Books to read

• Build a great marriage
• Build a great Christian marriage
• Find a way through marriage problems
• Build great relationships
• Cope better with everyday pressures
• Understand the effects of divorce on children
• Understand how and why marriage matters
• Understand how and why cohabitation matters
• Find out about family breakdown in the UK
• Find out about US initiatives
• Find a magazine on marriage education

Websites to visit

We've also put together a small selection of helpful websites covering:

• The best UK website on marriage
• Community Family Trusts in the UK
• Various research-based marriage and relationship programmes
• The best international websites on marriage

MENTORING MARRIAGES

Mentoring Marriages, by Bristol’s CFT director Harry Benson, explains how any ordinary married couple can use their experience of marriage to make a difference to couples starting out - whether moving in together or getting married. It is the first book of its kind in the UK. Mentoring Marriages is available from Amazon and most bookshops, priced at £7.99.

HOW TO HAVE A GREAT MARRIAGE

PREP has a deep wealth of research to support its effectiveness and is now probably the most widely used education programme in the world. You can deepen your understanding and learn far more about successful and unsuccessful relationships from this book. The 2001 version has been substantially updated from the original 1994 edition. As in the original edition, the book offers invaluable advice on achieving better communication and problem-solving skills, using structured techniques to resolve conflicts, sharing a core belief system, understanding commitment and forgiveness, restoring intimacy, increasing fun, and improving your sex life. The authors show that conflict in intimate relationships is as normal and essential as love-but it's how you fight and resolve conflicts, that determine the difference between a sustained healthy marriage or a painful divorce.

HOW TO HAVE A GREAT CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE

This is the book of the Christian version of PREP. Scott Stanley has managed to integrate a Christian view of marriage with his considerable knowledge of marriage research and experience with marriage education, as an originator of PREP. So this is a Christian book that teaches about marriage and marriage skills but with serious academic credibility behind it. There are also versions of the original book for Jewish marriages and for empty nest marriages whose children have left home.

HOW TO DEAL WITH MARRIAGE DIFFICULTIES:

A colleague heard this lady speak at a marriage educators conference in the USA in 2001 and she impressed them with her practical wisdom drawn from both hard research and clinical experience. Don't go, or send your friends, to a marriage counsellor until you've read this book. "Divorce Remedy", as its predecessor "Divorce Busting", has had rave reviews from the industry. It is the book for you if you want to help friends who are in trouble. It is the book for you if your own marriage is in trouble and you want to save it. It is even the book for you if your spouse has actually moved out or is having an affair. This lady has a successful track record. Thousands of couples have rebuilt their marriage using the principles she suggests. The logic to these steps is clear and easy to understand. It has worked for others. It can work for you and for your friends. Don't knock it until you've tried it. She puts it like this. "When you got married, if someone would have told you that in x number of years, you would fall out of love, you would not have believed that person. Your positive feelings for your partner at the time would have prevented you from even entertaining the possibility that love would die. Well, the same is true in reverse. Your current negative feelings are blinding you to the possibility that you will ever feel different again." If that's you, then read this book and do what she suggests. You have everything to lose if you don't and everything to gain if you do.

HOW TO HAVE GREAT RELATIONSHIPS

This is a really interesting book on relationships from a married couple who together have a wealth of academic and practical experience, including training hundreds of mentor couples. This would be a book I'd recommend to ordinary couples if the skills-based books and courses don't seem to be having the impact they should. What stands this book apart is how they deal with the importance of our beliefs about relationships - whether we get them from our personal backgrounds, our families or our friends. For example, if I really believe that "you can make me whole again", I am more or less guaranteeing myself relationship failure. When you fail to satisfy me, as you surely will at some stage, I will inevitably gravitate towards somebody or something else who I believe can. The Parrotts show how we must be responsible for our own wholeness. No amount of skills training can keep a relationship together if these kinds of false underlying beliefs are there to pounce when things go wrong.

