APPENDIX A
COUPLE CHECKUP: GETTING YOUR MARRIAGE OFF TO A SMART START
Dr. David Olson and Amy Olson
MARRIAGE CAN BE ONE OF the most gratifying and fulfilling relationships in your life, but it can also be one of the most frustrating relationships. About 50 percent of marriages end in divorce, which makes marriage one of the riskiest choices individuals voluntarily make in their lifetimes. It’s so risky, in fact, that no insurance company has been willing to offer divorce insurance.
While the overall divorce rate remains about 50 percent, the divorce rate is about 40 percent for those who are getting married for the first time and 60 percent for those getting married a second time.[55] For those married before, the divorce rate is high, often because children and stepchildren add complexity and stress to those marriages.
The Value of a Good Marriage
The benefits of marriage have been well documented in numerous studies, and the benefits are even greater for those who are happily married.[56] Married people live longer, have more wealth and economic assets, and have more satisfying sexual relationships than single or cohabiting individuals. In addition, children generally fare better emotionally and academically, and they have lower rates of substance abuse and crime when they’re raised in two-parent families.
Public figures have affirmed the value and importance of marriage to individuals and families. Mohnish Pabrai recalls that when Warren Buffett, who is one of the most successful billionaires in the world, was asked to give Pabrai’s daughters some advice he told them that “the single most important decision they would make in their lives was who they decided to marry.”[57]
David Brooks, a highly respected columnist, said, after finishing a book on well-being,
Marital happiness is far more important than anything else in determining well-being. If you have a successful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many professional setbacks you endure, you will be reasonably happy. If you have an unsuccessful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many career triumphs you record, you will remain significantly unfulfilled.[58]
Love Is Not Enough for a Successful Marriage
Love is a poor predictor of marital success. Why, you ask? Because almost all individuals are “in love” when they get married, and yet 50 percent of those marriages fail. One aspect of being in love is that people tend to be idealistic and see their relationship through rose-colored glasses. So most premarital couples are wearing rose-colored glasses, and they see the world, and especially their relationships, in an overly positive way.
If love isn’t a predictor of marital success, what factor is most predictive? The answer is having and using good relationship skills. In a national study of fifty thousand married couples from the ages of twenty to sixty-five, researchers found that the following five relationship skills are most accurate in predicting a happy marriage: communication, closeness, flexibility, personality compatibility, and conflict resolution.[59]
You can learn and use these five relationship skills to develop a more healthy and mutually happy marital relationship. Communication is important because it indicates your ability as a couple to share feelings and ideas and know your partner understands you. Closeness involves feeling emotionally connected to your partner. Being flexible represents the ability to change when necessary and being open to doing things differently. Personality compatibility involves being able to accept your personality differences and use those differences to better work together as a team. Conflict resolution is the ability to resolve ongoing issues so that you can create a more harmonious relationship.
The Couple Checkup: Marriage Maintenance Is Critical
Would you let your car go one hundred thousand miles before getting an oil change? Would you go for a dental checkup just once in twenty years? Would you get a physical exam only after you’ve been in pain for weeks?
The obvious answer to these questions is no, and yet married couples rarely ever have a checkup for their marriages. Couples invest a great deal of time and money on their weddings, but then they begin to take their marriages for granted. It’s increasingly clear that without ongoing work on the relationship, marriage can lose its vitality. Like any other checkup, the sooner a person identifies the issues, the easier they are to solve.
A couple checkup is like a diagnostic assessment of your car. Though it takes time and money for a car tune-up, it’s worth the investment because it prevents future problems. By identifying a potential problem like a leaky hose, the cost of repairs is minimal compared to repairing the car after the hose bursts while you’re driving.
Prevention is very important in all health fields, including medical care, dental care, and mental health. Early cancer detection is a good example of the value of the preventive approach in reducing the mortality rates of cancer patients. Early detection, prevention, and education are also important for relationship issues. Unfortunately, most distressed married couples don’t seek counseling until one or both are considering divorce. In fact, treating couples who wait too long to come for marital therapy is much like treating terminal cancer. The relationship has been so destroyed that it’s difficult to rebuild the marriage.
