There is now an online marriage preparation service that works with local Marriage support personal and allows couples in unusual situations (such as one partner being overseas for the time being) to complete a full featured marriage preparation program.

Why Marriage Preparation Matters

The goal of Marriage Preparation is to bring about superb marriages, the kind of marriages where people say, "Aren’t they a wonderful couple!" and mean it. The realities of our culture make this extremely challenging. Nearly all of the couples who come to the Church for marriage are already sexually active with one another; nearly all of them are using contraceptives* to avoid pregnancy before marriage, and half to three quarters of them are already living together. By their lifestyle choices, they have already convinced themselves that the Church has nothing to tell them about male-female relationships or fertility management, and certainly nothing worthwhile to say about sexuality.

So why do they come? Plainly they are looking for something more than they can get from cohabitation. They know from observation of other couples (and possibly their own bitter experience) just how fragile sexual relationships outside of marriage can be. They want something better for themselves and hope that a gorgeous public ceremony or maybe some mysterious "blessing" from the Church can give them that extra something.

So what can the Church do for them? Well, Jesus gave us the best teaching on marriage and relationships ever delivered, and John Paul II has taken that teaching and packaged it so well that we now know more about what makes a marriage work (and what doesn’t) than ever before, and this knowledge is mostly available only through the Catholic Church.

Marriage is a fine-tuned, extremely powerful biological/psychological/spiritual package. Marriage moves couples to create the very best setting for bringing up resourceful, contributing members of society.
That setting is the human family with two highly involved parents. The family, however, revolves around the wholehearted sexual donation of each spouse to the other. Anything that attacks that relationship is highly destructive to marriage and the family. Pornography, for example, involves the husband with imaginary sexual images instead of his wife. Both partners are clearly aware of this disconnection, and sexual activity becomes divisive instead of unitive, with typically disastrous consequences. Birth control is even worse. Contracepted sex is the individual pursuit of physical/emotional gratification instead of a mutual pursuit of greater love and family involvement. This self-centered sex, unlike family-oriented sex, has devastating effects, for example, the huge increase in divorce that has come about as our culture has become saturated with birth control.

Marriage preparation programs can now clearly teach what factors, such as birth control, attack the marriage bond and what factors, such as accepting children, support and enhance it. We owe a great debt to John Paul II, because now we can tell couples not only what to do (and avoid) for a life-long, excellent relationship, but we can also tell them why these practices make such a remarkable difference. Effective marriage preparation, however, calls for a thorough re-education of the trainers as well as the trainees, since all of us are immersed in a culture where sexual values are highly distorted.

This is absolutely worth the effort. Healthy marriages lead to loving families. Loving families lead to functional, productive communities—a culture of life, a Civilization of Love. Anything we can do to foster this society will have an enormous payoff!

Four steps to take:

• 1) Give couples an outstanding "marriage prep packet".
• 2) Set out a table with additional resources.
• 3) Build a powerful Marriage Preparation Curriculum.
• 4) Create a library for couples, presenters, and mentors.