Item from the Smart Marriages Archive, reproduced in the Divorce Statistics Collection

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October 1, 1998

Couple works to save marriages / Strategies will be topic at workshop

Thursday, October 1, 1998

BY ALBERTA LINDSEY Times-Dispatch Staff Writer

While admitting there's no quick fix, Mike McManus has set out to lower
the nation's divorce rate one city at a time.

His tools are the clergy and lay couples who are trained mentors.

"In every church, we have couples with good marriages who could be of
help to others but they have never been inspired or asked to be mentors
for engaged or newlywed couples," said McManus, of Bethesda, Md., a
syndicated columnist and author of "Marriage Savers."

He and his wife, Harriet, will be the keynote speakers at a workshop on
"Strategies to Strengthen Marriage" tomorrow and Saturday at St. Giles
Presbyterian Church, 5200 Grove Ave. The couple will speak during
tomorrow's 12:30 p.m. session for clergy and again to pastors and lay
mentor couples during Saturday's 9 a.m. session.

The program will be presented by Marriage Builders Alliance of Richmond,
a group of area clergy of various denominations who have been
meeting for almost a year to draw up a community marriage policy. The
voluntary policy will offer guidelines about premarital preparation and
post-marital counseling sessions with clergy or a mentor couple, will
address ways to support marriages and families and will promote fidelity
in
marriage.

More than 70 area ministers representing various denominations are
expected to attend the workshop, said Bob Ruthazer of Youth With A
Mission. The alliance plans to hold a large citywide event next year to
introduce Marriage Builders, he said.

About 90 cities already have established community marriage policies,
said the Rev. Jay Butcher of First Baptist Church on Monument Avenue at
the Boulevard in Richmond.

Sixteen cities using the marriage builders approach have experienced a
faster decline in their divorce rates than has been seen nationally,

McManus said in a telephone interview Wednesday. Nationally, during the
last year, there was a 1.3 percent decline in the divorce rate.

McManus' church, Fourth Presbyterian in Bethesda, trained 42 couples as
marriage mentors, he said. The church has classes for engaged
couples. Additionally, engaged couples meet five times with the mentor
couples they are paired with.

Between 1992 and 1997, 175 couples took the classes and between 25 and 30
couples decided not to get married, he said.

As part of the program, there is a premarital inventory which can predict
with about 80 percent accuracy which couples will divorce, he said.
"Their scores are equal to those couples who marry and later divorce."

But only about 15 percent of people who marry use an inventory, he said.

McManus described a couple he and his wife mentored. "They had problems
in their relationship. They took the inventory and we mailed it off.
When the results came back, it [had] the worst scores I've ever seen.
They were miles apart on everything."

With that and other red flags, the woman broke that engagement and later
married someone else, he said. "If she had not gone through this, she
would have married the wrong person and would probably be divorced by
now," McManus said.

Couples have to know how to resolve conflicts, he said. "My theory is
that women tend to know there are problems during courtship, but they
don't say anything, and the men just go along thinking everything is
fine. In the first few months [of marriage], the woman will start
pointing out
things."

Newlyweds often are surprised by their arguments because they didn't have
disagreements before getting married, he said.

"The marriage savers are those couples sitting in the pews not doing
anything because the pastor hasn't asked them. They could provide hope to
other couples."

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