Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Learning about Love: How Sex Ed Programs Undermine Happy Marriages


For many engaged couples, pre-marriage education is a must. Some couples seek it out, hoping to build a stronger foundation for their marriage and to lessen their chance of divorce. Others may find it a prerequisite for marrying in their church. Regardless of one’s reasons for participating in a pre-marriage course, it appears that such preparation is generally a good idea for the future quality of one’s marriage, according to a new study sponsored by the National Marriage Project.

Interested in the association between premarital experiences and marital quality in young adults, University of Denver researchers Galena Rhoades and Scott Stanley studied a group of 418 individuals who had married some time in the five years following their recruitment into the Relationship Development Study in 2007 and 2008. Their analysis of the data, as reported in their paper “Before ‘I Do’: What Do Premarital Experiences Have To Do With Marital Quality Among Today’s Young Adults,” yielded multiple findings, among them the conclusion that those who participate in pre-marriage education are more likely to experience superior marital quality down the road. According to the report, 57 percent of those who received pre-marriage education reported higher marital quality, versus only 32 percent of those who did not take advantage of such services.  (more...)


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