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Home / Marriage Enrichment / Articles to Enrich / Building a Successful Marriage
Marriage Enrichment
The Key to Building a Successful Marriage
Welcome to the Marriage Ministry at St. John's Retreat Center. One may wonder why St. John's Chapel has a Marriage Ministry program specifically aimed for couples in their early years of marriage. The simple response is that preparation for marriage does not begin 6 months before the wedding date and end the day of the wedding. The key to building a successful marriage is through ongoing formation and enrichment.
A compilation of statistics have demonstrated that those marriages which not just survive the divorce statistic (currently 40 - 50% of new marriages will end in divorce) but which thrive in marital satisfaction, are found by couples who avail themselves of pre-marriage counseling and preparation classes and a variety of resources and supports once married.
Previous generations more often enjoyed the support of extended family, tighter sense of community belonging, and societal norms and mores which supported couples during stressful stages of the family life cycle. Today these supportive elements are often absent or inadequate resulting in a crisis of failure in marriage. (1)
Research has indicated that 2 periods can be considered the most critical for the survival of marriages:
- The first 7 years of marriage, during which half of all divorces are known to occur
- The period during which the first child reaches 14 years of age, which has been suggested as a low point for marital satisfaction in the life course. (2)
Roughly two-thirds of divorces happen for reasons cited other than physical or emotional abuse:
- spouses grow apart
- they disengage emotionally from one another
- they experience personality clashes
- infidelity
- communication problems
- financial difficulties (3)
The Pontifical Council for the Family and United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has recognized the importance of early preparation for marriage and ongoing marriage formation across the life span. They have identified four inter-related areas in which growth must continually occur to sustain healthy marriages:
- Maturity – personal and social growth patterns
- Vision – of marriage itself and for our marriage specifically
- Skills – learned behaviors
- Community – supportive social and religious context (4)
To this end, in 2005 the Catholic Bishops launched the National Pastoral Initiative for Marriage to call attention to the meaning and value of marriage for the Church and society. As a part of the Initiative, the Family and Marriage Committee launched a new website resource for couples of all faiths. You can check out the web page For Your Marriage for resources on all sorts of marital topics—blending personalities, disillusionment, infertility, infidelity, intimacy, and values to name but a few— plus daily marriage tips, a marriage quiz, inspirational stories, and more ways to care for your marriage.
The program goal of the Marriage Ministry at The Retreat Center at St. John's is to:
- Assist couples to prepare for the sacrament of marriage.
- Offer marriage enrichment programming that is specific to the needs of couples in their first years of marriage.
- Link couples to resources and supports as an adjunct to their home parish participation.
David Grobbel, L.M.S.W.
Marriage Preparation Coordinator
The Retreat Center at St. John’s
1. Whitehead, Barbara Dafoe (2005). Patterns and Predictors of Success and Failure in Marriage. The National Marriage Project. "Promoting and Sustaining Marriage as a Community of Life and Love" A Colloquium of Social Scientists and Theologians, October 24-25, 2005.
2. Gottman, J. M., & Levenson, R. W. (2002). A two-factor model for predicting when a couple will divorce: Exploratory analyses using 14-year longitudinal data. Family Process 41: 83–96.
3. Wilcox, W. Bradford (2005). Seeking A Soulmate: A Social Scientific View of the Relationship between Commitment and Authentic Intimacy. Institue for American Values. "Promoting and Sustaining Marriage as a Community of Life and Love" A Colloquium of Social Scientists and Theologians, October 24-25, 2005.
4. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (2003). A Working Paper of the USCCB Committee on Marriage and Family Life: A Renewed Pastoral Effort to Sustain Marriages for a Lifetime, June 2003; PONTIFICAL COUNCIL FOR THE FAMILY: Preparation for the Sacrament of Marriage, Vatican City State, May 13, 1996.
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