HOW TO WITHSTAND EVERYDAY PRESSURES

If you feel pushed and pulled all over the place by the insatiable demands of work, family and recreation, this book can help release you from such tyranny and show you how to take charge of your life again. Doherty is a family therapist who gives you real cause for optimism. As one tiny example, he signed my own copy of his book with the words "For Harry & Kate. May your marriage flourish". How many times have you heard a complete stranger make such an encouraging and lovely remark to you? His book reads just like that. In particular he focuses on how we can deal better with the pressures of overwork, consumerism, and an overemphasis on personal fulfilment, factors that pull couples apart. We need to decide to take charge of our marriage, "intentional marriage" as he calls it. We need to establish and value our own and others "marriage rituals". We need to support each other as a "community". This is a practical book brimming with common sense.

THE LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF DIVORCE:

Because most kids of divorce appear to do OK in life, Wallerstein's focus on how divorce affects all children has been heavily criticised. However … what she says is really helpful if you are a child of divorce yourself, married to one, or simply want to know how divorce typically effects children. This book covers 25 years work alongside 93 children of divorce, now in their 30s and 40s, as well as a comparison group of those who had grown up in intact marriages, both good and bad. The unexpected legacy is how divorce affects children most when they reach adulthood and form their own intimate relationships. My wife and I heard her speak at a conference in 2001. As a child of divorce myself, it comes as quite a shock to hear your own words coming from a 79 year-old sociologist. The fact that most of us cope and survive doesn't take the deep scars away. The positive spin on divorce overlooks this. My wife can tell you how surprising and helpful it was to hear that I am not uniquely odd, even if she doesn't always understand it! This book is an illuminating read that may make you view divorce in a very different light.

RESEARCH ON THE EFFECTS OF MARRIAGE:

All of us have personal experience of divorce, marital disputes or relationship breakdown amongst family and friends. So no wonder it is increasingly normal to turn our backs on marriage as a natural first choice and see it more as an ideal. This book presents the research evidence how and why marriage typically makes people happier, healthier and wealthier, in an easily understood manner. Contrary to fashionable thinking, married people don't necessarily start out that way. Sociology Professor Linda Waite explains how long-term studies find significant differences occur amongst those who marry that cannot be accounted for by their initial states of poverty, health or education. For example, married people typically earn 10-40% more than similar unmarried people, after accounting for initial differences. Unmarried people are also at far greater risk of domestic violence and abuse than similar married people. Both men and women gain benefits and protections from being married. The key factor appears to be the public commitment to the long-term. Taking such a long-term view enables married couples to specialise in their roles, something that tends not to occur amongst cohabitees. Married couples also have more of an incentive to look out for one another's health and job prospects. As far as I know, this book provides the clearest exposition currently available of the research case for marriage. This is a well-evidenced and easily understood message that any politician or social activist ought to be all too aware of. I urge you to read it!

RESEARCH ON THE EFFECTS OF COHABITATION:

It's hard to be completely dispassionate when discussing marriage or cohabitation. Our personal choices of living arrangement, and our success or failure in those choices, tend to bias our opinions. Just as we know of wonderful unmarried couples, we know of dreadful marriages. The surprise to many is that these are very much the exception and not the rule. Cohabitation is far from equivalent to marriage as a family choice. The underlying premise of cohabitation is to keep one's options open and not expressly commit fully to one's partner. This short-term mindset exposes us to all sorts of health and societal risks that the long-term mindset of marriage, more often than not, actually protects us from. Patricia Morgan has taken the lid off this can of worms by highlighting and summarising the findings of a huge body of recent research. Whether you read this book or not, policymakers and couples alike need to be aware of the truth so smothered by modern day political correctness. If people are to make better-informed choices, then we need better public education of the kind provided in this book. Marriage and cohabitation are public health issues. The big lie today is that cohabitation and marriage are the same. They're not.

FAMILY BREAKDOWN IN THE UK

This is a straightforward and well-written analysis of up-to-date UK and European research on the family and family policies. For those who would like some easily absorbed UK research, this is the booklet for you.

WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM THE US

This is a well-written history and analysis of social change in the USA. Columnist Melanie Phillips, formerly Sunday Times and now Daily Mail, challenges current UK family policy to learn the lessons from the US. There is information in here about Community Marriage Policies and the Oklahoma initiative.

