Started

The Mrs and I finally started the Marriage Course last night. The introductory session was more searching, and thought-provoking than I had anticipated. There's a bit of 'homework' to do next, involving getting diaries and planning how to spend more time together - one of the main aims of the first week. I'm looking forward to reading back over some of the stuff we thought about in the first session with the Mrs and to the next session.

In terms of going on to run the course I can see two possible difficulties. The first is that the sheer volume of material is very hard to get through in the timings that they suggest, meaning that our first session went on too long. That's OK for a one-off but isn't sustainable for 8 weeks. However, they suggest that the evening needs to start at 7pm, which is too early if you've got kids! The other thing we felt was that the material possibly plunges too quickly into opening up areas of potential conflict without first giving sufficient opportunities in discussion for the couples to appreciate each other's strengths. We'd want to adjust that slightly when running the course ourselves, we think.

The other good thing was that the video sessions weren't cheesy (as we had feared they would be). We'd seen a few clips from the Marriage preparation course and found a few toe-curling moments. Session one of the Marriage Course however seemed to be free of these - which is good. The consensus however was that the camera close-ups of the male presenter's face while his wife was speaking, make him look rather suspicious.