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Yesterday, I returned from an amazing three day Smart Marriages conference in Orlando.  (Check out their perspective on the Number 1 Predictor of Divorce and their Relationship IQ Quiz).  While I was there to speak on a panel, I also had the unique opportunity to listen to the leading researchers in the field of relationship education.  I was stunned by the strength of the empirical data showing the harm of divorce and the benefit of lasting marriages.

The California Healthy Marriages Coalition collected some of the new research and organized it into pamphlets (with sourced footnotes) here.  Some of the highlights are:

1. Girls with divorced parents are at particularly high risk for developing depressive symptoms during adolescence.
2. Almost 50% of households with children undergoing divorce move into poverty following the divorce.
3. In surveying 3,828 adolescents ages 14-16, those living with their biological father and mother were 2.4 times less likely to be sexually active than those living with their mother and her cohabitating partner, and 1.7 times less likely than those living with a never married single mother.
4. Juvenile incarceration rates for children of divorced parents have been found to be 12x higher than for children in two-parent families.
5. Men and women in unhappy marriages have higher cortisol levels after waking up and higher self-reported stress and blood pressure throughout the day than those who are generally happy with their marriage.
6. Higher marital relationship quality predicted long-term survival (over a 4-year period) in a study of 189 heart disease patients, independent of other known risk factors including initial severity of the diagnosis.  The most seriously ill patients, if they were in satisfied, low-conflict marriages, lived significantly longer than much healthier patients in less-satisfying marriages.
7. When marital conflict is high and sustained, children benefit psychologically from divorce.  When marital conflict is low, children suffer psychologically from divorce.

So much data, but what does it all mean?  What if you are in a high conflict marriage?  The answer is marriage education.  Research gives us much hope that an individual can dramatically improve his or her relationship with a bit of education.  Learning new communication, conflict-resolution and empathy skills are the tools you need for a smart marriage.

A longitudinal study on a well-known Marriage Education program found that, compared with couples without marriage education training, those with the training maintained high levels of relationship satisfaction and sexual satisfaction and lower problem intensity three years after training; they also demonstrated significantly greater communication skills and greater conflict-management skills up to 12 years after instruction.

Perhaps we didn’t learn everything we need to know in kindergarten.  If you want to find out about a marriage education program in your neck of the woods, visit the Smart Marriages website here for a directory of classes.  If you don’t need relationship help, then think about a friend who does, and let him or her know that marriage education is an option.   Remember that marriage education is NOT therapy, it’s learning new skills that all of us need to succeed in the goal of lasting love.

Have you or has a friend been to a marriage education program?  If so, what was it called and did it help?  Any recommendations for the rest of us?

This entry was posted on Monday, July 12th, 2010 at 6:46 pm and is filed under Balance & Fairness, Verbal Communication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response.