s
generally began on Friday evening and ended with Sunday lunch. One, for
Methodist ministers and their wives, lasted five days, and proved to be
the inauguration of a nation-wide program now being run by the United
Methodist Church under the title "marriage communication labs."

These experiences brought us into close touch with many "normal" married
couples. Our practice was to insist that the retreats were _not_ for
couples with problems, but for those who considered they had
satisfactory marriages and wanted to explore their potential for further
growth. As counselors, we had previously dealt only with marriages in
trouble. Now we found that many of these "normal" couples were settling
for relationships that were far short of their inherent potential. Some
exhibited the same self-defeating interaction patterns which we were
accustomed to finding in couples with "problems"--but either they had
accepted these poor patterns as inevitable, or the conflicts they caused
had not yet reached crisis proportions.

Matching our observation of these couples with some of the research
findings on marital interaction, we arrived at four important
conclusions:

1. Only a small proportion of marriages came anywhere near to realizing
their full potential. Lederer and Jackson[C] suggest that the proportion
of "stable-satisfactory" marriages in our culture does not exceed 5-10
percent.

2. Most married couples desire, and hope for, the achievement we have
called "relationship-in-depth." Early in their married life, however,
they find their growth together blocked by interpersonal conflicts which
they either cannot understand or are not prepared to make the effort to
resolve. They settle for a series of compromises, resulting in a
superficial relationship.

3. As time passes, the couple either accepts this unsatisfactory
situation, or it becomes progressively intolerable. They are usually so
"locked into" their self-defeating interaction pattern that they are
quite unable to change it by their own unaided efforts. Some seek
marriage counseling, but often too late for it to be effective.

4. This tragedy of undeveloped potential could be avoided in many
instances if married couples had a clearer concept of the task of
marriage and did not have to struggle in almost total isolation from
other couples going through the same experiences. The potential of
married couples for giving each other mutual help and support is very
great; bu