Table of Contents | Previous | Next |
Dimension IV: Timing—When does it occur?
Marriage educators often treat time and life circumstance as a constant. They teach general principles for building and sustaining healthy marriages that transcend temporal and circumstantial boundaries. They tend to think of marriage education curricula as covering the waterfront of important skills and knowledge unmediated by time, generally applicable across the marital life cycle and changing life circumstances. But couples married for a long time actually experience several different marriages. Certainly general marriage principles exist, but there are good reasons for marriage educators to think carefully about the temporal context of their interventions.
Probably the most important reason for temporal specificity is that it makes curricula more relevant. For example, learning general problem-solving skills is important, but young, engaged couples basking in the rose-colored sunlight of fresh love may not even sense that they will ever encounter difficult differences. Hence, just as important as problem-solving skills may be attention to such issues as assessing risk and protective factors in the relationship and understanding the basic duties that marriage imposes on those who enlist in its ranks. Similarly, couples facing the transition to parenthood face specific challenges that older couples interested in enhancing their marriage have likely already worked out. Couples beginning a second marriage with responsibilities to children from a previous union bring specific concerns and challenges. In other words, explicit attention to timing and circumstances modifies the content of marriage education, making it more relevant to learners. The more tailored educational offerings are to the temporal and life circumstances of their students the more likely they are to fit their perceived needs. By extension, more temporally tailored teaching will be easier to apply and more likely to be effective. It may also attract more students in the first place, a constant struggle for marriage educators. While there are reasons to construct temporally undiscriminating curricula, as well, we believe many marriage education initiatives should be tailored for specific life course times and circumstances.
Developmental Changes. A benefit of temporal sensitivity in marriage education is that it stretches educators to reach further backward and forward in time to address developmental needs of learners. To date, marriage education has probably focused most on young engaged or married couples in the first few years. Reaching back in time to adolescents who are forming attitudes and beliefs about marriage as well as forward in time to couples whose nests are emptying alerts marriage educators to more educational possibilities.
Adolescence. Developmentally, adolescents are beginning to think abstractly about their personal future. They are building their own identities, full of hopes, dreams, and fears. They are keenly attuned to the adult world of relationships. Accordingly, this may be a fertile time to address a major life goal that almost all youth share: having a loving, lasting marriage. Adolescents are likely to be eager students of marriage education if it is done well. As mentioned previously, some high school curricula, such as “Connections,” have tried to integrate relationship and marriage education into adolescents’ education. Healthy relationship skills are a staple of these programs, but it may be equally important that they attend to other issues as well, such as basic knowledge about marriage, marriage myths, constructive attitudes about marriage and divorce, and guidelines for preparing effectively for marriage (Stahmann & Salts, 1993). Adolescents have grown up in a society with an unprecedented tolerance for divorce and non-marital childbearing. Many have experienced these circumstances personally; some will even struggle to point to any healthy, long-term marriages in their circles of family, friends, and in their neighborhoods. And adolescents consume large helpings of television and other media that send out confusing and false messages about the nature of marriage and healthy, intimate relationships. Under these circumstances, it is reasonable to assume that many adolescents’ will lack a solid understanding of what marriage means, how society benefits from marriage, and how healthy, stable marriages are built and sustained. As Pearson (2000) has argued, marriage educators should attend to adolescents’ basic understanding of marriage.
Moreover, curricula should not sidestep important issues weighing on adolescent minds, such as early sexual experience. One experienced youth educator argues that teens are bored by the typical educational messages about sex that focus on body parts and sexually-transmitted diseases (Pearson, 2000). She asserts that teens need and want to understand a fuller and richer meaning of sexuality. In addition, myths about effective ways to prepare for marriage would be an important topic to address with adolescents before they move into early adulthood.
Parenthetically, marriage education for adolescents should take place in other settings besides high school, such as religious youth groups. Media also could help to balance misleading and false ideas about marriage in primetime media with program offerings based on solid research. Effective marriage education for adolescents in multiple settings carries the promise of fewer bad choices later on. Early dosages will likely be lower than what is possible in later periods. But even small course corrections, if they occur early on, can produce developmentally different destinations.
