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Dimensions of Marriage Education
The first three dimensions in the framework—content, dosage, and methods, located inside the diamond in Figure 1—are related to core curricular decisions in marriage education. The next three dimensions in the framework—timing, setting, and target, on the outside of the diamond in Figure 1—are related to the temporal, physical, and human context of marriage education. The final dimension—delivery, also on the outside of the diamond in Figure 1—raises the crucial issue of dissemination or outreach.
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Dimension I: Content—What is taught?
Formally asking what is taught in marriage education can be beneficial because it can open up marriage educators to content that has received less attention. Most marriage education programs are based in some way on the excellent research of psychologists over the past 20 years that has illuminated couples’ interactional processes, communication patterns, and problem-solving behavior as central in the breakdown of marital relationships (Gottman & Notarius, 2000; Gottman & Silver, 1994, 1999; Markman, Stanley, & Blumberg, 2001). Less attention has gone to, for instance, basic knowledge about the institutional features and benefits of marriage, or to the marital virtues that sustain healthy marriages (Fowers, 2000), despite the real possibility that these mental and ethical elements of the marital infrastructure have been eroding over the past generation, like the national power-transmission grid. We explore three sub-dimensions of marriage education content: (1) skills; (2) knowledge/attitudes; (3) motivations/virtues.
Skills. Relationship skills have been the primary emphasis of most of what we typically refer to as marriage education. There is justification for this. As mentioned previously, a generation of research points to the importance of interactional processes, communication patterns, and problem-solving behaviors that sustain healthy marriages and that predict marital breakdown when they are lacking (Gottman & Notarius, 2000). Recently, prominent scholars have emphasized that the core of a lasting, healthy marriage is friendship, and that friendship is developed and nurtured by a set of interactional behaviors (Gottman & Silver, 1999). Marriage educators are indebted to a generation of talented researchers who indexed both the correlates of marital decline and the predictors of marital growth, and whose continuing research will inform the practice of marriage education. The importance of good interactional skills has increased because our cultural expectations for marriage have increased. We expect marriage to bring us joy, companionship, personal growth, parenting partnership, profound meaning, sexual fulfillment, and more, and we expect it to do so for a long life time. Many believe this is an unrealistic standard. Nevertheless, expectations about marriage are higher today than in the past, so it comes as no surprise that couples need better skills to achieve their personal visions of marital success.
Evaluation research provides hope that relationship skills can be learned in an educational setting and sustained over time (Fagan, Patterson, & Rector, 2002; Stanley et al., 2001; Carroll & Doherty, 2003). Relationship skills have been and will continue to be a vital domain of marriage education. Nevertheless, as Wilcox (2002) and Browning (2003) have argued, skills education tends to see marriage within a therapeutic worldview. This worldview is less attentive to the institutional features of marriage and the virtues that undergird healthy marriages. These are important to include within the content dimension of the framework.
Knowledge/Attitudes. It seems reasonable that relational skills will develop and work best in the context of a good understanding about marriage and healthy attitudes that foster it. Most programs, even when they focus primarily on relational skills, still teach participants some basic knowledge about what can be realistically expected in married life. For example, most programs deal directly with partners’ personal expectations and how these may contribute to relationship conflict. Many programs discuss common problems that arise for married couples to make couples aware of potential pot holes that could be better absorbed or avoided all together. In addition, virtually all programs discuss or strongly imply that sustaining healthy marriages is an on-going process that requires work. Doherty (2001) argues that we live in a social context that will pull marriages apart unless couples are intentional about their relationships and protect them from neglect and decay. In essence, most marriage education invokes a principle of social entropy; that is, the natural order of a system is to decay unless energy is put into it to maintain it and to keep it orderly in the midst of change. And this knowledge or attitude may be gaining increasing importance in a society with less social regulation and more psychological buy-in to the notion that a pre-destined, magical soul mate is out there waiting to be found and taken to the alter to crown a perfect relationship (Whitehead & Popenoe, 2002). Without understanding the principle that relationships require intentional action, even well learned relationship skills will deteriorate and place a marriage at risk. These are just a few examples of basic knowledge that is critical to forming and sustaining healthy marriages.
