage enrichment. It has 271 items addressing issues of communication, conflict management, consensus building, family-of-origin, personality traits, and more.An advantage to RELATE is that couples who are separated by distance can use the on-line premarital inventory individually.
