Pre-Marital Counselling is the Cause of High Divorce Rate in Ghana

Lawyer Yaw Boafo, the former president of the Ashanti Regional Bar Association has made a revelation that the increasing insistence on marriage counselling in churches is rather being accompanied by an alarming increasing number of divorce and marital conflict in the country’s court.

He made this known on the Ultimate Breakfast Show whiles discussing the essence of marriage counselling and whether it guarantees successful marriages or not.

He said, “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 divorce 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 added.

Lady Pastor Regina Hage, who is a counsellor and pastor with Light House Chapel International disagreed with the assertion made by Lawyer Yaw Boafo.

She explained that premarital counseling is necessary in introducing people to the various issues in marriage that they need to know before they get married.

She stated that, “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.”

She explained that the counselling process only focuses on models, but it takes the temperaments of the couple to be able to deal successfully with all the issues that comes out of their marriage and make it work.