People who work with marriage education have so much to say about it that it is sometimes hard to find a summary of the basics: What is it? Does it work? How? Who needs it? How is it different from therapy or pastoral counseling?
That last one is still a widespread and tragic misunderstanding. Couples don't know about marriage education or don't explore it because, as they say, "We tried counseling." And legislators and policymakers, even those trying to encourage people to get help for their marriages, often don't understand that it isn't "counseling", and can be delivered by trained lay people.
Seth Eisenberg of PAIRS, one of the leading marriage education curricula, addresses this need in his new article, "The ABCs of Marriage and Relationship Education". On the things that I'm an expert in, I sometimes get so involved in them that it gets harder to explain the basics in a way that people understand, but on the other hand, when I make an effort to do that, I actually learn more: I discover new connections between different parts of the field, and new reasons why it's relevant and important in terms of my basic values in my own life and our shared values as a society. That is definitely going on in Seth's article as he summarizes the key lessons of Marriage Skills Education and how they are instilled not merely by reciting them, but through training and practice.
