Experienced legal practitioner Lawyer Yaw Boafo has stated that the increasing insistence on marriage counselling in churches has rather coincided with an alarming increase in the number of divorce and marital conflicts in the country’s courts.
The former president of the Bar Association in the Ashanti region made the disclosures while arguing on the Ultimate Breakfast Show on the essence of marriage counselling and whether or not it guarantees successful marriages
“I’ve been a lawyer for 22 years and when we were called to the bar in those days, you come to court rarely to see that a judge has not sat because a matrimonial matter was being heard in chambers. But now it’s gotten so endemic that we have a court specifically called a gender court that deals with matrimonial cases and when you go there it is as packed as a criminal court.”
“And the clear evident which we’ve seen and most lawyers have done copious research on it just that we have not written it down is that, 98% of the people coming to divorce are between thirty to thirty-five.
They all got married 4-5 years in the churches but in the past where there was no counselling we had next to nothing negligible divorce rates. But now that almost every church has a counselling of eight months, six months et-cetera surprisingly there is the connection and an increase in diverse rates and that is the question we need to avert our minds to,” he pointed out.
“A lot of us have taken interest in doing matrimonial matters and what we have noticed is that they go through this counselling and they are taught that there is a particular way of marriage working. But you don’t really teach people how to relate to each other because human relationships generally evolve. When you leave people to determine between themselves how to relate to each other, it works you can only teach something that has a definite answer like arithmetic,” HE insisted.
But counsellor and lady pastor with Light House Chapel International who was crowned Ultimate Mother Supremo, Lady Pastor Regina Hage disagreed with the stance.
She contended that marriage counselling was relevant in exposing people to the nuances of marriage before they joined the ship.
She explained, “We are just helping them because we tackle various areas that you need to know before getting married.”
“In the beginning you need to know why you are even entering into it. As you go there are two different people coming together and there are three main conflict areas in marriages when it comes to communication, finances and sex. These three areas, at least we need to expose you to it.”
Challenging the argument that marriage counsellors had developed a stiff template to marriage she stated that the counselling process only focused on models but emphasized that it took the temperaments of the couple to deal with emerging peculiarities in the marriage to make it work.
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