Building a better marriage - Chicago Trib, 9/12/99

[owner-smartmarriages]

from: Smart Marriages

This article features Doherty, Sollee, Stanley, Markman, Baldwin, 
Burgoyne, Haycraft,
PAIRS, PREP and, more important -- couples who've taken the courses.

Building a better marriage 
How to be a good spouse 

Mike Meshenberg and his wife enrolled in a marriage education program 
"with 
healthy skepticism" but were won over. 

In PAIRS, they learned they couldn't "put away" their conflicts "like we 
have 
for 30 years," says Mike. Kit regrets they didn't take the course decades 
earlier so "we would have been better role models for our three 
children," 
now married themselves. 

      
By Shirley Barnes 
Special to the Chicago Tribune 
September 12, 1999 
Ever since the 1960s, when divorce became the exit strategy of choice for 
couples who couldn't get along, half of American families have become a 
revolving door of quarreling moms and dads and joint custody kids.
 
Ties expected to bind couples for life seem to be made out of Velcro 
these 
days, claims Minnesota family therapist Bill Doherty. 

In part, that's why 1970s couples came up with the idea of living 
together, 
to test the waters before tying the knot, a fledgling trend that became a 
flood. 

But cohabiting isn't working any better than marriage vows to create 
lasting 
unions, studies now show. 

Nor is marital therapy. Many warring spouses, particularly men, reject 
the 
idea that they need a therapist: "I'm not crazy, I just don't love you 
anymore," 
they say. 

So where can couples turn? 

Some researchers are convinced they've come up with the answer. Having 
studied good and bad marriages, some for as long as 20 years, they've 
discovered they 
can teach couples - from engaged pairs to the very married - how to have 
better marriages, just as one can learn how to be a better parent or 
drive a car. 

Follow-up studies of participating couples, for up to five years, are 
showing 
promising results. 

Practical, research-based marriage education courses - offering a raft of 
prevention techniques for making good marriages even better and troubled 
marriages more secure - are now available throughout the country. Some 
parents and grandparents present them as wedding gifts to young couples. 

Such a skills-based approach is "the vaccine couples need to create 
marriages 
that go the distance," says 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. 

Sollee is not alone. A growing number of family therapists, researchers, 
policymakers, legislators, clergy, lay trainers and committed couples 
count 
themselves as part of the marriage education movement, what Sollee likes 
to 
call "a marriage renaissance." 

It can't come soon enough, according to the National Marriage Project 
report, 
released at the Coalition's third annual Smart Marriages/Happy Families 
conference held earlier this summer in Washington, D.C., showing that the 
American marriage rate is at a 40-year low and that fewer pairs who are 
married are very happy. 

Obviously, Sollee and her colleagues have their work cut out for them. 
Most people don't even know what marriage education is. Those who do 
question 
how this skills-based education differs from the more traditional, 
church-based courses for engaged couples, newlyweds and others, which 
have been around for 
years. 

"I figured marriage just happened and that was it," says Tom Gullion, 34, 
of 
Oak Park, acknowledging that when serious problems arose in his 
eight-year 
marriage to musician wife Kristina, "she took me kicking and screaming to 
a 
couples counselor." But the therapy process stalled. 

In desperation, Kristina looked for alternatives, finally learning about 
PAIRS (Practical Application of Intimate Relationship Skills), a leading 
skills-based marriage education course developed by Falls Church, Va., 
family therapist Lori Gordon in 1986. Eight hundred trained professionals 
now teach PAIRS 
throughout North America with positive results. 

"It just sounded right," says Tom, a jazz saxophone player/computer 
programmer. 

"I liked the idea of a class where you learn how to be a couple. I wanted 
things to be good but I didn't know how. I was just trying to muddle 
through. 
We were using a bigger broom to sweep things under a bigger carpet." 

To Kristina, "PAIRS changed my life." 

Before they enrolled, "I couldn't see the light at the end of the tunnel. 
We 
had reached a point that was pretty low. We tried to fix it ourselves but 
it 
wasn't working. It's like being in a job with no training," Kristina 
says. 

The Gullions took the Cadillac of marriage education courses, a 
seven-month, 
120-hour semesterlong course taught by Michele Baldwin, a licensed 
clinical 
social worker, and her husband, Dr. DeWitt C. Baldwin, a 
psychiatrist/scholar 
in residence at the American Medical Association. The course, taught in 
the 
Baldwins' counseling office in Chicago, costs $1,800. 

More common are shorter marriage education courses--from one-day to three 
or 
four weekends--for couples with crammed schedules and slimmer budgets. 

Booster sessions are also available to help people through particularly 
troubling 
times. 

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. In 
a PAIRS course, among many other skills, they learn how to take their 
partner's 
"daily temperature reading": Holding hands, sitting knee to knee, they 
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. 

Another leading marriage skills course, PREP (Prevention and Relationship 
Enhancement Program), teaches, among other techniques, how to ensure that 
both partners' views are heard in a conflict by passing a plastic card 
back and 
forth to designate who has the floor. 

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, says Sollee, who has taken many 
of 
them. 

