Now here’s an interesting case for premarital counseling.

If you are at all geeky or web-marketingy (to coin a really ugly term), then you’ve probably used the Overture keyword selector. It lets you find out how often a given topic is searched on Yahoo in the last month.

Search for “premarital counseling” and related terms like marriage preparation, marriage education, or premarriage counselling. You will come up with about 2,000 searches for the month.

If you search for “marriage counseling” (and no other related terms), you come up with 35,000 searches!

Over 17 times as many people “repenting at leisure” as there are prepared to look beyond “love will conquer all”! (Sorry, that was a bit cheeky when we are talking about people who are in difficulty, pain, and even crisis.)

Now that is very telling to us. We are sure that most people involved in marriage preparation will agree. No offense to the Marriage and Family Therapists out there, but it would be a much better world if those two numbers were reversed! We are guessing that most therapists would really rather that people came to them before they had problems, too.

These numbers, by the way, are a fraction of the total number of people looking. Given that Google and other search engines have a much larger reach than Yahoo alone, there are probably 150,000 searches for marriage counseling each month, compared to maybe 10,000 for premarital counseling.

That’s a lot of people dealing with pain that they might have avoided by being better prepared.

Happy Couples, Happy Planet!