Read an Excerpt
The Couple Checkup
By David H. Olson, Amy Olson-Sigg, Peter J. Larson Thomas Nelson
Copyright © 2008 David H. Olson, Amy Olson-Sigg, and Peter J. Larson
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4185-7327-0
CHAPTER 1
LIKE A RIVER FLOWING
You can never step into the same river, for new waters are always flowing onto you.
—HERACLITUS OF EPHESUS
The sixth-century philosopher Heraclitus taught that nothing is permanent but everything is constantly changing. We cannot use our senses to perceive some changes because they are so gradual, yet they are real. Not only do our brains attempt to deny these truths when it comes to ourselves (our fight against aging being just one example) but we also want to believe that the people in our lives will remain stable and predictable. Our egos want to believe that relationships can be mastered, and will forever be glorious and meaningful. This is a common mistake that will eventually lead to disappointment.
YOUR RELATIONSHIP IS CHANGING TOO ... DO YOU LIKE THE DIRECTION IT IS GOING?
A popular metaphor used to understand family and couple relationships is that of a river. Thinking about your family as a river emphasizes its long-term continuity, something that both reaches back in time and extends ahead into the future. More importantly, the river metaphor accentuates the ever-changing nature of families and relationships. On the surface a couple may look relatively stable, but deeper examination reveals "undercurrents" that change from moment to moment, altering the flow of the relationship. After all, couples are comprised of individuals who are affected by their own experiences and are changing their ideas and desires over time.
Over time it is clear to see how Bob and Stephanie grew farther apart in their values. Using the river metaphor for their relationship, we see that as they move through life, they gather substance from different sources and join and blend with other "waters." These other sources naturally become more influential as couples transition into married life. In the early stages of their love and marriage, Bob and Stephanie felt cocooned in their love, with family and friends having a very peripheral role. But after several years of marriage, especially when children are involved, family and friends return as more central figures of influence. In the case of Bob and Stephanie, time and experiences with others solidified and enhanced differences that were already there.
We can easily recognize the effects of time on physical matter, and we act accordingly. For example, if you want your car to run and to last, you refuel, change the oil, replace brake pads, and so on. If you want your teeth to last your lifetime, you brush and floss daily, and you have a yearly dental checkup. If you want your body to remain healthy, you eat a variety of wholesome foods, exercise, get enough sleep, and have a medical checkup once a year.
• Would you drive your car one hundred thousand miles before getting an oil change?
• Would you go twenty-five years without a dental checkup?
• Would you have a physical exam only once in your lifetime?
Your relationship deserves a checkup too.
In contrast, although most couples report that being happily married is one of their priorities, regular couple checkups are rare. Especially considering the natural change that takes place in all things, it's surprising that many people are not intentional in knowing their partner and staying connected. The assumption is that a good relationship flows naturally. Whether one believes the source is God or just an organic flow from the wellspring of love and commitment, the fact is relationships often do seem to work well naturally.
But just as a river requires replenishment, so do relationships. Rivers lose substance to the earth through which they pass, to the air, and to those who draw water from them. Relationships also lose substance as they flow through time: from work demands, physical and mental health issues, and the countless other ways in which our time and energies are dissipated.
Replenishment is crucial to a happy partnership and can exist in a variety of forms, many of which may already be part of your relational connection—rituals, shared interests, a place of worship, family and friends, and so on. Reading this book with your partner and completing the exercises and Couple Checkup is a deliberate and concise way to replenish your relationship. Not only will you have the opportunity to customize the information and assimilate it into the uniqueness of your relationship, but you can also be assured that the questions are relevant in the first place.
Many of the ideas and insights into marriage and couple relationships in this book are based on research with thousands of couples who took the PREPARE-ENRICH couple inventory used by counselors and clergy. PREPARE-ENRICH has been taken by over 2.5 million couples nationally and internationally over the past twenty-five years. PREPARE-ENRICH contains twenty critical areas of a couple's relationship and consists of 165 key questions that couples answer. PREPARE is used to help premarital couples prepare for marriage. ENRICH helps married couples enrich their relationship. Using data from fifty-thousand married couples who took ENRICH, the content of this book is organized around a national survey of marriages that identifies what distinguishes happy couples from unhappy couples. (For more information on this, see chapter 2.