The highly structured communications tools the couples learn "are really 
tiresome at the beginning," admits Mike Meshenberg, an emergency planner 
from 
Chicago. "I'm a person who's not very patient with that kind of thing." 
But he became a convert by learning how to adapt classroom methods at 
home. 
He and his wife, Kit, an end-of-life care administrator, enrolled in the 
Baldwins' PAIRS program "with healthy skepticism. I had no clue what the 
concept of marriage education was," he says. But they knew their 30-year 
marriage was suffering from decades of neglect and weren't interested in 
therapy. 

"We didn't think we needed to be shrunk. Each of us thought we were 
pretty 
good," says Kit. 

In PAIRS, they learned they couldn't "put away" their conflicts "like we 
have 
for 30 years," says Mike. Kit regrets they didn't take the course decades 
earlier so "we would have been better role models for our three 
children," 
now married themselves. 

"The impact (of PAIRS) has been immeasurable," she says. "We're ready for 
the 
next 30 years."
 
But the most significant payoff was in March when Kit had two surgeries 
in 10 
days for a lung malignancy. "I can tell you that because of PAIRS Mike 
was my 
hero in this terrible time. He took care of me. He anticipated my needs. 
I 
was safe with him, completely safe. It was a horrible, traumatic time, 
but we 
came out the other end together. I don't think we could have done that if 
we 
hadn't moved from where we were (in the relationship) before we went into 
PAIRS." 

Nancy Burgoyne calls marriage "one of the last frontiers" in American 
social 
life. Although the divorce rate here is twice as high as in Europe and 
three 
times as high as in Japan, few couples - either stable or distressed - 
ever 
ask for help. 

It took decades for parenting and birthing education to be accepted, she 
says. 

"Certainly marriage is just as hard," says the Oak Park licensed clinical 
social worker, who offers one-day PREP workshops in the western suburbs. 
But 
people still assume "we're going to have this 40-year relationship 
without 
any tips on how to do it." 

Architect Ray Meek and clinical psychologist Allison Miller, both of 
Chicago, 
were engaged when they enrolled in PAIRS. Although never married, Meek, 
at 
40, had been "in a number of relationships," always walking away when 
things got 
sticky. His three siblings were all on second marriages. "I knew there 
was a 
different way. I just didn't know what it was." 

With the course under their belt, both feel "much more confident that 
we'll 
be married for the rest of our life. We now know that no matter what's 
going on, 
we're bigger than any problem," says Allison. 

That's one of the strengths of the marriage education approach, says Meg 
Haycraft, who teaches an Evanston weekend PAIRS class with her 
psychiatrist 
husband, Dan. "It's action-oriented. The couples do the work, in their 
own 
way, in their own time, in their own space. They take on a much higher 
level of 
responsibility for their marriage than in therapy," which is a more 
passive 
experience, she says. 

But therapist Jim Natter, who teaches a course called Couple 
Communication at 
the Monakea Medical Complex in Wheaton, disputes the claim that marriage 
education works for even hostile couples. 

"One size fits nobody," he says. "People with major problems come and 
blow up 
and leave. They should stay away from the educational model," he says, 
advocating couples therapy instead. 

Burgoyne disagrees. "Marriage education doesn't solve the problems for 
people 
who have very, very long-term entrenched marital problems but it's a 
tremendous launching," she says, acknowledging "for some couples it's 
enough and for 
some it isn't." 

The idea of marriage education is not new. Ever since the 1960s, trained 
church lay couples in various denominations have led Engaged Encounter 
and Marriage 
Encounter groups. Some Catholic parishes offer Retrouvaille groups for 
"back-from-the-brink couples" struggling with issues such as alcoholism 
and 
abuse. 

But part of the continuing challenge for marriage educators is 
pinpointing 
the techniques that work the best for the long run. 

University of Denver marital researches Scott Stanley and Howard Markman 
found that PREP premarital and post-marital couples have one third the 
likelihood 
of breaking up in the five years following a premarital course as opposed 
to 
control couples. In Germany, where PREP is taught in Catholic churches, 4 
percent of PREP couples were divorced at a five-year follow-up as opposed 
to 
24 percent who participated in more traditional premarital counseling or 
no 
counseling at all. 

In the first year of Scott's and Markman's latest five-year study, which 
is 
tracking 540 couples in 135 Denver-area churches, synagogues and mosques, 
PREP courses taught by trained clergy and lay people are proving to be 
more 
effective than traditional methods or even the same premarital PREP 
instruction taught by mental health professionals. Heartening news, says 
Markman, because 
it means many more couples will have easy, cost-effective access to such 
help. 

But even the staunchest marriage education supporters understand that 
many 
distressed couples will need additional marital therapy to root out 
deeper 
problems.
 
For hostile couples, marriage education skills "can start to backfire" 
without follow-up therapy sessions, says Dan Haycraft. For such couples, 
learning how 
to talk with each other without yelling is only a first step in marriage 
repair. 



Diane Sollee, Director
Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Education, LLC (CMFCE)

5310 Belt Rd. NW, Washington, DC 20015-1961
www.smartmarriages.com
202-362-3332  (FAX 202-362-0973)   Email: cmfce at smartmarriages.com 

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