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Premarital counseling found to cut divorce rate Marriage Savers asks engaged couples to take a written compatibility test and to wait two months before tying the knot Friday, March 27, 1998 By Ervin Dyer, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Dan Erickson grew up in a family that let the dinner dishes languish. The mission after supper was to enjoy each other's company and not to worry if a small mountain of plates was sitting in the sink.
In Angela Ruby's family, though, the rule was: Absolutely no leisure until the dishes were washed, dried and reshelved.
It's a small matter, perhaps, but one of the many that can trouble the waters in a marriage if it's not resolved.
So, before their wedding 2 1/2 years ago, Dan, 29, and Angela, 25, agreed they would try it Dan's way. Angela has discovered that she likes it. Sometimes, she'll even let the dishes sit overnight.
The decision, along with scores of others they made about the exigencies of daily life together, has helped the young couple keep the peace in their marriage.
But the Ericksons, who live in Modesto, Calif., didn't deal with such issues on their own.
They got help from a program known as Marriage Savers, which encourages churches to require several weeks of premarital counseling before a couple can be wed in the church.
Marriage Savers was founded in the mid-1980s by syndicated religion and ethics columnist Michael McManus, who heads the nonprofit Marriage Savers Institute in Bethesda, Md. McManus was in Pittsburgh in January, trying to ignite the movement here, as he has in more than 70 other communities.
Twelve years ago, Modesto, in central California, became the first community in the nation in which a large number of churches established a Marriage Savers policy, or covenant, as it is sometimes called.
There, 100 clergy representing 60 churches signed on with the program, and McManus claimed it helped to sharply reduce the local divorce rate. A newspaper analysis showed that the divorce rate in Modesto's county had fallen by nearly 30 percent in the 12-year span, dropping from 6.2 divorces per 1,000 residents to 4.4 divorces per 1,000, which is close to the national average.
Marriage Savers asks churches to make premarital counseling mandatory, believing that it leads to stronger and more lasting unions. The program advocates the use of a written compatibility test known as PREPARE. To encourage pastors to give the program a try, it advocates using a church's married couples as "mentors" to do the premarital counseling, so the minister doesn't have to bear the whole burden.
The program asks for a mandatory waiting period -- in most areas, two months -- before a couple exchange vows. It asks the couple to avoid any sexual relationship before marriage, and it frowns on cohabitation.
A rare occurrence
The Marriage Savers movement doesn't appear to be a threat to the profession of marriage counselors -- largely because they rarely do premarital counseling.
Even though marriage therapists have offered premarital programs for nearly 50 years, most couples didn't take advantage of them. The basic perception in America, many counselors say, is that you don't seek out a therapist until a marriage is in distress.
Before the wedding, said David Olsen, a University of Minnesota professor who developed the PREPARE inventory, couples "don't want to shake up the relationship too much. They're in love and they think that's all they need to know."
Couples who have sought premarital counseling, Olsen added, are usually glad they did and recommend it to others.
But the reluctance of most engaged couples to go to marriage therapists has opened the way for religious groups like Marriage Savers to pioneer the expansion of premarital counseling.
Marriage Savers had 32 programs in as many communities in 1995, McManus said. Three years later, it's taken hold in 72 cities across the United States. Minneapolis-St. Paul, with more than 300 churches involved, has one of the largest community marriage covenants.
In January, McManus shared his views with 40 local clergy and lay people, who, after meeting for about a year, have unveiled their marriage covenant plan.
The 20 local churches, working with Family Ministries in Wexford and the Arkansas-based Family Life, have developed a network called the Pittsburgh Partnership for Families. The partnership wants to create a model of how churches can shore up marriages and family support ministries.
The partnership invited McManus to town because it agrees that one path to a healthy family life is premarital counseling, said Jim Leckie, head of Family Ministries.
Leckie said he believed strong marriages produced strong families, which produce strong churches, which produce strong communities.
"We've got to empower churches to lead the way," he said. "Until we do that, the family will continue to disintegrate."
Seeking more churches
McManus agrees, but he is seeking a broader base for Marriage Savers here than the Pittsburgh Partnership for Families.
He has presented his policy to Christian Associates of Southwest Pennsylvania, a sprawling ecumenical organization that is linked to 2,400 congregations.
The Rev. Dr. Robert Forsythe, executive director of Christian Associates and a parish associate minister at Northmont United Presbyterian Church in Ross, said his group was examining the program but wouldn't act on it before next fall.
"Personally, I think it's helpful to use this to build marriages," he said, "but we still have a lot of study to do."
Most mainline Protestant denominations do not have universal requirements on premarital counseling, but leave it up to individual pastors. The same is true in Orthodox Christian and Jewish congregations. Roman Catholics have a longstanding premarital counseling program for couples who want to be married in the church, dealing with religious and relationship issues.
Across the nation, Marriage Savers has mainly attracted evangelical Protestant congregations, although a smattering of rabbis and mainline church ministers have signed on.