Early Adulthood. The early adult period of the life cycle is emerging as one of the most critical times for marriage education because we have seen in the last third of the 20th century a substantial elongation of the time between adolescence and the time when most individuals want to marry. There is now, on average, a 12-15-year period between the onset of sexual capacity and interest and the time young adults enter the institution designed by society in the past to regulate it. And this lengthened period of the life cycle now coincides with unprecedented sexual freedom. Not surprising, some marriage scholars have given this changing life cycle demographic a great deal of attention. The National Marriage Project and the Institute for American Values, for instance, have been influential publishing insightful reports focused on understanding young adult attitudes and behaviors regarding dating, mating, cohabitation, and marriage (Glenn & Marquardt, 2001; Popenoe & Whitehead, 2002; Whitehead & Popenoe, 2001).
We believe that marriage educators could be more active in addressing the specific educational needs and possibilities of this period. Young adulthood is not a period of cognitive and behavioral latency about marriage; formal education should not be postponed until individuals are thinking seriously about marrying a specific person. Marriage educators could address in more concrete and explicit ways topics touched on in adolescence, specifically about dating patterns (Whitehead & Popenoe, 2000), sexual involvement (Glenn & Marquardt, 2001), and cohabitation (Popenoe & Whitehead, 2002). Colleges and universities should be a prime setting to fill this educational gap. Scholars have Glenn criticized the texts available to support these course offerings (Glenn, 1997; Larson & Hickman, in press, 2004). But given the pace of societal change over the last few decades, texts understandably will have some deficits. Better texts probably are on the horizon. Larson and Hickman (in press, 2004) have provided constructive suggestions for improved texts so that they address comprehensively the known premarital predictors of marital success. Educators of young adults in college may be tempted to divorce sexual experience from future considerations of marriage in their curricula, but research shows how sexual history impinges on marital choices and marital success (Teachman, 2003).
Another educational possibility during the young adult period is helping children of divorce to develop better mental models of healthy marriages and greater confidence that they can succeed. Research indicates that young adults are less confident than previous generations about their chances for marital success (Glenn, 1996), no doubt in part to childhood experience with divorce. For some young adults, especially disadvantaged African Americans, marriage is not only missing from their childhood experience but nearly absent in their communities. These young adults still hold aspirations for marriage, but they may need effective education to help them see a relationship and an institution that is mentally and emotionally dim in their minds and hearts. This is hardly an exhaustive list of marriage education needs for contemporary young adults, but clearly there is a need for more work in this period of the life cycle.
Premarital and Early Marital. This period of the life cycle has received the most attention from marriage educators. It is an obvious candidate for sound, preventative intervention. Many couples at this time are eager to engage their minds as well as their hearts in the task of building a strong foundation for their marriage. On the other hand, too many couples are blinded by the romance of falling in love and establishing a life together to see the pitfalls in front of them. These couples focus primarily on the wedding rather than the marriage, a problem that reality television has probably exacerbated recently. To help, religious organizations have been leading the way in turning wedding preparation into marriage preparation. Increasingly, churches, synagogues, and mosques are encouraging and even requiring involvement in formal marriage preparation in order to marry within a religious tradition. While some religiously-based marriage preparation programs in the past have not been much more than instructions for staging the wedding, many now are sound. The best programs combine religious instruction on the sacred nature of marriage with secular wisdom on building and sustaining healthy marriages. In addition, the best programs include couples taking a relationship inventory (e.g., FOCCUS, PREPARE, RELATE) to help them identify strengths and challenges in their relationship, and encourage intentional efforts to address identified challenges. (See Larson et al, 2002, for a critical review of the major inventories.) Some have speculated that formal premarital education may serve the purpose of preventing some ill-advised marriages from happening (Center for Marriage and Family, 1995; Stanley, 2001). A few couples may be discouraged from going through with their decision to marry because they have come to see dangerous flaws in their relationships. In addition to formal premarital education, some churches assign newlyweds a mentor couple trained to be a personalized support system during the sometimes stressful first few years of marriage. Workplace settings, as well as religious settings, could be involved at this time. Given that individuals are generally delaying marriage into their mid and late 20s, workplaces have become a more important venue for meeting potential marriage partners (Glenn, 2002).