THE ROLE OF THE COUPLE CHECKUP AMID CHANGE
Wait a minute, you may be saying to yourself. If all things are indeed changing, why gather information on a relationship (in the form of a Couple Checkup) if it is only going to change again? This is a valuable and important question.
The point of the Couple Checkup is to get information about your relationship as a couple at this moment. Your answers to the questions are important now, but as the months and years pass, they will becomes less relevant as your relationship continues to change. To understand this analogically, imagine that you are looking at a photograph of your childhood home taken after a snowfall. Does it matter any longer that the sidewalk needed to be shoveled and there may have been disagreement over who would do the work? Of course not! It no longer matters, because it is no longer relevant.
So the way you answer the questions about your relationship matters—it matters a lot—but remember that it only reflects the present. Like that snapshot of your childhood home, it will someday represent a time in history. Even the most loving and nurturing relationships will be swept away by the current if ignored. Nothing ever remains the same forever ... that is the process of life.
Relationships are living, growing, dynamic entities that require steady doses of nurturing, as well as periodic health checks. The failure to continuously nurture relationships is summed up in the all-too-common statements made by couples, such as, "I didn't realize he felt that way," or "I feel as though we do not know each other anymore." It is epitomized in the couple who "drifts apart," or after years of marriage (and often childrearing), feel as though they have lost the intimate bond they once had and are now just sharing living quarters.
What Exactly Is a "Couple Checkup"?
The Couple Checkup is an online assessment with approximately 120 questions about relationships. These questions cover between fifteen and twenty aspects of your relationship that research has identified as key areas for healthy relating. The questions are also designed to increase a couple's connection by encouraging them to talk about their relationship. The Checkup is based on the popular and highly successful PREPARE-ENRICH Program, which has been used by over sixty-five thousand clergy and counselors to help over 2.5 million couples prepare for marriage (PREPARE) and enrich their marriage (ENRICH).
Is the Couple Checkup Relevant to Us?
The Couple Checkup is designed to be relevant for couples who are dating or engaged, for couples who live together but are not yet married, and for married couples. Based on background questions that you answer about your relationship, the computer system will select relevant scales and questions for you to consider.
Dating couples. The characteristics that make for a good date are not necessarily the characteristics that make a good mate. The Couple Checkup, with its empirically based item relevancy, can help couples make good choices about their future. Seriously dating couples need objective feedback about their relationship quality before they commit themselves to an engagement and become caught up in the distractions of planning a wedding.
Engaged Couples. It is important to realize that getting married is easy, but continually developing a healthy marriage is very challenging in our society. The United States is the most marrying-and-divorcing culture in the world. For the last ten years, the annual divorce rate in the United States has been about 50 percent, so marriage is a very risky social institution. But marriage continues to be the most popular voluntary choice that Americans make, as over 90 percent will marry at least once. There are 2.3 million marriages and 1.2 million divorces each year; and in about half of the marriages, one or both of the persons have been married before.
Premarital Couples. All premarital couples can benefit from the early detection of potential relationship issues by taking the Couple Checkup. Currently, only 35 to 40 percent of all engaged couples receive any premarital education. Premarital education has been shown to reduce divorce by 30 percent and to improve overall marital satisfaction.
Cohabiting Couples. This is another group that will find the Couple Checkup of value. The number of couples living together outside of marriage has dramatically increased over time. In 1970 only five hundred thousand couples were living together; the number rose to 3.7 million in 1996, and currently there are over 6 million cohabiting couples in the United States. Some of these couples will eventually marry, some will break up, and many will simply continue to live together.
Cohabiting couples are often unsure if they are going to get married, and if so, when that will occur. Sometimes one person is less interested in making the commitment to marriage than the other. One of the positive aspects of taking the Couple Checkup is that it will help couples look at how living together is impacting their relationship. It can also help them make a clearer decision about how they each feel about the relationship, and it will encourage them to discuss the next steps in their relationship.
Married Couples. The Couple Checkup is a relationship health checkup for married couples. It identifies their strengths and issues and stimulates relationship dialogue. It provides a way for couples to reconnect with one another while they talk about important issues. Research has found that married couples tend to seek marriage enrichment and counseling only after their marriage has been struggling for several years and one or both spouses have already considered divorce. Couples in this distressed state have lost sight of their relationship strengths and focus only on their conflicts and issues. The Couple Checkup can identify and address minor issues proactively, before they cause major problems in a marriage.