Since 74 percent of marriages are performed by clergy, McManus said, the goal is to recruit as many clergy as possible to stop churches from becoming "blessing machines and wedding factories."
When churches sign Marriage Savers covenants, their ministers agree that they will perform weddings only for couples who undergo premarital counseling. The more clergy who participate, program leaders say, the less chance there is for a couple to avoid the counseling by going to another church.
Many of the programs use PREPARE (Premarital Personal Relationship Evaluation), the 160-question inventory created by Olsen, who is a family and social sciences researcher at the University of Minnesota. The detailed questionnaire -- which costs the couple $30 -- is designed to determine compatibility.
Users claim it is more than 80 percent accurate in detecting potential problems, because it examines everything from handling finances to communicating.
Learning how to argue
The Ericksons took PREPARE and participated in the eight 1 1/2-hour counseling sessions that followed. The classes helped the couple settle on far more than when they would do the dishes.
Before they began the counseling, Angela was hesitant. Why did she need counseling? Her parents had divorced and she was determined that her marriage would not fail.
"But," she discovered, "counseling gives you tools."
One important issue it helped them work out was what to do when they had children. Angela didn't want to work once she had their first child, who is due next month. Knowing this early on enabled the Ericksons to establish a savings plan that has allowed Angela to step down from her job as secretary in the church office.
The societal drumbeat that forms the backdrop for Marriage Savers is the nation's high divorce rate.
In 1995, the most recent year for which figures are available, the national rate was 4.5 divorces per 1,000 people, adding up to 1,184,000 divorces, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
While the rate has stabilized and may even have dropped slightly in recent years, about half of all marriages still end in divorce.
McManus said he believed the figure remained high because "people don't realize the amount of work that goes into building a successful marriage."
It's a lesson McManus had to learn for himself, the hard way.
McManus, who's 56, has been married for 31 years to his wife, Harriet. But two decades ago, a job in Washington, D.C., meant he could commute to his home in Connecticut only on weekends. Once he got there, he filled much of his time with paperwork and reading, and had little to spare for his wife or three sons. McManus was so busy he didn't see the rupture that was coming.
His wife did.
She hauled her husband to a weekend at Marriage Encounter, a retreat that encourages couples to communicate intensely one-on-one.
There, by writing love letters to each other and going through counseling, "our marriage grew so profoundly ... I developed an interest in other ways to save or strengthen other marriages."
A burgeoning industry
McManus still earns a living through his syndicated columns on ethics and religion, but he has turned Marriage Savers into a bustling national ministry.
He's written two books and created a six-part video series in which couples talk about going through the program. He also developed a guide for churches to create a 13-week Sunday school course that uses the books and videos to recruit marriage mentors.
The materials are packaged under his Marriage Savers Resource Collection, which he sells for $150. Nearly 3,000 churches have purchased the package, McManus said, which translates into $450,000 in gross revenue.
Marriage Savers is rooted in conservative Christianity. Program officials believe all committed relationships should lead to marriage, which, as they see it, is reserved for a man and a woman.
The program, however, shies away from laying down specifics on "hot button" topics such as abortion or whether the man should be head of the household.
Those kinds of issues are better dealt with individually in counseling sessions, said the Rev. Terry Snyder, a Methodist minister in Washington, Pa., who's used PREPARE for 12 years. The goal is to get couples to evaluate these sensitive matters through the lens of their individual beliefs and faith.
For most couples, he said, "it's been a very positive experience. It's raised a lot of issues couples have not talked about. Some have even decided not to marry after being evaluated."
In fact, according to Olsen, a tenth of the couples who take PREPARE decide not to marry. Marriage Savers advocates say they have no problem with that, because it prevents bad marriages before they begin.
In addition to PREPARE, the program also offers inventories for couples who already have children from previous relationships and are going to marry; couples at the midpoint of their marriages; and older people who may be remarrying, experiencing empty-nest syndrome or entering retirement.
The mentor method
A key component of Marriage Savers is its belief that more mature couples adopting young ones is the best way to pass on marital wisdom.
These mentoring couples are trained to offer the battery of compatibility tests and conduct the discussions.
McManus says the approach beats professional counseling because it's free, and you can't get better advice. "Any couple who's survived their problems have earned a Ph.D. in marriage."
The nation's 50,000 marriage counselors might not agree entirely with McManus' view, but they are beginning to pay some attention to premarital counseling.
Several members of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, a national professional group, have developed a premarital exam that concentrates on communication skills. They say they prefer to work with engaged couples because they are more teachable and optimistic about making their marriages work.
Scott Silberman, a former marriage counselor who teaches psychology at Chandler-Gilbert Community College in Tempe, Ariz., said he'd seen a lot of families suffer pain that could have been avoided if their issues had been dealt with before marriage.
"The mental health arena needs to become more like physical medicine and focus on prevention. It's like a person with a heart problem: You diet and lower your cholesterol to avoid an attack."
Additional stories:
Legislatures taking interest in marriage
Counseling of engaged couples is catching on in district
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