Enrichment education in the early years of marriage could be very effective in helping to prevent little troubles from growing into serious, long-standing problems that threaten the stability of the marriage. For many couples, issues which seem insignificant before marriage quickly litter the early marital landscape. For some couples, the division of domestic labor, decisions about who to spend holidays with, in-law relations, and other issues challenge budding skills. For other couples, even more complex problems must be addressed in the early years of marriage, such as co-parenting relationships with ex-partners, or dividing time between biological children from a previous union and time with step-children of a current union.. The early years may be an ideal time to encourage couples to work on the foundations of their marriage with skills and knowledge education. An enrichment program in the first year of marriage as a planned “booster” to premarital education holds particular promise. Religious organizations could do a better job of capitalizing on their successes offering premarital education to couples by extending their programs to include planned sessions during the first year or two of marriage to help couples navigate the choppy waters of early marital life. Progress is needed here. (Issues regarding premarital cohabitation will be discussed in a later section.)
Early Parental Years. Marriage educators have given a lot of attention to premarital and early marital couples. Not unexpectedly, then, marriage educators are beginning to shift their attention forward in the marital life cycle to the challenges associated with the transition to parenthood. The challenge this transition presents to couple relationships is now one of the most well-established findings in the family sciences (Cowan & Cowan, 2000; Twenge, Campbell, & Foster, 2003). Researchers over a generation have found that shifting from partners to parents (Cowan & Cowan, 2000) creates a marital crisis for a small, but significant set of couples. A recent meta-analysis suggested that recent cohorts of transitioning parents appear to be experiencing more of a decline in their marital satisfaction compared to their parents generation, perhaps because cultural changes have made parenting feel more restrictive of personal freedom and caused more role conflict than in the past (Twenge et al., 2003). Even when it doesn’t create an imminent crisis, the transition to parenthood is still stressful on the marital relationship for most couples, potentially foreshadowing a future season of marital drought, especially for couples whose relationships were shaky before children arrived.
A number of scholars over the years have noted the fertile possibilities for marriage educators to develop interventions to help transitioning couples deal with these unique challenges (Belsky & Pensky, 1988; Cowan & Cowan, 2000; Hawkins et al., 2002; Shapiro et al., 2000; Twenge et al., 2003; Worthington & Buston, 1986). Research suggests that simple awareness of parenthood’s pitfalls can decrease the negative influence of the transition to parenthood on marital satisfaction (Belsky & Pensky, 1988; Cowan & Cowan, 2000). Issues around gendered family responsibilities and domestic labor are heightened during this period. Often spouses’ feelings about their new identities and responsibilities are as much a surprise to themselves as they are to their partners. Economic pressures, both proximal from decreased time in the paid labor force and distal from worries about supporting the financial costs of raising children, impinge on transitioning couples with greater force. For many spouses, the timing of the transition to parenthood is “unexpected”; often one spouse, usually the husband, was not ready to take that step. An unplanned pregnancy has been shown to be a predictor of marital problems down the road (Cowan & Cowan, 2000). Thus, there may need to be remedial work on couple decision making, rebuilding a sense of partnership, and rebuilding a pattern of teamwork with these couples.
It is important not to forget about adopting couples, too. Although adoption has decreased dramatically with the loss of stigma for unwed childbearing and abortion, there is still a sizable number of couples who become parents almost instantly, rather than having a natural, nine-month adaptation period. Adopting couples will have unique needs. For instance, many of them have strained their marital relations as they have dealt with long-term infertility, intrusive medical and sexual treatments, and accumulating disappointments. These problems may affect husbands and wives differently, contributing to a sense of separateness rather than building a sense of partnership common to pregnant couples.