A couple married for several years took the Couple Checkup because they had ongoing issues that resurfaced again and again. After completing the questions online the wife said,
The Couple Checkup was easy, quick to take, and the results were very helpful. Anthony and I were described as a "Conflicted couple," but that did not surprise me. In a way, I felt relieved to have things out on the table. Now we're doing our homework for our relationship and devoting a couple of evenings each week to talking about things that came up in the Checkup process. We are finally talking about important issues and not avoiding them. We've even talked about marriage counseling, but at the moment we feel good about just walking through these issues we avoided for so long.
THIRTY YEARS OF RESEARCH AND MILLIONS OF COUPLES
We (David and colleagues) began designing assessment surveys for couples over three decades ago at the University of Minnesota. We constructed one of the first premarital assessments (PREPARE) in the late 1970s. This was followed by a marriage inventory (ENRICH) a couple of years later. These tools are now in their fifth edition and have been taken around the world by over 2.5 million couples (5 million individuals). Thirteen international offices have translated the PREPARE-ENRICH assessments into several different languages. The Couple Checkup, discussed in this chapter, is an adaptation of PREPARE-ENRICH, and a major difference is that the Checkup Report goes directly back to couples who takes it online.
Working with so many couples has allowed us to conduct many studies about couple relationships. Through our research, we have come to several important conclusions:
• Each individual has their own unique opinion of their couple relationship. One might assume couples in the same marriage or relationship would have similar opinions and levels of satisfaction about various aspects of their relationship. We quickly discovered, however, that couples often don't know how their partner really feels about things. There is "his" view of marriage and "her" view of their marriage, which often sounds like they are talking about different relationships. Our research has found that you can predict your partner's view of marriage only 25 percent of the time.
• Premarital couples tend to be overly idealistic about their relationship. They believe that love will conquer all and the way they feel about one another will never change. The romance will never fade. Many engaged couples will gladly tell you they've met their soul mate, the one person in the world with whom they could possibly have a successful marriage. They are busy planning their wedding and all the details that go along with it. In the midst of this distracted and unrealistic mind-set, counselors face the challenge of helping these love-struck couples realistically look at some of the challenges that all married couples eventually face.
In one of the first studies we conducted with premarital couples, the results demonstrated how rose-colored their worldview really was. A group in Minnesota had organized an eight-week educational series of lectures for about two hundred premarital couples. They invited several presenters to give very comprehensive talks about their areas of expertise (communication, finances, and so on). We were asked to organize a team of doctoral students to measure the impact of this program. We designed a rigorous study. After the eight-week lecture series came to an end, however, we were amazed to find no changes or improvements in the attitudes, knowledge, or behavior of the engaged couples. When we interviewed them later, they all felt the talks had been entertaining and had good information, but the vast majority of the couples felt the issues that were highlighted "really didn't apply" to them. Their idealism and rose-colored glasses prevented them from applying the information to their own relationships.
• Married couples tend to lose sight of their relationship strengths. As overly idealistic as premarital couples are, the trend among married couples is almost the opposite. When married couples start to struggle, their attitudes often begin to drift toward pessimism and a tendency to focus on the negative aspects of their relationship. In these cases, an assessment can help them identify some of their strengths and help them remember the good things that attracted them to one another in the first place.
THE FLOW OF YOUR RELATIONSHIP
Like a river flowing over thousands of miles, couple relationships flow through the ever-changing passages of our lives. Any lasting relationship has changed (or surely will change) over time with the addition and subtraction of family members, in family and work responsibilities, with individual and relational crises that complicate life, and in personal emotional maturity. How a relationship sustains itself throughout the ebb and flow of life is what either adds or detracts from the volume and force of the relationship, determining its course and the ease with which it flows.
The old saying "You cannot receive what you do not give" describes the cyclical nature of giving and receiving. This book provides a medium for this exchange in the context of relationships, but ultimately you determine how much you will receive from it. Think of the book and the Couple Checkup report as input (and insight), with the output determined by your dialogue, participation, and attitude. So as you read through this book, enjoy the process, knowing you are contributing to the replenishment and vitality of your relationship, health, and happiness!
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Couple Checkup by David H. Olson, Amy Olson-Sigg, Peter J. Larson. Copyright © 2008 David H. Olson, Amy Olson-Sigg, and Peter J. Larson. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Nelson.
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