THRESHOLD MAGAZINE

Far and away the best marriage education magazine on the market, this is well worth reading if you are serious about marriage education. Australia is well-advanced in the use of inventories such as PREPARE and FOCCUS, and skills courses such as PREP. A recent pilot scheme tested a voucher scheme whereby all couples marrying were offered education. Typical articles discuss aspects of this scheme, issues regarding stepfamilies or marriage preparation, as well as providing expert insights into tricky areas, such as cohabitation.

www.2-in-2-1.co.uk

Without doubt the best UK website for accessing marriage information and educational resources. You can find a course near you, read up on how to make your marriage work better, find out what the research says or which book to buy, and loads more. Authors Dave and Liz Percival also offer a highly informative weekly email summary of developments in the field as well as various online discussion fora.

www.nacft.org.uk

Find out more about Community Family Trusts in the UK. Of particular interest is a fantastic downloadable manual by Nick Axten that tells you how to set up your own project.

www.themarriagecourse.org

The Marriage Course is the fastest growing UK relationship education programme. Nicky and Sila Lee have put together a well-packaged seven evening course that is mostly run in churches. The course is highly appropriate for non-church couples and can be equally easily run at home using course videos. If you can invite friends for supper, and if you can put a video in your machine and press the go button, you can run The Marriage Course or join one run by Bedford CFT please contact Helen on 01234 824112 for details of the next course.

www.foccus.co.uk and www.prepare-enrich.co.uk

These are the UK websites of FOCCUS and PREPARE, two well-researched inventories that make mentoring couples extremely easy. Both inventories ask couples to record responses to a range of statements, usually before they marry. Profiles of the responses by subject have been found to distinguish successful and unsuccessful relationships up to 5 years later with 80% accuracy. Our Bedford CFT mentors and engaged couples use FOCCUS.

www.smartmarriages.com

Without doubt the best US website for accessing marriage information and educational resources. Single-handedly author Diane Sollee offers an array of course information, articles, relationship tips, books and academic references as well as a highly informative e-newsletter that distributes articles and feedback on marriage. Be sure to view her archive for examples before you sign up to the frequent emails, which are mainly geared to a US audience. Nonetheless the quality of information is excellent. Diane's summer conference is exceptional for illustrating the serious credibility and broad range of the coalition and its available resources. I definitely recommend a trip to the States if you're seriously involved in marriage work.

www.marriagesavers.org

MarriageSavers is really the only group anywhere in the world that has systematically and effectively reduced divorce rates across whole communities and cities. Their influence spreads well into our own Community Family Trust movement. Should the "marriage education" movement live up to its promise of slashing divorce rates across the world, Mike & Harriet McManus of MarriageSavers deserve a huge chunk of the accolades. Find out how their Community Marriage Policies have led to a reduction in divorce rates. Find out how some churches have almost eliminated divorce by offering simple but comprehensive marriage programmes - valuing marriage and offering ongoing education & support through mentoring. And find out how effective mentoring can be, whether for couples getting married, couples on the brink of divorce, or couples in stepfamilies. If you're thinking this is simply a religious programme, you'd be very wrong. Inactive mainstream churches are frequently on the receiving end of McManus' wrath for being more often part of the problem than the solution. Marriage Savers arguments are all the more credible for being independently evaluated.

www.prepinc.com

This is the website of PREP, one of two research-based programmes we use at BCFT. PREP is without doubt the best-researched and most effective relationship education programme in the world. Controlled studies find that couples who do PREP reduce their divorce risk up to five years later compared to couples who do other courses or none at all. Other research on PREP finds that the best effects are with "high risk" couples. These findings remain open to challenge due to methodological issues and one disputed Dutch study that appeared to find no effects. New research aims to address these concerns. For now we must wait. Still, no other programme I know of has anything like such studies to support its effectiveness. If you're interested in some of the research into marriage and this programme, this is a good place to look. The website is generous and informative.

www.aifs.org.au

For those interested on family research and work outside the US, this is the impressive site of the Australian Institute of Family Studies, an academic clearing house. Here you will find a whole range of reports on all sorts of aspects of family life. One example is a review of the effectiveness (or otherwise) of pre-marriage education http://www.aifs.org.au/institute/pubs/parker.html

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