It Must Be Love, but Let’s Be Sure

DUNWOODY, Ga. —  It was almost romantic when Doreen McDonald and Lee Rainwater sat down to take psychological tests together.

Some things they knew. He knew he was smitten the first time he saw her, at a church-sponsored lecture on “Love, Sex and Relationships.” She knew she loved talking to him so much that once they stood in a parking lot for a full hour, unable to end the conversation, while cars came and went around them.

So after six months of dating, they went to their church to begin a systematic inquiry: Should he ask her to marry him? Should she say yes?

Increasingly, couples are seeking out “pre-premarital” or “pre-engagement” counseling -- the opportunity to sit down with trained advisors to examine, dispassionately, whether their love is a passing fancy. This step, though still rare, is on the rise across the country. In the South, the most religious and divorce-prone part of the country, many churches have begun to recommend it.

In seminar halls or living rooms, dating couples practice the art of the painful conversation, face cold realities about sex and money, and catalog childhood traumas that might leak into their married lives. They examine printouts summarizing their psychological makeups and the weaknesses -- sorry, “growth areas” -- of their relationships.

It may not be the kind of love story found in Hollywood movies, but pre-premarital counseling responds to a yearning for a more reliable path to marriage. Using tools from social science, it aims to prepare the partners for conflict, prevent unions based on blind impulse -- and, ultimately, reduce a divorce rate as high for religious couples as for other Americans.

“What we’re trying to teach couples is: This is romantic,” said Rob Eagar, an Atlanta author and lecturer on Christian dating.

For Lee, a dark-haired, gregarious former Marine, the relationship raced along like quicksilver. The 28-year-old spotted Doreen in a crowd, surrounded by hundreds of people, and watched her, thinking he might never see her again. She was ivory-skinned, green-eyed, friendly and shy at the same time. He knew he wanted to marry her before he knew her name.

Doreen was the one who hesitated and wondered. In one conversation soon after they met -- a joke between them now -- Doreen, 31, explained brightly that there were a lot of pretty girls in their church group and it would be premature to focus his attention on just one. She dismissed him coldly in church one Sunday and spent the next week worrying that he would not approach her again.

Lee ignored Doreen’s standoffish comments. He had a feeling there was room to maneuver.

“I wasn’t pursuing her nonstop,” he says, “but I just didn’t really listen to what she was saying.”

The following Sunday, he asked her with a twinkle in his eye if this was the week she would talk to him. Not long after that, she stepped in shyly to watch him play basketball at the church and got hit in the face with the ball, leaving a cut on her nose and her glasses swinging wildly from one ear. She remembers babbling nervously through their first date, at Starbucks.

Six months later, around the time that Lee half-seriously invited her to elope with him to Las Vegas, Doreen floated her own suggestion -- counseling. Before long, they were signing up to take the Taylor-Johnson Temperament Analysis and the PREPARE Relationship Inventory, psychological tests designed to measure such indicators as Idealistic Distortion, Sexual Relationship and Equalitarian Qualities. PREPARE has 80% to 85% accuracy in predicting which couples will eventually divorce, according to David Olson, the University of Minnesota researcher who developed it.

Lee wrote out a check for $75 and they sat down in front of the answer forms. It felt, somehow, like they were jumping off a cliff.

“We just kind of looked at each other,” Doreen said. “This was a moment. It was like, ‘This is real, we’re going to take this step to see if we want to get engaged.’ ”

*

All over the country, social conservatives are examining marriage with a scientific eye. While the Bush administration touts traditional marriage as a centerpiece of its social policy, the country’s highest divorce rates are in Bible Belt states such as Alabama, Tennessee and Arkansas. The lowest rate -- 2.4 divorces a year per 1,000 inhabitants -- is found in Massachusetts.

A movement is afoot to rethink the structures around marriage. Lawmakers in Arkansas, Louisiana and Arizona have passed bills creating “covenant marriage,” a contract between bride and groom that limits grounds for divorce to extreme conditions including adultery and abuse. Lawmakers in Florida, Arizona, Tennessee, Maryland and Minnesota have passed bills offering a financial incentive for couples who attend counseling or marital education before they marry. In the conservative heartland, couples counseling, offered at many churches, has become ordinary.

Some have looked hard at the way Americans choose husbands and wives. In his influential 1997 book, “I Kissed Dating Goodbye,” Joshua Harris, a home-schooled evangelical Christian, attacked the short-term relationships of adolescence and young adulthood as a perfect training ground for adult divorce.

Harris popularized the alternative of “courtship,” which constrains the couple’s freedom to be transported by emotion. In courtship, parents would arrange meetings and group activities until the couple was ready to marry.

That idea of courtship has never quite taken off, said Eagar, the author of “The Power of Passion: Applying the Love of Christ to Dating Relationships.”

“Parents love it,” said Eagar, who lectures church groups on dating. “In essence, it’s giving them control -- or more control -- over their child’s relationship. Singles are saying that’s not working.”

Eagar recommends the more palatable alternative of pre-engagement counseling.

After a brutally short marriage, Eagar did not propose to his second wife, Ashley, until they had completed eight weeks of intensive counseling with a trained clinician at First Baptist Church of Atlanta. The therapist “found some things Ashley and I were struggling with that we didn’t even know,” he said. Now he tells everyone to do the same.

“If someone’s going to learn how to drive a car, you’re going to take classes, read the manual,” he said. “You’re not going to just jump into it. Unfortunately, that’s how a lot of couples approach a romantic relationship.”

Mike McManus, who trains church groups through his Maryland organization, Marriage Savers, estimates that 3,000 to 5,000 churches now offer rigorous counseling for couples considering or preparing for marriage. Use of premarital inventories such as PREPARE has also increased steeply, he said, from 100,000 couples per year in 1993 to 800,000 last year.