Improving Your Chances of a Happy Marriage
The Couple Checkup is an accurate and helpful map of your relationship. It’s an online assessment and program tailored to the unique stage and structure of your relationship. The checkup assesses about thirty areas that researchers have identified as key areas for healthy relationships. The questions are also designed to increase a couple’s connection by encouraging self-awareness and partner awareness and dialogue in these key areas. The Couple Checkup identifies both relationship strengths and growth areas.
The Couple Checkup is based on the highly successful PREPARE/ENRICH program, which has been used by over one hundred thousand counselors and clergy to help three to four million couples prepare for marriage and/or enrich their marriages. Couples who have taken the PREPARE/ENRICH program have reduced their chances of divorce by 30 percent.
A Comprehensive Picture of Your Relationship
The Couple Checkup explores about thirty important aspects of your marital relationship. As illustrated in the following figure, the scales are organized into a variety of important areas:
Ten core scales. The ten core scales of the Couple Checkup include the most common and important aspects of your relationship, such as communication, conflict resolution, finances, affection/sexuality, role relationship, and spiritual beliefs.
Relationship dynamics. This assessment explores positive and negative relationship patterns in your relationship.
SCOPE personality scales. Five personality traits are assessed for each of you, which helps you better understand your personality similarities and differences as a couple.
Couple map. The map explores how each of you feels about emotional closeness and your ability to handle change in your relationship. These areas are important dynamics that can help you build a more healthy relationship.
Family map. Each of you describes your families of origin in terms of closeness and flexibility. The map can help you better understand the family dynamics in your families of origin and how those dynamics compare with your partner’s family.
Cultural context. The diversity in families today in terms of ethnicity, level of education, financial conditions, and family structure adds to the complexity in a marriage. This assessment offers information about these topics for you to share and discuss.
Major Goals of the Couple Checkup
Thomas Carlyle wrote that a “block of granite, which is an obstacle in the pathway of the weak, becomes a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.” A major goal of the Couple Checkup is to turn stumbling blocks (issues) into stepping-stones (strengths). You can achieve this goal by taking the checkup and then reviewing, discussing, and processing the results with your fiancé(e) or spouse. The Couple Checkup is designed to help couples in the following ways:
1. The checkup stimulates you to talk about your relationship. Couples rarely talk directly with each other about their perceptions and feelings about their relationship. It’s easier to talk about their work, children, daily activities, and interests, but not about their relationship. Relationship talk is hard because it leaves you vulnerable when opinions, feelings, and needs are openly shared. Answering questions about your relationship creates curiosity in how your partner answered the questions. This can stimulate you to talk about your relationship.
2. The checkup identifies and helps build your relationship strengths. One of the advantages of doing a Couple Checkup is that it will reveal your relationship strengths, including some you may not have been aware of or perhaps have never discussed. Couples often assume they know each other, but our studies have found they only agree with each other on the characteristics of their relationships about 33 percent of the time. This means that rather than assuming you know your partner’s feelings and ideas, you should assume your guesses will often be incorrect. You can greatly benefit from taking an assessment that will reveal how each of you feels about different aspects of your relationship.
3. The checkup identifies and encourages you to resolve relationship growth areas (issues). An important goal of the Couple Checkup is to help couples build new strengths by resolving current issues. All intimate couples have issues and areas where their relationships could improve. Quite often, couples have difficulty resolving current issues, or they simply try to avoid discussing problematic areas in their relationships. This leaves couples feeling that their issues never seem to get resolved. In fact, one of the top issues men and women complained about from a list of survey items was “Some of our differences never seem to get resolved.” For men, this statement was the third most cited issue, and it was the second most common issue for women.[60] Unless you’re able to resolve issues in your relationship, tension will build and create more problems.
4. The checkup helps you learn effective relationship skills. Four of the top five predictors of a happy marriage are relationship skills: communication, conflict resolution, couple closeness, and couple flexibility. You can learn skills to improve these areas in your relationship. Once learned, these skills can be used not only in your marriage but in other relationships as well.
