Another Marriage Seminar
My wife and I had just finished speaking at a marriage conference in Helena, Montana. The conference organizer, a former Broken Arrow resident, began to ask us about couples we had both once known. I found myself saying time and time again, "they are no longer together or, they are separated or, they are divorced." By the end of the conversation I was depressed, despondent, and fully aware of the most often quoted "50% of couples divorce rate" statistic. I began to look closely at what is causing divorce and I found the answer---marriage. The problem is, couples keep doing it. 85-90 percent of Americans still marry--in spite of the odds. They still have children in the face of the predictions that they'll never equal their parent's earning power. They take on the difficult tasks of step parenting. They adopt crack babies, handicapped children, fetal alcohol syndrome children, and traumatized children from third-world countries. They go to church. They give to the community. They spend their working life earning a living to care for their families. And many of these giving, self-sacrificing, caring people end up divorced. It's all so discouraging. We all---conservatives, liberals, democrats, republicans, policy makers, religious leaders, parents, grandparents, bosses, workers, teachers, physicians, marriage therapists--- have become discouraged by the weight of the divorce epidemic in our country. We all have made the connection between family breakdown and violence, emotional abuse, poverty, school failure, substance abuse, and the list is endless.
We all believe that divorce is too costly--emotionally, financially, and spiritually---for individuals and society. Yet, as much as we believe that divorce has a tremendous cost, we've all somehow been convinced that divorce is inevitable---one of life's little necessary evils. It begs the question: Why does it have to be this way? Why do we have the attitude that marriage is a gamble, with worse than 50-50 odds?
Actually, I'm optimistic about marriage in America. I believe marriage has to do with an accurate understanding of what makes marriages work---or fail. John Gottman wrote a whole book on the subject, "Why Marriages Succeed or Fail." If couples knew how to make their marriages work they would keep their vows, raise their children, and plow through the inevitable conflicts that come with being married. We have all the answers ---the research, the know-how--the skill building education, and are not putting them to use. The information about what makes marriages work is almost the best kept secret in America.
My positive outlook is bolstered by the research I see that says we all value a happy marriage and family above all else. This outlook is validated and verified every time we speak at a marriage seminar. People are eager to capture the skills of relationship education and want to immediately put the skills to use to make the marriage better.
Most persons would use relationship education to strength their marriage. In our study (CMS), the percentage was 72% felt it was very important and 16% felt it was somewhat important to have relationship education. If my addition is correct 89% of the responders want relationship education.
In the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative (OMI) study, responders were slightly less interested, 66% felt it was important to have relationship education for their marriages.
While most people are happy with their marriages, many married people report a time when they struggled greatly with their marriages. However, among those married couples who thought their marriage was in serious trouble at some point, the overwhelming majority are glad that they remained together. These findings demonstrate that even happily married couples go through difficult periods, but if they have the skills to weather the storms, they are happy to stay married.
I hope and pray that in the near future couples will come to accept that the most romantic thing they can do is to walk hand-in-hand into a course on making marriages work. That taking courses will become as common as celebrating an anniversary. That not attending marriage seminars will come to be seen as foolhardy, reckless, uninformed, unsophisticated, dangerous, and irrational. That the time will come when none of us would dear dream of giving our children a wedding without a gift certificate to a marriage seminar. That along with prenatal classes a couple will also sign up for a course on keeping love alive through child-rearing years. And that employers and insurance companies will come to recognize that such courses will easily pay for themselves in work productivity.