It's a statistic that probably crosses the mind of most brides planning a wedding -- nearly half of America's marriages end in divorce. So how do you make sure that your relationship is a story that ends with "and they lived happily ever after"?
Recent studies show that couples who enroll in practical, research-based marriage education courses have the best chance of survival. "This is a vaccine couples need to create marriages that go the distance," reports Diane Sollee, executive director of the Coalition for Marriage and Family Education. The Washington, D.C.-based coalition serves as a clearing house to help people locate and select marriage education courses.
Classes range from 120-hour, 7-week courses to one-day to three-day seminars. The classes all aim to give you "the skills and knowledge to create extraordinary relationships with one another." Most often, a trained coach often will work with one couple at a time in order to give the couples an opportunity to practice what they've learned in the classroom.
Although the various courses offer different techniques for keeping fun and friendship in a marriage while wrestling with the inevitable problems, they have more similarities than differences.
Some of the common skills include how to lovingly discuss the routine issues that can make or break a relationship. Holding hands, sitting knee to knee, couples talk in turns about day-to-day concerns that too often never get a hearing, such as how to find more time for fun together and who's in charge of finding the baby-sitter when they do. They're taught how to share what they appreciate about their partner, air complaints, request changes and talk about their dreams for the future on a daily basis and in a structured format.
Scott Stanley and Howard Markman, two University of Denver marital researches, found that premarital and post-marital couples significantly reduce the likelihood of breaking up in the five years following a premarital course as opposed to control couples. In the first year of Scott's and Markman's study, which is tracking 540 couples in 135 Denver-area churches, synagogues and mosques, the courses taught by trained clergy and lay people are proving to be more effective than traditional methods. Heartening news, says Markman, because it means many more couples will have easy, cost-effective access to such help.
See our galleries of perfect wedding stories! Read all about them here...
Want to submit your wedding story?
The Mother Manager We've all heard mother-and-bride stories that make the hairs on ...