5. The checkup helps turn your stumbling blocks (issues) into stepping-stones (strengths). The Couple Checkup Report and an online discussion guide are resources designed to give you power to resolve ongoing issues and create a stronger relationship. Ultimately, you need to feel equipped to resolve issues so you can turn relationship challenges into strengths. With a good base of knowledge and some relationships skills, you can tackle many difficult issues in marriage and increase relationship satisfaction.
Benefits of the Couple Checkup for Your Relationship
The seven letters in the word checkup can help you remember the advantages of taking the Couple Checkup with your partner:
- C —Create positive change. You can create positive changes in your relationship by establishing new habits that promote a more satisfying relationship. The checkup will help you brainstorm new ideas to change your relationship in positive ways.
- H —Healthy for your relationship. Checkups promote and maintain relational health. Just as a physical exam or a dental checkup identifies ways to improve your body, the Couple Checkup identifies ways to improve your relationship.
- E —Evaluate where you are now. The best way to identify areas of improvement is to evaluate your current relationship. In fact, the first step in most medical treatment is a diagnostic assessment.
- C —Communicate more effectively. The checkup gives you the opportunity to share and discuss the specific results that reveal how each of you sees the many aspects of your relationship.
- K —Kick-start your relationship. Couples often need some outside intervention to stimulate discussions and change the way they typically operate. The checkup is one effective way to kick-start discussions and begin to implement positive change.
- U —Understand each other. Checkup results may surprise you when you learn how your partner responded to the statements. By sharing the results, you can gain a better understanding of each other’s ideas and feelings.
- P —Proactive versus reactive. Too often couples wait for a problem to become more serious before they deal with the issue directly. The checkup can help you be proactive by giving you exercises to complete and encouraging you to resolve current issues.
The following are a few more positive reasons for taking the Couple Checkup:
- It’s a simple, fun way to learn about yourself and your relationship.
- It’s tailor-made to your relationship based on background questions.
- It’s relevant to couples at various stages of their relationship —dating, engaged, married.
- It can be completed on a computer, tablet, or smart phone.
- It only takes about twenty to thirty minutes for each person to complete.
- It’s completely confidential.
- It stimulates discussion about your relationship.
- It primes you for improving your relationship.
- It’s an easy way to identify and explore your relationship strengths.
- It helps you to clarify and resolve problematic issues.
- The Checkup and Report are objective in nature.
- A detailed Couple Report goes directly back to you.
- It personalizes the couple program so it is more relevant to your relationship.
One of the first steps in your Ready to Wed experience is to go online at www.FocusOnTheFamily.com/ReadyToWed and take the Couple Checkup. To maximize the value and effectiveness of the Ready to Wed experience, the Couple Checkup and the Ready to Wed book have been fully integrated. They provide a comprehensive picture of the same twelve important areas of a couple’s relationship.
This table illustrates the corresponding sections of the Ready to Wed book and the matching Couple Checkup categories.
Ready to Wed Chapters | Couple Checkup Category |
2—Leaving Your Parents and Cleaving to Your Spouse | Family of Origin—page 12 |
5—Soul Mates: Building Spiritual Intimacy | Spiritual Beliefs—page 8 |
6—One Flesh: Sexual Intimacy in Marriage | Affection & Sexuality—page 7 |
7—Communication: The Language of Love | Communication—page 4 |
8—We Are So Different! | SCOPE Personality—pages 13–17 |
9—What Do You Expect? | Marriage Expectations—page 9 |
10—Fight Our Way to a Better Marriage | Conflict Resolution—page 5 |
11—Teammates: Ending the Chore Wars Before They Start | Relationship Roles—page 10 |
12—Our Money Relationship | Finances—page 6 |
Once you have both completed the assessment, you will be notified that your Couple Report (approximately twenty to twenty-five pages) is available for each of you to view, store, and/or print. It will be important to print at least one copy for your use as you go through the Ready to Wed experience. (Optional Guide: There is also a discussion guide, which contains about twenty couple exercises related to the various topic areas. This guide is in addition to the materials and ideas provided in this program. You can review the guide and selectively print out the relevant pages for each couple exercise.)