Smart Marriages… Happy Families

Mini conferences & Town Hall meetings near you!

The Smart Marriages… Happy Families Task Force is being formed in communities across our state providing program support for churches, schools & community organizations.

Purpose

Help couples who choose marriage for themselves develop the skills and knowledge necessary to form and sustain healthy marriages. The Initiative’s concept of healthy marriage is guided by Lewis and Gossett (1999), who define eight essential characteristics of a healthy marriage:

• Both partners participate in the definition of the relationship
• There is a strong marital bond characterized by levels of both closeness and autonomy
• The spouses are interested in each other’s thoughts and feelings
• The expression of feelings is encouraged
• The inevitable conflicts that do occur do not escalate or lead to despair
• Problem-solving skills are well developed
• Most basic values are shared
• The ability to deal with change and stress is well developed.

Overview

Marriage education, a relatively new approach to preventing marital distress and breakdown, is based on the premise that couples can learn how to build and maintain successful, stable marriages. Couples can learn how to increase the behaviors that make a marriage successful and decrease those associated with marital distress and divorce. Strong, healthy marriages have benefits for couples and their children. The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) concluded that destructive parental conflict is one of the generic risk factors for child and adult mental health problems. Mismanaged conflict predicts both marital distress and negative effects for children. Conflicts at home can even lead to decreased work productivity, especially for men.

The marriage education approach is based on years of research into the characteristics that distinguish marriages that succeed from those that fail. The difference between couples that survive and thrive in marriage and those that do not lies primarily in how couples understand and accept the fact that at times they will disagree and how they handle their inevitable differences. Behaviors and attitudes that predict success can be effectively and economically taught to couples, regardless of background, and at any stage of their relationship.

Along with the skills that teach couples how to communicate more effectively, manage conflict, and work together as a team, the courses also teach the benefits of marriage for couples and their children and what to expect in the course of marriage. Some programs have been adapted for specific populations (e.g., teenagers).

Program length ranges from several hours to semester-long courses. Most are 8 to 20 hours long and are taught over a weekend or through weekly classes. They are delivered in a variety of settings, including classrooms, community centers, childbirth clinics, houses of worship, courts, prisons, extension agencies, schools, and military bases. In addition to classes, workshops, and seminars, premarital and marriage education efforts can utilize assessment inventories and meetings with mentor couples.

Numerous studies suggest that marital outcomes can be predicted with a high degree of accuracy based primarily on aspects of a couples communication and ability to manage conflict. Some of the more popular programs (e.g., PREP) have been studied extensively. Longitudinal studies (some funded by NIMH) clearly demonstrate that couples can learn and use relationship skills, with some studies of PREP suggesting that participation affects both marital satisfaction and stability. Interventions seem especially effective for higher-risk couples.

Other Benefits

In addition to strengthening relationships, marriage education can benefit couples interested in marriage in other ways:

• Marriage education highlights the benefits of strong and healthy marriages for both adults and children. These include being better providers, living longer, earning and saving more money, and being less reliant on government services, such as welfare, health care, and mental health care.
• Marriage education provides a roadmap about what to expect in marriage, including challenges such as the birth of the first child, different philosophies on parenting, and negotiating work and family responsibilities.
• Marriage education can help couples better understand principles about commitment, acceptance, forgiveness, and sacrifice that are known to be associated with healthy relationships.
• Marriage education teaches individuals about risk factors so participants can decide whether or not a marriage they are considering is a good choice.

Volunteer county coordinator needed.  Your help is needed to ensure statewide effort. Free training available. Be part of this exciting project!

By Rob Vaughn
5/20/2003

Note: This article originally ran in the Allentown (PA) Morning Call. Reprinted with permission.
A woman captured me in 1975. I still don’t want to be released. In this spring season of rampant marrying, I happily extol the institution of marriage. Blissfully married as I am these twenty-five years (we married in ‘78, three years after my surrender and capture), I want to argue vigorously the merits of matrimony and to urge the unhitched to hitch.

Angela was nineteen when I met her, full of words and life, effervescent, stunning, and busy entrancing various young men. She was doing just that when I first laid eyes on her: She had commandeered the front of our Temple University marching band bus and was regaling various male members with loud, amusing stories.

I was mesmerized. I was also shy, but I took a chance and blurted some stupid thing into the mix, caught her attention, and the rest, as they say, is history. I’ll skip the exhilarating details of our courtship, except to mention the amazing sign that confirmed our union: As we locked lips outside Johnson Hall at Temple, a passing bird took aim and fired, splattering us both. Smart-bombed in mid-kiss. Doesn’t get any clearer than that.

A quarter-century of life shared with this remarkable person doesn’t make me an expert on marriage (just ask her). It makes me a grateful champion of this way of living. Marriage is a lot of trouble—it is an adventure, said G. K. Chesterton, “like going to war”—but it’s worth it.

Wives are to husbands as milk is to Oreos. There’s a magical coalescence, a savory sense of completion. My wife is the garlic in my gravy. (South Philly Italian girls like Angela call their homemade spaghetti sauce “gravy.” And they use their cruel culinary powers to ensnare unsuspecting admirers. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

“He who finds a wife finds what is good” (Proverbs 18:22). The Bible says it; social scientists have now proved it. The National Marriage Project at Rutgers University has found that “both men and women live longer, happier, healthier and wealthier lives when they are married.” Unmarried co-habitation doesn’t cut it. The Project says “cohabitation typically does not bring the benefits—in physical health, wealth, and emotional wellbeing—that marriage does” and that “married people have both more and better sex than do their unmarried counterparts.” My paraphrase: Marriage is deeply satisfying.

Or can be. Indeed it is work. But worth it. Again, Chesterton: “In everything worth having, even in every pleasure, there is a point of pain or tedium that must be survived, so that the pleasure may revive and endure.”

Yes. Marriage is not a roller coaster ride. Thrill rides are brief and traumatic (alas, so are all too many marriages). The better metaphor is the adventure or the heroic quest: long, difficult, sometimes tedious, interspersed with epic battles, but crowned with the glories of deep companionship, sweet victories, and sublime satisfactions that would otherwise be missed.

Or maybe I’m totally wrong. Maybe it’s just me. Are there other men out there who are finding the adventure wildly rewarding? Am I a dupe, brainwashed by this woman? It’s possible.

But whatever my mental state, let me state for the record: I love everything about this person. I love the way she looks, the way she walks, the way she thinks, the way she smells, the way she lights up a room. The way she has nurtured our kids and kindled their faith in God (and mine). The way she incomprehensibly holds me in high esteem.

If you ask me, love is, in fact, what it’s cracked up to be. Marriage—soberly contemplated, carefully cultivated—is the way to go. As we mark twenty-five years, our son gets set to start his adventure. Jim and Kelly, go for it. Godspeed.

And Angela: Happy anniversary.

Rob Vaughn is principal news anchor at WFMZ-TV in Pennsylvania.

William Penn High School — Pride of the Community Academy

Students from the ACTS Program and community volunteers from a number of churches, the Hindu Society of Greater Harrisburg and several prominent lawyers gathered at 8:30 am to begin the cleaning up and painting of the William Penn High School. The project was focused on painting and cleaning the 8 bathrooms and the back of the auditorium, used frequently to host gathering of the students and serves the community as well. A hallway covered with graffiti proved no match to the volunteers who tacked this project with great enthusiasm. All the bathrooms were thoroughly cleaned and two were completed repainted.
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