The marriage education movement has already spawned a cottage industry of trademarked seminars and self-help manuals. It has popped up, in varying forms, at community centers and churches across the nation. And it has successfully persuaded leaders of the federal government and the U.S. military to spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars a year attempting to disseminate its teachings to the masses. 
At its core, it's a movement that would ask of every divorcee: What if the truth was that you didn't marry the wrong person? 
What if you just didn't know how to be married? 
*** 
Men and women have been pairing off since the dawn of humanity. For most of its history, marriage was an economic institution that created advantageous alliances between clans and was arranged, often, without much input from the bride or groom. But by the 19th century, many in the Western world had begun to marry for love, making the relationship infinitely more complicated and divorce a lot more common. 
Romantic love assumed a position of high value but even higher vulnerability. 
Still, until the second half of the 20th century, these ubiquitous couplings went largely unstudied. What happened behind closed doors generally remained private, unless one had a particularly nosy set of in-laws or a manner of fighting that necessitated police intervention. 
Marriages, with the power to affect everything from personal income levels to mental and physical health, remained a hazy mystery. But with the advent of the affordable video camera in the late 1960s, psychologists began recording couples' interactions. The scientists hooked up their subjects to monitors that detected changes in blood pressure or stress hormones, and then coded even their slightest movements -- an eye roll or a knuckle crack. The couples were interviewed about their marital satisfaction and were, in some cases, tracked for years. 
"I like to quote Yogi Berra: 'You can learn a lot just by watching,'" says Howard J. Markman, a psychology professor at Denver University who was among the first to tape and study couples' behavior....Around the country during the 1970s and 1980s, Markman's contemporaries -- including Cliff Notarius, Robert Weiss, John Gottman and PREP co-founder Scott M. Stanley -- were coming to similar conclusions. Gottman gained particular fame for declaring that he could predict with more than 90 percent accuracy whether a couple was headed toward divorce just by watching them talk for a few minutes. 
Divorce, to be sure, is never our intention at the outset. Americans place enormous value on marriage: Nearly 90 percent of us will take the plunge at some point in our lifetime, according to the 2009 book "The Marriage-Go-Round" by Andrew Cherlin. And even when we divorce, we believe so much in marriage that 75 percent of divorced women will remarry within 10 years, according to a 2002 report by the National Center for Health Statistics. (The study did not offer a similar statistic about men.) More than 40 percent of first marriages end in divorce. The divorce rate for second marriages is above 60 percent, and it's higher than 70 percent for folks making their third walk down the aisle. 
"Everyone wants to get married," says Diane Sollee, the ringmaster of the marriage education movement. "We love marriage." From her white stucco house in Chevy Chase in Northwest, Sollee runs Smart Marriages, an ad-hoc organization of marriage educators who've been meeting since 1997 to discuss the latest findings on love and relationships. 
....But after a decade in the industry, she had this disheartening epiphany: Even as the number of therapists increased dramatically, the divorce rate remained steady. They weren't moving the needle. 
A few years later, in 1989, she sat at a conference listening to Gottman talk about the results of a decades-long study of couples at his "Love Lab" in Seattle. Gottman found that all couples -- those who are happily married into their rocking-chair years and those who divorce before they hit their fifth anniversary -- disagree more or less the same amount. He found that they all argue about the same subjects -- money, kids, time and sex chief among them -- and that for the average couple, 69 percent of those disagreements will be irreconcilable. A morning bird and a night owl won't ever fully eliminate their differences; nor will a spendthrift and a penny pincher. What distinguished satisfied couples from the miserable ones, he found, was how creatively and constructively they managed those differences. 
Hearing this, Sollee concluded that she and her fellow counselors had been "telling the public all the wrong stuff." 
If every couple has about the same number of disagreements, people who leave a marriage because of irreconcilable differences are likely to find themselves arguing just as much in their next marriage. The wallpaper might be different and the specifics may vary, but the frustrations will feel awfully familiar. 
