"We viewed our task as leaders to be one of creating and sustaining an atmosphere in which each couple could speak personally concerning their marriage. We felt we best accomplished this task when we participated as a couple in the same way as we urged the others to participate."
"We regarded ourselves as facilitators. We tried to be creative listeners; to put questions to the group that would help them to share personal experiences; to bring about a change of pace when we sensed this to be necessary."
"We were quite relaxed. We tried to be perceptive of the needs of individual couples. We hope we didn't talk too much."
"We saw ourselves as equal participants with the others, and facilitators of a process which started well with frank, meaningful conversation. We did agenda-building at several points. Our aim was to create an atmosphere in which defensiveness could be replaced with tolerant acceptance, and trust and confidence could grow as we heard each other and learned from each other."
THE PROBLEM OF UNFELT NEED
"The underlying problem is the fact that the marriage enrichment retreat meets unfelt needs. People don't feel keenly that they need it. If you think your marriage is sound, you aren't strongly motivated to spend a weekend making it even sounder. To get the tingle of a potential deepening and enriching takes emotional impact. This means hearing from someone obviously sensible who is warmly convinced about it."
A number of theories were developed to explain this resistance to our project. In general, it is true that it takes problems to motivate married couples to seek help, just as it takes pain to induce many people to visit a doctor; and in both cases, action may prove to be too late to be effective. On the other hand, many couples with basically stable marriages are wistfully aware that their relationship falls short of their expectations. But it takes a strong stimulus, in the form of a cordial personal invitation, to get them to take the necessary steps to enroll for a retreat.
Whatever the cause of this reticence, expressing itself on occasions as resistance, it seems an inappropriate response to the needs and opportunities of our day and age and one of the many factors responsible for the alienation between young and old which is popularly termed the "generation gap." Our trainees were themselves mainly in the second half of life, and they well understood the "privatism" that is a legacy of our past. They themselves, however, had lost nothing, and gained a great deal by the efforts they had made to cultivate greater openness to others, both in their marriages and in their wider relationships, and they would lovingly invite other Friends to make the same venture. They would also plead with Friends to give stronger support to, and undertake more active participation in, a project to provide marriage enrichment retreats for the couples in the care of our Meetings.
Some views were expressed suggesting a special reticence among Friends. There seemed to be some foundation for two theories—first, that Quakers tend to be very heavily involved in social projects, sometimes to the neglect of their own family relationships; and second, that they tend to be somewhat puritanical in the sense that they consider it improper to open their private lives to others. There may be a deep dichotomy in attitudes of Friends here such as reported by one couple: "vivid impressions of honest encounters between those who regard the worship of God as a private affair, and those who feel the need to reach out to their Meeting community for personal support and a sense of communion which includes closer relationships with other Friends."