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Couples who meet in Religious singles' groups avoid divorce |
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I told a graduate student, who was sharing an apartment with me, the story of my parents' meeting in a church singles' group. My parents were one of more than thirty married couples who met in singles' group run by a liberal Protestant church in Berkeley, California. As the singles' group was exclusively for singles, the married couples formed their own group that still meets more than fifty years later. Of the thirty plus couples that were active in the married couples' group for more than a short period of time none divorced. If we add the years each couple has been married together, collectively they are working on their second millenium of successful marriage. This impressed my roommate so much that he started to attend the local Unitarian church even though he was an Atheist or some other form of non-believer.
He seems to have been quite comfortable at the Unitiarian Church and he met quickly met a girl that he was more serious about than any previous girl, even though they did not marry last I heard. This maybe the only time that I convinced anyone to start going to church, even though I have been involved in other conversions in various ways. It convinced me that talking about the success of my parents' group is a way to get young adult singles back in church. As this is the stage in people lives in which church attendance is lowest that might be a major accomplishment. Let me grant that I have only one data point (I only got one person to start going to church) and I am putting alot of weight on it. The evidence that religious singles' groups form marriages that last is considerably stronger. The next landlord I had when my roommate and I parted and moved away said that the Catholic singles' group in San Francisco where he had met his wife had much the same experience as the liberal Protestant group my parents belonged to. My landlord's story was somewhat less impressive because his group only meets about once a decade, while my parents' group is monthly, so my parents' group has a much better feel for its own success. Other Catholic singles' groups also report a high rate of success. Actually my roommate was not actually following my parents' formula. I am not sure that the Unitarian church even had a singles's group, but at any rate I think my roommate meet his girl friend at some other church function. What I am recommending is searching for your marriage partner in a religious singles' group specifically set up for that purpose. This is not about turning spiritual groups into marriage markets. It is not about flirting in the pews during church services. It is about making a decision to search for a husband and a wife and doing so with a group of people who have similar meta-physical commitments. There are those who feel that this is not romantic, and others who feel that one should just trust God to send the right person. I claim that the experience of my parents' group and the other religious singles' groups I have investigated suggests that God honors the purposeful decision to search for a marriage partner in a way that honors him. It is Jesus who says "Seek and you will find." Yes, I know he is mostly speaking of faith and religious truth. While I am no great expert on religious singles' groups the success of my parents' group has lead me to investigate several of them. I have written several pages with leadership tips and comparing the church singles' group to alternatives like the office romance. You can leave a message in my Guest book. Geocities will e-mail me to inform me of your message, only I will be able to read it, so this is like e-mail. Page last updated December 20, 2004 |
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