Atlanta churches have established pre-engagement programs because couples were demanding them. Counselors at Peachtree Presbyterian Church offer a twice-yearly workshop called “To Marry or Not to Marry?” James Eubanks, at First Baptist Church of Woodstock, puts a notice in church circulars advertising counseling “if you’re considering engagement.”

Part of the message is a warning: The prognosis may be bad. Some counselors share discouraging statistics showing couples who live together before marrying have a higher risk of divorce; the same is true for people whose parents divorced and for those who marry particularly young or too soon after meeting each other.

Other counselors make it a goal to put stress on a relationship, hoping to identify matches that are headed for disaster.

“With a married couple, I’m working hard to stabilize and maintain that relationship,” Eubanks said. “With a pre-engaged couple, I have no vested interest in maintaining that relationship. If I rattle their cage and the cage is falling apart, I think I’m doing them a huge favor by allowing it to die.”

Tests, too, can deliver bad news. Les Parrott, coauthor of a program called Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts, said he can administer 21 tests and “pinpoint pretty accurately the future course of love for a couple.”

Parrott, a professor of clinical psychology at Seattle Pacific University, a Christian school, does not tell couples to break up if their prospects look poor. He tells them that their “chances for success are diminished” and that they are “going to need to work hard on developing some skills” if they don’t want to end up divorced. Sometimes, he said, just looking at the divorce statistics is enough to make a couple postpone their wedding.

The PREPARE inventory, which is scored by computer, categorizes engaged couples as “Vitalized,” “Harmonious,” “Traditional” or “Conflicted,” with about 25% of couples falling into each group. Although counselors may choose not to share these statistics, the future for the Conflicted couples does not look good, said Peter Larson, PREPARE’s director of programs and research.

When researchers in one study followed up on that group three years later, they found that 40% of the couples had decided not to get married. Among those who did marry, 53% had divorced or separated, and an additional 30% described themselves as dissatisfied in the marriage, Larson said.

In contrast, 17% said they were happily married.

*

As they sat down to take the tests, Doreen and Lee had differing thoughts. Lee started out with a twinge of skepticism, as if he were taking a Cosmopolitan magazine poll. Doreen was avidly curious: Would she, who mostly grew up with a stay-at-home mom, have different expectations about gender roles than Lee, whose mother worked as a corrections officer throughout his childhood?

Would she get over her fear of conflict, or just wilt every time an argument arose? Would he really want to be with her once he observed her mood swings at close range? Were there unknown factors in the murky future, just waiting to destroy their marriage?

“I was at the point of being, like: ‘I do love him, but I don’t know. I’m not sure,’ she said. “ ‘I’m not going to jump into something. I want to make sure this is a person I’m willing to commit to.’ ”

Doreen and Lee looked over a list of 180 statements that make up the PREPARE inventory. They marked how strongly they agreed or disagreed with sentiments like these:

I am concerned I am marrying too soon.

Every new thing I have learned about my partner has pleased me.

My family approves of my future spouse.

My partner sometimes uses or refuses affection unfairly.

I am concerned that my future spouse sometimes spends money foolishly.

A booklet explaining their test results -- analyzed by a company in Minnesota -- was passed to two trained mentors from First Baptist Church of Atlanta, Scott and Ruta Reynolds, who met with them six times over the next few weeks.

Scott, 52, and Ruta, 45, had both been divorced before they married. Eight months into their marriage -- before they entered a Christian counseling program -- they were at the brink of splitting up.

Scott and Ruta like to start with bleak scenarios. This is what they told Doreen and Lee on their first meeting: You will not always be in love. When reality hits, as Scott puts it, “it’s the middle of the night, and she just got through in the bathroom and it stinks. I might have a three-day growth and a booger hanging out of my nose.”

“I say to a couple, it may be that tomorrow he is in a car accident and becomes a paraplegic,” Ruta said. “I bring that up quite a lot.”

Doreen and Lee recalled shooting each other a look that said, What have we gotten ourselves into?

Over the following weeks, though, the two couples practiced communication techniques developed by therapists. Doreen and Lee learned that when they needed to discuss a thorny issue, it helped to make an appointment, as if it was a business meeting. They examined the items on the PREPARE test they had answered differently.

Doreen could feel herself unfolding. She began to feel “at peace,” she said, “about what to expect.”

“You could see her let go of all that caution,” Ruta said.

On their last session together, Scott and Ruta told Lee and Doreen their assessment, even though they technically are not supposed to: We think you guys are going to make it.

Lee’s mother, Nancy Rainwater, who lives in a small town in North Carolina, is impressed by her son’s purposeful approach to building a good marriage. She and Lee Sr. eloped when she was 17, six months after they met, and proceeded to have five children.

Looking back, Nancy, 46, acknowledges that there have been bumpy stretches. She wishes she and Lee’s father had gotten to know each other a little better before they married. But she also believes that Doreen and Lee’s lives are about to change in ways that no amount of study can prepare them for.

“You can stand back and look all you want before you jump,” she said, “but you never know how deep the water is.”

On a spring day three months after their last pre-engagement counseling session, Lee asked Doreen to dress up to meet him at the Starbucks where they had their first date, so she thought he was going to propose.

But then he arrived late, so she decided he wasn’t. He took her to a fancy restaurant, so she thought he was.

But he disappeared into the bathroom again and again, returning empty-handed, so she thought he wasn’t.

They went back to her apartment, and, disappointed, she slipped off her high heels and decided she might as well do some cleaning.

She was walking out of her bedroom, two plastic garbage bags in her hands, when he surprised her with a diamond ring.