Because couples are already overwhelmed with the demands of caring for a new infant, topical, moderate-dosage educational offerings addressing these and other issues may be necessary. A natural setting for reaching out to couples during the transition to parenthood is the healthcare system (Hawkins et al., 2002). In fact, several scholars have suggested that marriage education for transitioning couples be integrated into childbirth classes (Belsky & Pensky, 1988; Duncan & Markman, 1988; Institute for American Values, 2000; Polomeno, 2000; Powell & Cassidy, 2001). A large number of couples participate in childbirth education classes at the urging of their physicians. They are already in a learning mode and may be open to dealing with relational issues as well as the perinatal health issues. Some marriage educators are finding that childbirth educators are quite receptive to including marriage education in their curriculum, especially if it can be done in a way that doesn’t displace too much of the time to cover traditional material (Hawkins et al., 2002). Other practitioners are also finding ways to use the perinatal healthcare system to invite prenatal couples to participate in marriage and parenting education programs (Doherty, Erickson, & LaRossa, 2003; Shapiro & Gottman, in press). One program in Chattanooga, Tennessee, “Boot Camp for Dads” (http://www.firstthings.org/red/fathering_bootcamp.html), reaches out to expectant dads in childbirth classes with a curriculum tailored to their specific concerns, and covers important marriage topics. Prenatal couples have more flexibility and time than postnatal couples, so prenatal education may be more effective, even if the looming problems are still over the natal horizon. Other educators may want to attempt to wiggle themselves into the temporal cracks of couples’ lives after the baby is born when relational struggles are no longer abstract. Many communities have developed new-parent, home-visiting programs to teach new parents about principles of infant development, help them learn optimal care for their newborns, and alert them to community resources that support their parenting efforts (Gomby, Culross, & Behrman, 1999). These programs also may be open to including a marriage module in their curriculum. Many transitioning couples, especially in disadvantaged communities, are not married but are living together or still romantically involved and have high hopes for marriage and giving their child a stable, loving home. Their situation will be discussed in more detail later in this section.
Mid-Parental Years. Having successfully traversed the high wire of the early years of marriage and finding their balance again after becoming parents, it would be easy to view the middle parenting years as uneventful, requiring little attention from marriage educators. There are good reasons to reject this perspective, however. This period of the family life course is becoming known for its time-starved quality, when more children and more commitments mean less couple time. The daily investments of couple time that lubricate marital functioning dry up with chauffeuring hyper-scheduled children, meeting increased work demands, and physical exhaustion at the end of the day (see Daly, 1996; Doherty, 2001). Lower-income families, who struggle constantly even with two incomes to meet the economic needs of their families and still find time to monitor and nurture their children, may be even more likely than middle-income families to be affected by this time crunch. Accordingly, marriage education, especially dealing with creative ways to prioritize marital time, would be valuable for couples in the mid-parental years. These years have not received adequate attention.
Ironically and unfortunately, couples will have little time to accommodate this educational need. So marriage educators will need to be creative in how they overcome this barrier. Marriage education in a neighborhood setting disguised as “Friday night date” activities for couples could be an option. Embedding low-dosage, topical curricula in other settings where active parents are involved is worth considering. For instance, parents may already be involved in religious groups encouraging their children’s religious education. This may offer a temporal cloister for marriage education. Marketing some lunchtime seminars in a workplace setting could also attract time-impoverished parents to topical marriage education. One scholar-educator, Bill Doherty, of the University of Minnesota, has been instrumental in successfully lobbying for a national “Take Back Your Time” Day (http://www.timeday.org) that draws public attention to the time dearth so many families are experiencing, and urging individuals, families, and communities to take positive steps to resist contemporary time pressures on marriages and families. Even healthcare providers, who encounter busy, married parents in the course of children’s doctor visits, could put on their holistic medicine hat and take a minute to diagnose a temporal infirmity and prescribe a resource book or Website to keep a chronic marriage malady from becoming an acute or even terminal marital illness. Marriage educators could encourage and help physicians to improve their practices to support marriages by recommending resource materials.
