Cordon bleu -,tAmL marriage

IT IS perhaps, a curious and rather sad paradox that, at a time when marriage as an institution is so constantly under attack, more and more people seem to want to write about it, to analyse it and w prescribe for it.
Some good tips
Several recent paperbacks examine different facets of the same topic. In Maureen Green's Marriage (Fontana, £2.75) she attempts to define what makes for success in the marital relationship. Confidently subtitled The Pleasure and Pains of Modern Marriage why one works and Another Doesn't, the approach would remind the reader of those books by cookery experts which set out to solve the mysteries of why meringues go soggy at the bottom or mayonnaise curdles.
This is perhaps not being entirely fair to a well-researched and easily readable book which covers preparation, the just married stage, children, divorce and long term marriage, in that rd
many other sources,
A aountghor consulted the Catholic Marriage Advisory Council and she gives a detailed description of a visit to a 'Getting Married' course run by a Catholic couple.
The First Two Years of Marriage, by Kathleen Fischer Hart and Thomas N Hart, is an American publication, but is obtainable from Fowler Wright Books at Leominster, Herefordshire at £5.00. The authors write: "The first two years of marriage are a crucial period. They are foundational."
They believe that the arrangements made by a couple in this initial period, and the methods developed by them for dealing with all that is involved in married living, will determine to a great extent how the marriage will play itself out in the years ahead.
Topics dealt with are expectations, communication, intimacy, role relationships and the first child, among others. There are exercises at the end of each chapter, suggesting ways in which individual couples can learn to reflect together on what they have read and reach some conclusions of their own.
After Marriage, by Jennet Kidd (Creative Publishing, 50p) is another little booklet directed towards helping couples to discuss areas of their relationships to one another. It is well illustrated by attractive photographs, and the short passages of text would enable it to be used in discussion groups.
Close encounters
What is Marriage Encounter? is a recent CTS publication by Malcolm and Mary Smith (CTS 45p). The authors had been married themselves for twenty years when they went on their first Marriage Encounter weekend, and did not feel that there was a great deal more they could learn about marriage or about themselves.
This step by stip account of the weekend describes how they were taken by surprise by how much they could discover about their relationship in the short space of time they spent with Marriage Encounter.
So impressed were they that they have been helping to organise similar weekends for other couples ever since and their first Marriage Encounter took place ten years ago.
Dr Jack Dominian is Director Of the Marriage Research Centre
at the Central Middlesex Hospital, a research project which he himself established. He needs no introduction as an expert on Christian marriage and his writings on the subject are already widely respected.
Counselling
Make Or Break (New Library of Pastoral Care, £3.95) is written by him as an introduction to marriage counselling. In his preface, he points out that people in marital difficulties turn to all sorts of advisers, ministers and their assistants, teachers, social workers, doctors, 'and ultimately any one of us who form the intimate family circle of the spouses'.
For this reason, Dr Dominian underlines the importance of the need that as many people as possible should be informed about the nature of marital difficulties, how they arise and the way they are presented.
The book is written with the author's usual clarity and has a useful index. It will be of great assistance to thoSe professionally involved in marriage counselling. Equally, it makes fascinating and valuable reading for any of us who become involved in marital problems in our own families or among our own friends.
Even our own marriages can hardly fail to benefit from the greater understanding of what makes a marriage or breaks it, which a reading of this book can scarcely fail to give.
Second chance
Finally, it may come as something of a shock that remarriage can be considered possible in the Church after a divorce has taken place. In A Redeeming State (Paulist Publications, Fowler Wright) Judith Tate O'Brien and Gene O'Brien describe how such a second marriage should be approached.
It is emphasised, however. that the book is designed for formerly married engaged couples 'who are in a position to remarry in the Church'. This includes couples in which at least one person is widowed.
However, as the authors point out, it can also include couples in which at least one person is divorced, where the first marriage has been annulled or declared invalid by the Church.
It is still not perhaps sufficiently generally known among Catholics that, in appropriate cases, it is possible to obtain a decree of nullity in the Catholic Church. Most people know that if a marriage has not been consummated, it can be declared a nullity. But there are other circumstances in which, even when the marriage has been physically consummated, the Church will declare that it was a nullity in the sacramental sense.
As greater advances in the understanding of human psychology have been made, the Church gives more consideration to the question of the intellectual and emotional maturity of those purporting to make a lifetime commitment to one another.
It is for this reason that remarriage in the Church after divorce is something which is not all that uncommon. A Redeeming State consists of two booklets, one designed for use by a couple planning remarriage, and one for the use of leaders of such couples.
Maureen Vincent Mullally