What Markman, Gottman and the others were finding undermined the basic principle driving romantic relationships in America: "That it's about finding the right person. That if you find your soulmate, everything will be fine," Sollee says. "That's the big myth." 
It's important to choose a spouse wisely, these scientists would say, but it's equally important to be skilled in the convoluted art of conducting a marriage. [my boldface added, Dennis]
And as much as we want them to be, relationships are far from intuitive. People fortunate enough to grow up in a home with both parents are less likely to wind up divorced, in part because they had good role models. But not everyone draws that lucky straw, and even those who do may still find themselves floundering when the going gets tough with a spouse they can't seem to please. 
After 10 years, a once-adoring wife does little but criticize. An attentive boyfriend becomes a husband who seems to prefer the warmth of a laptop to his wife. Newlyweds fight with a ferocity that scares them both, or infertility chokes the joy from a couple trying to conceive. The sex life dies; someone strays. "She doesn't love me anymore," he thinks. "I married the wrong man" she confesses. And: "Deep down, I probably knew it the whole time." 
Suddenly the only glimmer of light starts to look a lot like an exit sign. 
*** 
It's never been that bad for George and Mindee Laumann. They're committed and, largely, content. 
...If they'd chatted with Diane Sollee beforehand, she would have told them that a marriage education class is more like drivers' education....There are PowerPoint slide shows, workbooks and video presentations. Couples talk almost exclusively to each other unless one has something to say to the rest of the room. 
The Laumanns joined four other couples in a Bethesda apartment building in time to hear a lecture about acquiring the skills to "keep love alive." 
....She and George listened as the instructor talked about the importance of empathy. They made lists of all the ways they behave during arguments: Mindee walks away; George retreats to his garden. But mostly, over the course of the two days, they practiced listening. 
If marriage education teaches couples only one thing, Sollee says, it's how to listen. Not just that they should do it but how to listen-- "with a full and open heart, in a way that they cannot doubt that you love them." 
The method George and Mindee were taught involves parroting. One explains at length how he or she feels, and the other paraphrases the sentiment, going back and forth until they are on exactly the same page. 
In the past, the Laumanns had seen a therapist on a couple of occasions. "He would help us talk to each other. ... He was a facilitator," says George, who was married and divorced once before he met Mindee. "With the training, we learned to do that without a facilitator." 
After the course, Mindee at one point found herself snapping at George as he made suggestions about the way she handled the kids. It was one of those mild annoyances that can "fester as you carry it around like a black cloud," she says. And for two conflict-averse partners, it would've been easy to pretend to ignore the tension. But the cloud loomed long enough that they sat down to use the techniques they'd learned at the workshop. 
"I was telling my part, and he was mirroring it back," Mindee recalls. "But instead of mirroring it back, he kept saying, 'You can't tell me what I'm doing that's bugging you -- you have to talk about your feelings.' I said, 'I am talking about my feelings! And he said, 'No, you're not -- you're telling me what I did wrong. Talk about your feelings.' And I felt myself getting really angry, because what I was really feeling and what I finally said was, 'I feel like you think you're my father!' 
....Even if they don't resolve the issue, "it's always about being heard," Mindee says. 
Both say they underestimated the effect the course would have on their relationship. They still squabble. Mindee still runs late, and the television continues to be turned on in the morning. But the fights are laced with less gunpowder, and the insights they took from that weekend have come to feel like a safety net. 
"In my mind, seeing us having worked through it, practicing the dialogue and succeeding at it -- and knowing he's a willing partner in doing it -- that's huge," Mindee says. "It gives me a depth of comfort that's hard to imagine." 
*** 
....For our weddings, we are hyper-prepared. But for marriage? Often, not so much. 
...."We think the number one problem for marriage today is the lack of information -- about what to expect, the benefits of marriage, why they should hang in there when they get stuck, and how to behave your way into a sexy, happy marriage," Sollee says. 
