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"The fact is that anyone who finds themselves in a bad marriage made a mistake at one time or another. Half the time, their biggest mistake was getting married in the first place. To prevent these bad matches or to help get the marriage off on a better start, marrying couples should be required to undergo several hours of marriage classes and/or marital counseling from a licensed minister or marriage counselor."

For people marrying in a church ceremony, this is almost always, if not always, required. Yet there are plenty of divorces among those couples, too. The counseling is often cursory and the couple may not pay that much attention-it's just another thing on the long list of to do's.

For people marrying in a church ceremony, this is almost always, if not always, required.

The church didn't require this when the wife and I got married in the Philippines but BOY the Navy did.
Took us 2 years from the time I asked for her hand before the Navy gave us permission to get married.
All types of counseling, pressure, paperwork, etc.

It also helps to discuss this ahead of time.
Both of us knew, going into marriage, that neither of us believed in divorce.

Consider that the fundamentalists and Pentecostals have divorced themselves into over 2000 denominations and that every week there are 5-10 church splits. This went into overdrive about 60 years before the divorce rate for unsaved married couples and now thirty years later the divorce rate for fundamentalists and pentecostal christians is as high as the unsaved divorce rate was 30 years ago.

Having attended churches of multiple denominations and tent meeting the divorce rate of teh "Ungodly" was a favorite topic of preachers and evangelists and was given as a proof that God was with the church and in the lives of belivers and that bother were morally supperior to the world.

Recently I was reading something from ine of the apostollic fathers -- The people taht carried the baton after the apostles died and a hundred or more years before the Roman catholic Church came into being.

The writer made a point that Christ did not chose the Apostles because they were righteous men but because they were sinners. He then quoted some verses to back supposition -- I was stunned this theme is to intregally woven in the Gospels that it has become hidden. Jesus came not to save the righteous but sinners to which paul said I AM chief not was.

And because Christ deals with sinners even the divorced whether they be church divorced or are from a broken marriage instead of their being assigned to the blackest hell as I used to hear preached, the bible says they can come to Jesus and find Him dispensing salvation and grace.

Christ came to save sinners.

For people marrying in a church ceremony, this is almost always, if not always, required. Yet there are plenty of divorces among those couples, too. The counseling is often cursory and the couple may not pay that much attention-it's just another thing on the long list of to do's.

This is so true. We're going through premarital counseling now and have found it to be fairly cursory. The pastor is spending as much time on planning the ceremony as he is on actually counselling us on marriage. (Granted, we aren't terribly fond of the guy and plan to change churches after the wedding...just dealing with it so I can be married in the church where I was raised)

Even the Catholic pre-cana process, which is more involved than many Protestant or Jewish premarital programs, is viewed by many as an annoyance. Several friends have been married recently in the Catholic church and paid little attention to it besides being another thing to check off on the to-do list. None of them wanted to listen to a never-married priest preach to them about birth control and the challenges of effective communication with one's spouse. Some may say that makes them not Catholic, but I can't help but think that more of a mentoring experience with long-married couples might be more effective.