Yount - Making a success of marriage: planning for happily ever after

There is no more lovely, friendly, and charming relationship, communion, or company than a good marriage.

Martin Luther

M any years ago, when I was dean of a Virginia college across the Potomac from Washington, D.C., I hosted groups of married couples for Marriage En counters weekends. Some of the spouses were old enough to be mistaken for parents of our undergraduates.

When students and faculty inquired what these oldsters were studying, I answered that they were brushing up on their lives togethernot unlike a 50,000-mile service checkup on the family automobile to keep it in running order.

Not least among the attractions of a Marriage Encounter was that spouses enjoyed a few days together free of domestic duties and the demands of their children. Yet another attraction was that, unlike much of marriage counseling, it was not a desperate measure. Perhaps best of all, participants looked forward to the opportunity to compare their own wedded lives with the experiences of other couples. Most spouses returned home relieved to have learned that the challenges and blessings of wedlock are remarkably similar from couple to couple.

Marriage Encounters has since become a worldwide nonprofit move ment that boasts of millions of graduates and promises to help married couples turn a good (or even ho-hum or boring) marriage into a great mar riage.

According to their prospectus, a Marriage Encounter weekend helps couples

• Rediscover the spark that was there on their wedding day
  
• Rediscover the best friend they had when they were first married
  
• Learn how to keep their marriage vibrant and alive
  

If this strikes you as too good to be true, consider that participants are not desperately trying to save dysfunctional marriages, but merely aiming to recapture the intimacy, trust, friendship, and romance that brought them to gether in the first place.

What the Encounters teach best is communication the courage to replace silent grudges with talking and sharing. Often that is all that is needed to live happily ever after.

Arguably, marriage owes more to art than to science, but the good news for commitment-shy and divorce-prone America is that there are proven formu las for marital success. We know a great deal about marriagehow it works, how much satisfaction it can bring a couple, and how spouses can contribute to its failure.

Good marriages have common characteristics that are apparent to sociol ogists and demographers alike. Rest assured, there are divorce-resistant recipes for courageous couples who are determined to live happily ever.

These recipes are deceptively simple to state but demanding in practice. Happy marriages share these ingredients: mutual kindness, respect and rever ence, plus the appreciation of ones spouse as an exciting and trustworthy per son and a sympathetic lover. Spouses in successful marriages respond to their partners emotional needs, share household tasks, and cooperate in the raising of children. Sharing a common faith and investing in romance only improve odds for a happy marriage.