Late- and Post-Parental Years. As children grow through adolescence and young adulthood, the temporal crunch of the middle parenting years dissipate. The financial pressures, however, may even be inflated for middle-class families who are funding their children’s higher education. Added to this continuity of financial pressures are new challenges that often emerge during this later period of the marital life course. Launching children can be disorienting for couples, especially if parenthood has become the primary bond between spouses and the marital bolts have become rusty through neglect. There is some evidence that marital quality declines somewhat with the duration of the marriage (Glenn, 1998; VanLaningham, Johnson, & Amato, 2001).
Yet diminishing parenting demands hold possibilities for reprioritizing and reinvigorating intact marriages that could prevent later-life divorce. Living longer and healthier lives means that contemporary adults in intact marriages could have many more post-parental years together as a couple than they had active parenting years. The dark side of that cloud is that there are more at-risk years for problems that could threaten the marriage. Yet middle-aged couples will also have more time and resources to invest in long-term returns for their marriages.
All this suggests possibilities for marriage educators to merge relevant relationship education with midlife and later-life interests. However, if we hold only a utilitarian view of marriage—that it is the institution designated by society to raise children in the best possible environment—then a concern for post-parental marital quality and stability would be purely sentiment, and interventions to strengthen marriages in the later years could be considered a luxury. For at least three reasons, both pragmatic and philosophical, we believe educators should reject this perspective. First, strong marriages are a primary and critical support system for aging individuals. Keeping marriages strong in the later years is a pragmatic concern about better, more efficient care for the aging that places fewer burdens on public coffers. And research suggests that strong marriages are associated with better health in the later years (Cohen & Lee, 1979; Waite & Gallagher, 2000). Second, the break-up of a long-term marriage that seemed to children to be functional and satisfying can be psychologically difficult for the adult children of that marriage. And third, marriage has deep and even sacred intrinsic meaning apart from its parental function. Both publicly and privately, marriage has a place of honor. To treat marriage in the post-parental years as a utilitarian union that eventually loses its meaning and value, like an old car that is getting too costly to repair, is both short-sighted and irreverent. Accordingly, we believe the efforts of marriage educators to serve aging couples is justified and important.
Marriage curricula that revisit the fundamentals of marital communication and problem solving is another intriguing possibility for education in this time period (Arp et al., 2000). By this time, couple interaction paths are well worn and predictable, but they can be less than ideal and create unnecessary bumps and bruises. Marriage educators face the challenge of helping couples un-learn less functional, ingrained interaction patterns and replace them with healthier ones. Programs like “MATE” (Olson & Adams, 1996), specially modified from the “PREPARE/ENRICH” program to help couples in the later years have an important educational niche to fill.
Even couples who have established healthy communication and problem-solving patterns could use a comprehensive tune-up for the longer journey of the mature years that lie ahead. The curricula for these tune-up sessions, however, would likely be quite different from well known, off-the-shelf marriage education programs that were designed for couples earlier in the marital life cycle. Retirement may be as disorienting to familiar marital patterns as children leaving the home (Kulik, 2001). Marriage curriculum on this topic could be helpful. Health issues will be increasingly important for aging couples (Goldin & Mohr, 2000). Certainly issues of physical health and its impact on marital relations should be prescribed for midlife and later-life marriage curricula. Disadvantaged couples are likely to experience these health problems sooner and more frequently with fewer economic resources to help. Research confirms the benefits of a good marriage to a diverse set of health outcomes such as longevity, recovery from acute illness, positive health practices, and even immune system functioning (Kielcolt-Glaser & Newton, 2001; Waite & Gallagher, 2000) Gerontology education is a booming field, given our aging population; educators in this field could be recruited to work with marriage educators in developing helpful programs. Gerontology educators, no doubt, could also help marriage educators develop marriage-focused curricula to help individuals deal with the death of a spouse, both preparing for it and coping with it after the fact. Helping spouses to let go of past hurts, unrealized marital dreams, and to hold on to precious moments, potentially could make the passing of a loved but imperfect life companion easier and happier.
