The wife and I went to London at the end of last week to attend the Marriage Conference. Having recently completed The Marriage Course and benefitted from it, we went to find out all about how to run and host a course ourselves. The church which pioneered the Marriage Course, Holy Trinity Brompton, held a day-long training event bringing together loads of people running such things to think through how it can best be done to help the most people, as well as explain the ethos of the course.One particularly poingnant thing mentioned was the research of Catholic psychologist, Jack Dominion who has analysed the reasons for the high divorce rate today. He suggests that 50 years ago what made marriages successful was the extent to which the parties fulfilled the prescribed roles which society ascribed to husbands and wives. The changes in both culture and the economy however mean that this is no longer the case, and instead what makes marriages work is the quality of the relationship of the spouses. The marriage course therefore aims to help people develop critical skills such, listening, communication, forgiveness, etc which enable them to more effectively meet the needs of their spouse.
Another really useful thing to note was the way in which at the host church they have overcome the potential stigma in attending such courses. They have done this by involving virtually all the married couples in the congregation in the course, so that going to the course is not associated with your marriage being in difficulties. We are aware that this could be a problem, because some people said to us when they heard that we were doing the course, "Oh, I hadn't realised you were having problems". Whereas the course could probably do a lot to help struggling marriages (and there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest this) it is more about strengthening marriages that are OK. One marriage counsellor commented that he spends much of his life trying to give couples the relational skills they need - ten years too late!
We hope that instead of the church just extolling the virtues of marriage (for which the biblical and contemporary statistical evidence is overhwelming) and bemoaning the divorce rate, and helping individuals to pick up the pieces from messy divorces - we can at least offer to help people to build better marriages today. This strkes us as the kind of worship we should be offering.
13 comments:
good on you for running this course - we 'did it' a couple of years ago and found it really helpful... we are planning on running it soon at our church too...
I'm not sure I place a huge value on marriage though I do place a huge value on children being brought up in a stable relationship if at all possible. I must admit we only got married to ensure full paternal rights and make oursleves each other's next of kin etc. Wild romantics us. Anyway, I do admire you for doing the course if it helps relationships, which is surely a good thing. What's your view on unmarried couples doing the course though? Surely it's as important for them to stay together?
For us marriage is important, for spiritual, romantic, as well as legal/practical reasons.I agree on the importance of stability/kids too. In the UK today marriage still outperforms all other arrangements on this criteria.
As for unmarried couples doing the course -it depends. Feedback from courses in England has shown that couples in the early stages of co-habitation have gained more from doing the 'marriage-preparation course', which encourages couples to explore together the implications of life-long commitment. On the other hand, couples who have been together a long-time (say 2+ years), can gain a lot from this course. They would need to be comfortable with the fact that it is a course about marriage, so for instance the terms "marriage", "wife", "husband""spouse" are used throughout; references to marriage vows are made, and broadly Christian assumptions about the covenant of marriage underpin the course.
Isn't it the case with these courses that those with real issues would rather let them lie - and you will only attract rather snuggly smug couples. Won't you end up doing a lot of work for little benefit.
Well, time will tell. All I can say is that we did the course neither being snuggly newlyweds with nothing to talk through, nor being in any kind of crisis - and we found it useful. But as I say - time will tell.
So are cuddly newlyweds like us welcome or not!?
Thanks for the reply. Marriage does indeed outperform the other options. I've given this much thought as I'm not sure why it should, though I realise I'm looking at it from a different angle - I can see that the spiritual aspect is important for Christians and other faiths. Marriage will include people who marry for religious reasons and I have a theory that they may be less likely to divorce for similar reasons - that's probably a good thing as long as they aren't just soldiering miserably on. And amongst those cohabiting, you'll have the people who drifted into it for a variety of reasons as well as the people who regarded moving in together as a big commitment. So that'll skew the statistics to some extent I suppose, though it doesn't explain all of it.
I'm not criticising the course - I think it's a good idea. In some ways I think the churches have their social action a lot more sorted than we agnostics and atheists. I guess the non religious don't have the structures in place - though the Humanist society does a good funeral, which is a start.
"Soldering miserably on" is a grim image! One of the good things about the training day we went to was to hear the way that some couples had been in just that state prior to doing this (or similar)courses but whose marriages had improved.
For some it was the practical things such as relearning lost listening skills which made the difference. Others spoke of a spiritual transformation - of being more aware of God's love which in some way liberated them so to love. In these cases the 'soldiering on' marriage was redeemed.
I was also interested to read recently that this year the UK had it's fewest ever marriages (although that figure is skewed by a clamp-down on so-called marriages of convenience). However on the other hand the escalating divorce rate seems to have slowed. The high divorce rate again contains some interesting facts, in that the rate of marriage failure of 1st time marriages is quite low - the overall figures being radically altered by the small % of people who go through several marriages.
One interesting comment on the training course was that the media (especially films) celebrates the initial excitement of "falling in love"; but rarely finds ways to celebrate the greater achievement of "staying in love". Long lists of paper/ruby/diamond anniversaries are now passe. Finding creative ways of doing this is maybe our next challenge.
Some of the figures include the following, taken from "7 Years in the lives of British Families" Emisch, J. and Francesconi, M. (2000).
Failure to stay together following the birth of children.
Results at 5 years.
1) Cohabitees, 52% split.
2) Married following birth of children, 24% split.
3) Married prior to birth of children, 8% split.
The UK remains the divorce and teenage pregnancy capital of Europe.
Yes, but amongst the cohabitees and married after birthers will be people who might not have stayed together in the first place had the woman not got pregnant. There will also be some of those amongst the married before birthers, but probably fewer. A more interesting comparison would be if you could compare like with like in terms of situations on moving in together/getting married and then look at results. Otherwise it's difficult to separate out correlation from cause and effect. I don't have anything against marriage (obviously), I'm just not sure of some of the claims put forward for it.
I agree films tend just to do the falling in love bit. But I wouldn't look to Hollywood for romance advice any more than I'd look to Disney for careers advice for my daughters (mooch around, dodge the step mother and marry a prince at first opportunity. Yeah right).
Oh, I agree! I was very careful not draw any direct causal relationship from the correlation, however stark it is.
As with all observable social phenomina there are a huge number of interrelated factors affecting the patterns. In order to actually 'test' the effect of the marriage element, you'd also have to factor out any other distorting factors such as, age, ethnicity, religion (as you previously suggested) and social stratification. I am not aware of any study that has done this. My guess is that the marriage itself is one factor amongst many producing the stark results found in studies such as Emisch and Francesconi.
However on the evidence available, marriage seems to perform well and the data does require some explanation (although I think the analysis would inevitably lead into a statistical quagmire). I loved studying sociology, especially social theory), until the stats got too heavy - I'm hopeless with numbers!
As for disney/hollywood/tv, I do wonder what effect they have in the sociaslisation of the young, with the steady drip-drip-drip effect of life viewed through a distorted lense. They might not end up kissing frogs, but who can estimate how expectations are shaped by the mass media, for good or ill?
The one thing I should add to that is that the point of the course we are doing is to help people who are married to stay married and for it to thrive.
As such, a more relevant piece of research for us has been, "The Good Marriage" by Wallerstein & Blakeslee. Following her PhD work on the causes of divorce Wallerstein explored the factors which make marriage work long-term.
And despite everything I've said above about marriage, I think the course is a good thing. Helping people to stay together happily is a really worthwhile thing to do, so good on you both.
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