"I want to give [couples] the confidence to say, 'We can figure out together how to keep this great, good thing going so that it will get better and better,' " she says. One of her biggest aspirations for the movement is to make it so that an engaged couple would "feel it was irresponsible not to take a class together." 
....for almost five years now, the federal government has been spending tax dollars trying to teach couples how to be better at marriage. 
Whether that's an appropriate use of public funds is a legitimate question -- marriage is hugely complicated, and anyone who's felt relief from exiting a bad one may think the government has no business meddling with our most personal affairs. But equally pressing is whether marriage education really works. And so far the government has published little evidence proving the effectiveness of the programs it has been funding. 
....But there's growing evidence that the workshops and seminars can improve the quality and longevity of unions. A 2009 analysis of more than 100 academic studies evaluating the effectiveness of marriage education found "modest evidence" that the programs can work preventively and as interventions, though no one suggests marriage education is the answer for couples dealing with abuse or acute dysfunction. 
One of the most compelling statistics backing marriage education comes from Stanley and Markman, creators of the curriculum taught in Ocean City. In a study funded by the National Institutes of Health, they found that of married Army couples who took their Strong Bonds program, 2.03 percent were divorced after one year. Out of a control group of couples who didn't take a marriage education course, 6.2 percent were divorced in the same period. What's impossible to know: whether the couples who volunteered for the retreat were in a better place to begin with, or whether the skills they acquired made the difference. 
Regardless of effectiveness, there's a cottage industry poised to capitalize on the movement. And unlike marriage therapy, no certification is required to become a marriage educator. Hundreds, if not thousands, of marriage education outfits have popped up in recent years -- many since the government funding was announced -- and some teachers leading workshops have done little more than watch a video or read a book on the subject. Stanley and Markman found that their program could be as effectively taught by non-psychologists, but the instructors in their study had extensive training on the curriculum, something many who call themselves marriage educators could easily lack. 
If you ask Sollee, she'll tell you it doesn't matter -- that any marriage education is better than none. "This isn't rocket science," she says. "John Gottman didn't discover that you need to learn physics. He discovered that you have to learn how to talk about your differences without using certain bad behaviors that erode love." 
*** 
....Among the lessons taught: a new way to listen. 
Heidi was doubtful of the technique but decided in their hotel room that night, "Okay, let me see if this stuff works. I'm going to be quiet." 
And Kirk talked for 20 minutes, uninterrupted. In the history of their relationship, that had never happened before. 
"It felt like a breath," he recalls. "Like when you're drowning and you get a fresh breath." 
Heidi's habit of interrupting Kirk was done was with the intention of advancing the conversation, making him see what she really meant. But it happened so frequently that Kirk says he "would just close up and keep it all inside." 
So that night in New Mexico, when he finally spoke and she finally listened, "We got things off our chest that were weighing down on us," he says. "Things we didn't talk about -- ever." 
"I understood sooooooo much more," she recalls. 
Both had thought, she says, "that there could've been a day that we just said 'We're going to call it quits.'" But that night, they promised each other they wouldn't let it happen, that they'd work to find ways to manage whatever came between them. 
And even as their own relationship was strengthened, they found themselves looking back at their previous marriages. 
"I know if I would've had these tools, I'd still be married to my first wife," says Kirk, now 42. 
"And I probably would be, too," Heidi, 37, adds, of her first husband. "But I'm thankful we're together." 
....What it's done more than anything, Heidi says, is added perspective on the ups and downs of marriage. 
"When I met him I thought, 'Oh, he's perfect, he's perfect!' " she recalls. "Then as you grow older together, you realize they're not as perfect as you thought they were -- but that doesn't mean you don't love them." 
Ellen McCarthy is a Washington Post staff writer. She can be reached at mccarthye@washpost.com. 
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"The Marriage Myth: Why do so many couples divorce?" by Ellen McCarthy in the Washington Post; Sunday, June 27, 2010; 
Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/18/AR2010061804509_pf.html