Life Course Changes. Contemporary unions often follow more diverse temporal and developmental paths than the traditional family life course discussion above suggests. Indeed, research indicates that at the beginning of the 21st century, more than half of all couples cohabit with each other before marrying (Bumpass & Lu, 2000), and in about half of all marriages one partner was previously married, or both (U.S. Census Bureau, 1999). Cohabitation, non-marital childbearing, divorce, and remarriage introduce greater complexities that marriage educators must accommodate in their efforts to help all couples build and sustain healthy marriages. Much more could be written about these topics than we will do so here. But we provide some initial comments to spark some critical and creative thinking for marriage educators.
Cohabiting. More than five million couples are currently cohabiting, nearly 10% of all unions in the United States (U.S. Census Bureau, 2001). About half of cohabiting couples see themselves as assessing the relationship with a view to marriage (Bumpass, Sweet, & Cherlin 1991). And nearly two-thirds of high school seniors, in a recent national survey, said they agreed that it is usually a good idea for a couple to live together before getting married to assess compatibility (Popenoe & Whitehead, 2002). For both lower-income and middle-income Americans, cohabitation is common and relevant to the institution of marriage. Thus, marriage educators have much to offer cohabiting adults.
Recent research from the Fragile Families Study documents that most urban, low-income, single mothers still are intimately involved with their baby’s father at the time of the birth (Bendheim-Thoman Center for Research on Child Wellbeing, 2002). About half are cohabiting; another 30% of fathers are frequently visiting and romantically linked to the mother; almost 75% have high hopes that their romantic relationship will mature into marriage. Unfortunately, early reports suggest that less than 20% ever do (Bendheim-Thoman Center for Research on Child Wellbeing, 2003b). According to a recent Heritage Foundation report (Rector et al., 2003), this low rate is not due just to a lack of marriageable men, although it is a contributing factor. Although about a third of these couples have serious problems that make them poor prospects for a healthy marriage (Bendheim-Thoman Center for Child Wellbeing, 2003b), most of these men are employed, do not suffer from substance abuse or serious mental health problems, and are not violent towards their partners. Policy makers have found these statistics encouraging and are anxious to experiment with ways to capitalize on this “magic moment” around the birth of a child and help many disadvantaged, unmarried parents who want to marry develop the skills, knowledge, and virtues needed to build and sustain a healthy marriage. Some believe that other supports for these couples, such as job skills training and substance abuse counseling, could be more effective when integrated with marriage education efforts. A large, long-term, federal research project is under way to explore what kinds of efforts can be successful with couples in these circumstances.
Marriage educators reaching out to serve these couples have both a tremendous opportunity and a significant challenge. As mentioned earlier, there will be unique curricular demands. These couples often have complex fertility histories and obligations that make the commitment of marriage more challenging. Marriage education in this setting will require helping many couples figure out how to manage prior relationships, obligations to other children, and other relational complexities. In addition, recent research documents that there is a higher level of distrust, in particular about sexual fidelity, among disadvantaged families, especially among African Americans (Cazenave & Smith, 1990; Edin, England, & Linenberg, 2003). Some of this mistrust is related to past romantic relationships and children born from these unions. Marriage educators cannot assume a strong infrastructure of basic trust; curricula will do well to focus on these issues and help couples build boundaries and commitments that enhance the trust. Of course, earlier preventative education may help some young people avoid these complicating factors. In addition, a disproportionate number of these poor, unmarried mothers have experienced childhood abuse (Cherlin, et al, 2003). These tragic experiences can be exacerbated by adult intimacy and may become a barrier to healthy marriages. Educators should not overlook these curricular needs of many couples. Existing curricula will need to be modified substantially or new curricula will need to be developed if they are to succeed in helping these hopeful, but hurting couples. Marriage educators will need to think more ecologically than is their norm, supplementing their educational offerings with links to support services for these couples (Bendheim-Thoman Center for Child Wellbeing, 2003b). (A thoughtful, innovative framework for helping these couples, developed by a research group under contract with the federal government, can be viewed at www.buildingstrongfamilies.info.)
