Around the world, in all societies, wedding celebration marks the transition from singlehood to married life. Invitation cards, wedding ceremonies and setting up new matrimonial home are common rites and rituals that couples go through to establish the new status as being married.

Marriage is a lifelong process of living with your partner and enriching your relationship with each other. All marriage will have its ups and downs. To strengthen the marriage, learn how to cope with conflicts which may develop from time to time and thus it is important to encourage couples to attend marriage preparation and enrichment programmes before they tied the knot to ensure the couple understand what is marriage life and are ready to take on the new responsibilities.

Divorce rate is going up every year around the world. Birthrate is dropping and government in many countries are implementing schemes to encourage married couple to have children. People are earning more money, more educated but that also create more relationship problem in a marriage. An understanding of marital responsibilities is a key ingredient to a successful marriage. Couples need to know themselves, their partners and learn to grow together for a meaningful relationship to work.

Marriage preparation workshop helps couples planning to get married or for newlyweds to engage them in a process of working on key issues that married couples have to manage. In a typical workshop, the following issues will be taught:

* marriage expectations, roles and responsibilities
* financial planning & housing plans
* in-law and extended family members relationship
* sexual intimacy & parenting
* conflict management and communication.

One of the common divorce reason given is "Communication Breakdown".

Effective Communication reinforces a marital relationship. Communication is a skill and effective communication takes practice. How we express our thoughts and feeling in verbal and non-verbal and listening is important.

Learn to listen or check on the feelings expressed by your partner and convey empathy if they sound emotional. Indulge in regular routine conversations such as jokes, news or daily happenings at work, with friends. Just by being together, is a form of connecting with each other.

Share your dreams, goals and hopes with each other. Have a common goal so that both of you can work together to achieve it.

Communication is important during conflicts. The words you used, the tone of your voice can send a positive or negative signal to your partner. There are couples who just didn't want to communicate when conflict arises. They choose to ignore the problem, blame the other partner, erupting with emotion, suppressing their feeling, giving the "cold silent" treatment or breaking up the marriage. Each of us are being brought up differently and there will be different views on matter such as work, money, children, in-laws, habit etc. We have to understand "what's work" rather than "who's right" in an arguement.

Effective way to resolve conflicts or differences is to deal with it immediately. Avoid pinning blame on your partner, criticism or name calling, trying to put the other partner down and don't drag up past issues but focus on the issue. Listen to your partner's perspective before trying to explain yours. Come to a mutual understanding and decision to resolve the issue.