Review of Smart Marriages Conference, 2001
By Harry Benson
Marriage education programmes
The message of Marriage Savers and of academic research on individual courses is that to get serious about cutting divorce and helping marriages we need to buy into a new community "culture of marriage". Bill Doherty mentioned this in his opening address. In terms of programmes that we then slot into our marriage culture, it’s hard to highlight all of the many programmes on offer at the conference because most are not available in the UK. Although no-one knows for sure, it seems likely that the culture may be more important than the specific courses – so my strong suggestion is to use what we have within an overall context and import what we can.
Of those that are available, many of you are aware of the popular FOCCUS and PREPARE pre-marriage inventories that rate highly and are starting to be applied successfully in the UK. Amongst the better enrichment courses, only Marriage Encounter is relatively widely available here in various forms. Kate and I did a 1-day course in a Christian version of PREP, an outstanding enrichment course. PREP in its secular form is probably the best researched of all education programmes and there is evidence suggesting its long-term effectiveness. What we especially liked about PREP was its focus on high risk automatic negative behaviours (withdrawal, escalation, negativity, invalidation), how a simple but outstanding communication tool can break these automatic cycles, and a strong conclusion about the importance of commitment – perhaps the single defining difference between marriage and cohabitation and explanation behind many of the outcome differences. I suspect it is the inclusion of specific teaching on values and attitudes, not just skills, that differentiates PREP in terms of its outcome successes to date. We will be in touch with PREP to see whether there is any way to make this course more accessible in the UK.
For marriage recovery, the industry leaders are two Christian programmes that are achieving 80-90% reconciliation rates led by couples who have themselves survived near-divorce. We are already running one of these programmes ourselves on a couple-to-couple basis and are very keen to train other couples wishing to apply this. There is nothing like it that we know of in the UK. We also discussed a further course at length with its originator, called the "Third Option" (meaning reconciliation, rather than unhappy marriage or divorce). It uses similar principles to the Christian-only courses but may be more applicable by and for secular couples. Again if you want more info, let me know.