The rationale for enriching marriages
By Dave Percival
Why enriching marriage works - the Marriage Encounter experience
It is possible to offer couples a vision of what their marriage might be, but unless it is one that is rooted in their own personalities, experiences and hopes, it will not become truly theirs - they need to own it. The Marriage Encounter movement has understood this dynamic for the past 30 years and has created a unique experiential weekend that takes each couple at its own pace, and with its own issues, through a discovery process that enables the couple to formulate, in their own terms, their hopes for their relationship. Simultaneously it teaches a communication skill that assists in the ongoing development of the relationship
Such a process requires that the couples have the time, space and privacy to make their journey, and needs the guidance of leadership who will enable them to become more vulnerable with each other. This is achieved by the leading couples sharing very vulnerably from their personal struggles and joys. At the heart of the weekend is an understanding that feelings, our spontaneous emotional responses to a situation or person, are a unique reflection of who each of us is as an individual. Husband and wife are encouraged to identify, share and accept each others feelings as signs of their deeper selves. This they do using a technique called Dialogue which involves a time of individual reflection and writing the feelings down. Husband and wife then exchange their reflections and spend time exploring the feelings expressed until they can really understand, experience and accept the feelings in their partner. The closeness that this engenders creates an atmosphere where couples can see hope for the future and they re-discover the specialness of their partner based in loving honesty and openness rather than in romance, and thereby come to a point of renewed commitment based in knowledge and understanding rather than fleeting emotion. The couples go home with a tool of communication, Dialogue, which they are encouraged to continue to use to maintain the closeness and intimacy they have discovered possible. The weekend is just a beginning to a new way of living and interacting, and ongoing support is offered through the movement's network of couples for those who wish to be part of its ongoing work
Experience has shown that the best process results when a couple is removed from all the day-to-day pressures of life, and from all the powerful anchors that ground them in what they perceive as their present reality. This time and space, and removal from the present, can only be really achieved on a residential programme lasting a full weekend. Whilst other formats have been tried, this structure is proven not only in marriage work, but also in many "Vision forming" processes used by commercial groups
Because the Marriage Encounter weekend is essentially experiential, and relies largely on the couple developing their own vision through a guided process, it is largely free from immediate constraints of particular viewpoints or doctrine. Thus whilst the programme is firmly rooted in a Judeo-Christian belief in monogamous marriage, it is highly accessible to couples of any faith or none, and indeed many couples who would profess themselves "non-Christian" have derived great benefit from the programme.
