National Weddings Month: A New Survey Helps Couples Talk Before They Marry

The celebration is easy. The conversations that follow matter just as much.

A Florida collaborative divorce attorney encourages couples to plan intentionally using premarriage agreements and a new premarriage planning survey

DAYTONA BEACH, FL, UNITED STATES, February 9, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- February is National Weddings Month, a time filled with proposals, planning checklists, and celebrations of commitment. It’s a season focused on love, optimism, and the excitement of a shared future. Yet amid the cake tastings and seating charts, many couples never pause to ask a quieter question: are we actually prepared for what marriage carries beyond the wedding day?

Marriage is not just a romantic milestone. It is also a legal, financial, and emotional partnership that unfolds over years and decades. While most couples plan their weddings in detail, far fewer are given tools or encouragement to plan for how they will handle conflict, finances, major life changes, or even the possibility that the relationship might one day end.

Pam Masters, founder of the Collaborative Divorce Center in Florida, believes this gap in preparation is one of the most overlooked issues facing modern couples. As a collaborative divorce attorney and mediator, Masters works with people whose marriages have become strained or broken down. Over time, she has seen patterns emerge—many couples never talked about expectations, decision-making, or fairness until they were already in crisis.

“Most people don’t avoid these conversations because they don’t care,” Masters explains. “They avoid them because they assume love will carry them through, or they worry that planning somehow signals doubt. In reality, planning is an act of care.”

Masters emphasizes that intentional marriage planning is not about predicting failure or dampening romance. Instead, it is about creating shared understanding before stress, resentment, or fear enter the picture. Couples who talk openly about money, roles, boundaries, and change early on are often better equipped to navigate challenges later.

During National Weddings Month, the Collaborative Divorce Center is encouraging couples to rethink what it means to prepare for marriage by offering practical, accessible planning tools designed to spark thoughtful conversation rather than impose rigid rules.

One of those tools is a Premarriage Planning Agreement, a guided and collaborative process that helps couples explore expectations around finances, decision-making, and future transitions. Unlike traditional prenuptial agreements, which are often narrowly focused on assets and drafted in anticipation of conflict, premarriage planning agreements are meant to support transparency, fairness, and mutual understanding.

Alongside this process, the Collaborative Divorce Center has launched a free Premarriage Planning Quiz available on its website. The quiz is designed to help individuals and couples reflect on key areas of their relationship, including communication, finances, values, and planning for change. Participants receive an overall score as well as category-specific insights, along with recommendations for conversations they may want to have together.

“The quiz isn’t about passing or failing,” says Masters. “It’s about noticing where assumptions exist and turning those assumptions into discussions.”

Masters notes that many couples discover they are aligned in some areas and less so in others, which is entirely normal. What matters is having the conversation early, when curiosity is easier than defensiveness and when decisions can be made collaboratively.

The broader goal of these tools is to normalize preparation as part of commitment. Just as couples attend premarital counseling or financial planning sessions, Masters believes marriage planning should be viewed as a supportive step rather than a pessimistic one.

“Marriage works best when people feel emotionally and financially safe,” she says. “Those feelings don’t come from avoiding hard topics. They come from facing them together.”

By highlighting marriage planning during National Weddings Month, the Collaborative Divorce Center hopes to shift the narrative around what it means to invest in a relationship. A wedding may last a day, but a marriage is built over time, shaped by conversations, choices, and the willingness to plan with care.

Couples interested in learning more about premarriage planning agreements or taking the free Marriage Planning Quiz can visit www.MastersCDC.com.

Pam Masters
The Collaborative Divorce Center
+1 386-271-8044
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