Cohabitation is hardly unique to disadvantaged, urban couples. It is a common pattern before marriage across the socioeconomic spectrum and geographic regions. Cohabitation appears to be a risk factor for later divorce, unless one only cohabits with the partner he or she eventually marries (Teachman, 2003). Some preliminary research with mostly white, middle-class couples suggests the need to distinguish between those who cohabit before engagement and those who cohabit after engagement (Stanley et al., 2004). Post-engagement cohabitors appear not to have the risks to marital quality and stability associated with pre-engagement cohabitation and especially serial cohabitation, though researchers are not clear on why these differences exist. Both premarital education and marriage-strengthening curricula need to be tailored to fit these challenges.
Many cohabiting couples probably believe that they are already in the premarital laboratory experimenting with the long-term viability of their relationships. They may think that formal premarital education is unnecessary because they are learning all they could in day-to-day life. Cohabitation undoubtedly teaches couples a lot about each other, but research suggests it is not a reliable lesson in the factors that predict long-term marital success. One study (Dush, Cohan, & Amato, 2003) concludes that the experience of cohabitation is responsible for the greater risk of divorce these couples face if they marry, even more than selection effects (i.e., those who are already at greater risk for divorce choose to cohabit). Some scholars have speculated that, in fact, cohabitation may even “trap” some individuals into getting married because the costs of leaving are higher and the expectations for the relationship are greater than dating relationships (Stanley & Markman, 1997).
Premarital educators may need to be proactive about reaching cohabiting couples. Premarital education is usually much more than assessing compatibility; it emphasizes learning the knowledge and skills that support strong marriages, and challenges a common myth that marriage is a magical union of soul mates. Cohabitation may help to take some of the romantic luster off the relationship and build more realistic notions of everyday life together, but by itself it is unlikely to teach effectively the knowledge and skills needed to build and sustain a healthy marriage. Hence, marriage educators have an important role to play with couples who choose to cohabit before marriage. Religious organizations that require couples—cohabiting or not—to participate in premarital education before marrying will help, especially if they are designed to emphasize needed skills and knowledge, and not dwell as much on issues, such as sexuality, with which cohabiting couples are already familiar. It is important for these religious institutions to involve rather than shun cohabiting couples who may need their services more than couples who do not cohabit before marriage. It will also be helpful for marriage educators to make use of the media to try and combat widespread myths about cohabitation as a strategic way to prepare for marriage. These low-dosage educational interventions may or may not reduce cohabitation, but they could succeed at urging cohabiting couples, who may be at greater risk for divorce should they marry, to seek out formal educational opportunities in order to reduce their risks.
Divorce/ Separation. Recent estimates are that 40-50% of first marriages will end in divorce (National Marriage Project, 2001). Most of these divorces involve children. Divorce can have long-term, negative impacts on children and adults (Amato & Booth, 1997; Hetherington & Kelly, 2002; Waite & Gallagher, 2000; Wallerstein, Lewis, & Blakeslee, 2000), although many children are resilient. Marriage educators see their roles primarily as preventing divorce. But there may be some untapped educational opportunities for creative educators among individuals who have recently gone through a divorce. Many marriage educators relate anecdotes from individuals in second marriages in their classes who say that if they had learned these skills and principles earlier in life they might still be married to their first spouse. Similarly, some research in Minnesota suggests that about a third of divorced individuals say they had some regrets about their decision to divorce, and two-thirds said they wished they had worked harder to work through their differences (Waite et al., 2002). Individuals who have recently divorced could use the help of talented educators to help them adjust and try to maintain a functional co-parenting relationship with their ex-spouse for the sake of their children. But they also may be open to and even searching for understanding of what went wrong and how they could avoid serious problems again should they remarry. If done sensitively, educators in various settings could capitalize on this desire and reach out to divorcees with helpful curriculum.
