Community marriage initiatives

• Author: Jared R. Anderson,William J. Doherty
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.0197-6664.2004.00050.x
• Published date: 01 October 2004
• Date: 01 October 2004

Community Marriage Initiatives

William J. Doherty and Jared R. Anderson*

This article reviews the development of community marriage initiatives and their relationship with family professionals, with

particular emphasis on sociohistorical context. We describe five leading community marriage initiatives, discuss the state of

the evaluation research, and propose new directions for this promising area of work.

For more than 3 decades, there has been a not-always-

comfortable relationship between marriage professionals

and lay-led community initiatives. In this article, we

review this history of community marriage initiatives, with an

emphasis on the historical and cultural context. We then describe

five exemplar community marriage initiatives, discuss key issues

in their implementation and evaluation, and propose next steps

for partnership between professionals and community leaders in

creating community initiatives to promote healthy marriages. We

deal only tangentially with the important parallel developments

of couples skills programs researched and developed by academ-

ics and other professionals (Halford, Markman, Kline, & Stanley,

2003).

Because the field of community marriage initiatives is rela-

tively new and has not been subject to historical inquiry, we offer

only one perspective on this history and current developments,

albeit one informed by three decades of participant observation

by the first author. Some observers no doubt would frame the

developments in community marriage initiatives as stemming pri-

marily from the translating of academic findings on relationship

skills to the field (Stanley, Markman, St. Peters, & Leber, 1995),

whereas our perspective emphasizes broader social and cultural

forces and assigns a secondary role to the work of academics and

family professionals.

Historical and Cultural Context

The 1970s marked the initial flourishing of marriage pro-

grams featuring couple-to-couple support as distinguished from

professional counseling. In 1973, family professionals David and

Vera Mace founded the Association for Couples in Marriage

Enrichment (ACME) in hopes of creating an umbrella organiza-

tion for all couple-based initiatives in marriage enrichment

(Mace, 1983). Their larger goal was not realized, but their organi-

zation did launch couple support groups not tied to professional

services or curricula that continue in many parts of the country.

By far the largest nonprofessional movement of the 1970s was

Marriage Encounter, which spread to the United States from

Spain. Hundreds of thousands of couples, mostly Catholic but also

from other denominations, attended weekend retreat programs led

by a clergyperson and two lay couples, the aim of which was mar-

ital renewal in the context of spiritual renewal (Elin, 1999). Mar-

riage Encounter, which explicitly avoided interacting with

marriage and family professionals, attracted concerns from marital

therapists and academics about the potential risks of its intensive

format for distressed couples (Lester & Doherty, 1983). However,

by the late 1970s, the promise of lay-led community-based mar-

riage programs seemed enormous.

In the 1980s, the mass market for marriage enrichment went

flat. Marriage Encounter weekend retreats dwindled, and faith

communities seemed to turn their attention elsewhere. Many pro-

fessionals found that they could not fill their skills courses. Only

programs for premarital couples, such as PREPARE (Olson &

Olson, 1999) and Catholic Pre-Cana, continued to attract large

and growing numbers of couples, in part because they had audi-

ences who were required to participate. We also note that the

1980s were an incubation period for important academic research

on couples skills programs, and that a number of currently prom-

inent couples programs—such as the PREP (Stanley, Blumberg,

& Markman, 1999), Relationship Enhancement (Cavedo &

Guerney, 1999), Couples Communication (Miller & Sherrard,

1999), and PAIRS (Gordon & Durana, 1999)—continued to de-

velop during this period. Yet, from our observation, the reach of

these professional programs paled in comparison with the huge

public response to Marriage Encounter and related church pro-

grams of the 1970s.

Looking back at this turnaround, it is now clear how much

the 1970s marriage enrichment movement was fed by the human

potential movement. During the 1980s, the mainstream culture’s

fascination with personal growth faded as the consumer culture

blossomed (Cohen, 2003). Further, the political climate of the

Reagan era de-emphasized funding for the prevention of mental

health and family problems; the medical model and pharmaceu-

tical solutions prevailed. ‘‘Marital therapy’’ became the new name

for ‘‘marriage counseling’’ (Fancher, 1995), and marriage and

family therapists competed for recognition as bonafide mental

health treatment providers for insurance panels and employee

assistance programs (Shumway, Wampler, Dersch, & Arredondo,

2004). In this environment, many therapists abandoned whatever

interest they had in prevention and enrichment, which were not

reimbursable through insurance.

In addition, the 1980s brought the feminist critique of mar-

riage into the family field, and many researchers and profession-

als began to emphasize only the dark side of marriage (Blaisure

& Allen, 1995). Mainstream ideology moved from embracing the

value of marriage toward a neutral or even skeptical view of mar-

riage as just one form of adult partnership alongside cohabitation,

with married-couple families seen as not necessarily superior to

one-parent families (Doherty & Carroll, 2002a). Many religious

leaders from mainstream denominations developed the same

ambivalence about marriage as they struggled over how to sup-

port couples without accepting traditional patriarchal norms, or

disparaging other family forms (see From Culture Wars to

Common Ground, the landmark book by Browning, Miller-

McLemore, Couture, Lyon, and Franklin, 2000). By the end of

*Address correspondence to: Dr. William J. Doherty, Department of Family Social

Science, University of Minnesota, 290 McNeal Hall, St. Paul, MN 55108 (bdoherty@

che.umn.edu).

Key Words: community, evaluation, marriage, marriage education.

(Family Relations, 2004, 53, 425–432)

2004, Vol. 53, No. 5 425