There are other areas of knowledge, however, that appear to be less integrated into current marriage education curriculum, despite, as we mentioned earlier, the real possibility that the mental and ethical elements of the marital infrastructure that support healthy marriages have been eroding for a long time (Bellah et al., 1985; Blankenhorn, 1995; Fowers, 2000; Wilson, 2002). One domain of knowledge that is usually taken for granted, and thus absent in curricula, is a basic discussion of the institutional and societal features of marriage (Nock, 2002; Waite, 2002). For instance, what societal purposes does a strong, stable marriage serve? What are the public responsibilities inherent in this private relationship? With the roots of marriage education in clinical psychology (DeMaria, 2003) rather than sociology or anthropology or law, it’s not surprising that marriage educators have given scant attention to basic knowledge and attitudes about the public dimension of marriage. Indeed, a potential criticism of marriage education is that its lack of attention to the public dimension of marriage reinforces the notion that marriage is just a private relationship and that the health of one’s marriage has no relation to the public good. Moreover, in some disadvantaged communities, healthy marriages—or any marriages—are a minimal feature of the social environment. Some disadvantaged couples have virtually no models of healthy marriage (Edin & Kefalas, in press), suggesting the value of supplemental curriculum that touches on some of the most basic elements of healthy marriages.
Motivation/Virtues. In addition to needed relationship skills and basic knowledge about marriage, the personal motivations and virtues one brings to marriage are important content domains for marriage curricula. In general, however, this content domain receives less direct attention from educators. Doherty argues that we are in danger of handing marriage over to the consumer culture that governs so many other aspects of our modern, affluent, individualistic lives (Doherty, 2000a). Consumer marriage is weak because individuals are in it for the personal benefits it can give them today. If a consumer ethic is a dominant motive in marriage, then even good skills and knowledge may not be enough to keep marriages together.
Commitment is one important motivation that is usually directly addressed in marriage education curricula. This emphasis is in line with a growing body of research that has found that commitment is a central feature of healthy, stable marriages (Amato & Rogers, 1999; Stanley, Whitton, & Markman, 2004). Strengthening commitment in educational settings is an objective of many programs. Other motivations, however, that individuals bring to marriage which support or undermine its health and stability have received less attention. Fowers (2000) has critiqued marriage intervention—both clinical and educational—because of its single-minded dedication to relationship skills as the core of a healthy relationship. Fowers argues that attention to individual character and the motivations individuals bring to relationships are fundamental to understanding healthy marriage. Attention to communication technique is helpful but insufficient, and may not even be primary. He puts character virtues, such as loyalty, generosity, justice, and courage at the center of healthy marriage. They form the motivational foundation that skills-based education largely assumes to be in place.
Fowers’ criticism of marriage intervention may be overstated somewhat because some quality marriage education programs do attend to issues such as loyalty, equitable allocation of domestic labor, and forgiveness. These programs may not frame the issues as one of character and ethical conduct, but they address them nonetheless. Still, we think it is useful to distinguish this third domain of motivations and virtues in marriage education from the other two—knowledge and skills—because it draws greater attention to their value in a comprehensive curriculum to promote and sustain healthy marriages. Relationships, in general, and marriage, especially, are and always have been fundamentally moral endeavors because they are interconnected with the well-being of others, including spouses, children, and civil society (Doherty, 1996; Doherty & Carroll, 2002). Thus, when educators teach relational skills and knowledge they do so in a moral domain, not just an instrumental one. Explicit attention to the moral context of marriage curriculum likely strengthens anything else that is taught (Browning, 2003). Admittedly, it can be challenging to include explicit attention to character and virtue in some settings, especially in groups that bring together individuals with diverse backgrounds and experiences. But we suspect that the most effective portrayal of the moral dimension of marriage is seldom done with flashing, harsh lights; rather, softer, unobtrusive lighting is probably even more effective in illuminating the ethical and moral principles marriage educators teach. Addressing the religious and spiritual beliefs that couples hold is another way of naturally inviting the moral element to be an active component of the curricula.
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