Marriage educators also should make a more concerted effort to reach couples who are making mental plans to divorce. Rather than cede these couples to the divorce industry that has a financial stake in helping unhappy couples take the leap to dissolve their marriage, marriage educators can help these couples consider options, including fixing marital problems. Legal practitioners generally see marriage as developmentally dichotomous: marriages are either happy or they have become unhappy with no hope of improvement, like spoiled fruit. Yet recent research suggests that many marriages do indeed go from good to bad to good again. One study showed that nearly 60% of individuals who said their marriages were “very unhappy” at one point in time but stuck it out reported five years later that they were now “quite happy” or “very happy,” and another 25% report significant improvement (Waite & Gallagher, 2000). Several processes appear implicated in helping to turn unhappy marriages around, from ultimatums to personal changes to the simple passage of time that outlives stressful circumstances. Moreover, researchers have marshaled evidence that casts reasonable doubt on a common belief that divorce is a reliable path to eventual personal happiness (Waite et al., 2002).
In short, marriage educators have something to offer highly distressed couples. One faith-based effort—Retrouvaille—that attempts to intervene to save marriages on the brink of divorce reports a success rate of around 80% (Rubin, 1998). As daunting as it may seem, marriage educators perhaps need to reach out to legal practitioners who are as wearied by the sadness of their day-to-work as they are profited by it. Some divorce mediators and lawyers may respond to an invitation to serve their clients by first inviting them to participate in marriage education efforts to examine if their relationship can still be repaired. Still, once couples have begun the road to divorce, the momentum is hard to break. So finding ways to reach unhappy, separating couples before they are entangled in the legal system will be valuable. Curricula for these hurting individuals who may not even be speaking to each other probably cannot begin in the typical ways. Instead, education may need to begin with a strong dose of basic information about how marriages can and do recover and a reality check that divorce may not be the well lighted path to happiness it seems to be when things are so dark around them now. This may open up a window of opportunity to work on the quality of the relationship with important knowledge, skills, and virtues.
In addition to this strategy, marriage educators should be in the front lines of policy making regarding divorce education. Several states now mandate that divorcing parents participate in education to inform them of the potential difficulties their children will face and encourage them to co-parent in ways that can minimize these effects. Marriage educators could urge policy makers to upgrade the curricula of divorce education to reflect recent research on how many unhappy marriages turn around and why.
It is important to consider building these programs not just for couples but for individuals, as well. In many instances, both spouses may not be willing, at least at first, to participate together, or even at all. But there is evidence that even one partner can salvage a marriage (Waite et al., 2002; Weiner-Davis, 2001). The challenges of marriage education to individuals already drifting toward divorce are substantial. But marriage educators who enjoy a challenge should explore more thoroughly the possibilities of swimming upstream to help these couples. Incidentally, the fact that these couples are in enough pain to be thinking seriously about divorce does not mean that marriage educators should bow out of the picture and leave intervention up to therapists. Many separated individuals may be wary of therapy. Some therapists are inclined to see little value in trying preserve a marriage that has serious problems (Doherty, 2001). Although marriage education for separated couples takes it somewhat outside of its preventative orientation, many marriage educators are well trained to work with individuals in pain and are up to the challenge.
Remarriage. Even if remarriage is the triumph of hope over experience, hope is hardly in short supply. As mentioned earlier, nearly half of marriages in the U.S. today involve a second marriage for one or both spouses (U.S. Census Bureau, 1999). Accordingly, there is a growing need for tailored marriage education to serve this large population. The complexities of remarriage call for enhanced communication and problem-solving skills, which are a staple of numerous marriage education programs. But tailored programs may be more attractive as they integrate these generic skills with important topical content that addresses the added challenges of remarriage, such as dealing with ex-spouses, obligations to children from a previous marriage, step-parenting roles, blending finances, and others.
| Table of Contents | Previous | Next |