Nuptial Notebooks

It is Friday night and 30 married couples have arrived at the Ramada Inn in Woburn, Mass., where they will spend the weekend without looking at a clock, phoning the baby sitter back home, watching TV, or even stepping outside the motel. Under the guidance of three couples who have gone to similar weekend sessions and with the help of a Roman Catholic priest, the 60 men and women will spend 44 hours quizzing themselves and each other about their relationships. Most of them are there because they want their marriages to be better or because friends who have undergone Marriage Encounter urged them to attend.

Encounter, which began in Spain in 1958 and soon spread to 26 other countries, has quietly become an important Roman Catholic force. Since its introduction to the U.S. in 1966, more than 400,000 U.S. adults have attended the weekends, including Protestants, Jews, even some agnostics. They range from mechanics to corporation executives, from great-grandparents to newlyweds, who are sometimes given an Encounter weekend as a wedding present. (Fees vary, but are moderate.)

Safety Valve. The Encounter weekend is exhausting and so unnerving that couples with severe marital difficulties are urged not to attend but to go to a marriage counselor instead. Unlike those who attend secular encounter groups, participants do not discuss their own problems in group sessions, but listen to the leaders as they relate theirs. Another difference is the impact of Catholic belief in marriage as a sacramental commitment. The presence of the priest reminds couples of the dignity with which their marriage began. By being available all night to talk or hear confessions, the priest also functions as a safety valve for the emotions.

At the opening session, everyone is given a notebook and ballpoint pen and told to use them freely. "Thoughts" are to be shunned in favor of writing down "feelings," which are "neither good nor bad, they just are." As the meetings progress, the participants are told, they will be asked to write answers to questions ("What is the quality in us that I like best?"). These answers will be the basis of what, in the jargon of the Encounter, is called a "conjugal dialogue." It takes place when husband and wife are alone and have traded notebooks.

The process begins in earnest Saturday morning when the couples are confronted with a list of "symptoms of spiritual divorce," including feelings of insecurity, quarrels, bad humor. They check which ones they believe are happening in their marriage and write their feelings about the worst. Another list, more hopeful, includes "areas for reaching out," such as sex, work, relatives. Again the husbands and wives write their comments. Through the day, reticence gradually recedes, and by nightfall the couples are primed for a presentation on Christ's presence at the wedding feast at Cana (John 2). Then, in a room dimly lit by a few lamps and candles, the priest asks the couples to share their feelings and tell what they are experiencing. A young teacher speaks up: "Tonight, for the first time since we were married seven years ago, I told my wife that I loved her, straight to her face." Another husband tells the group, "I'm still skeptical, but at least we've communicated with each other."

Greatest Love Letter. On Sunday morning, the couples are asked to begin "the greatest love letter of your life," a three-hour marathon of reflection and "dialogue" in which, alone in their rooms, they take an inventory of their entire relationship. When the group assembles for lunch, most men as well as women are puffy-eyed from crying. At day's end they attend a Mass, during which the husbands and wives recite their marriage vows to each other.

The weekend is only the start. The newly "encountered" husbands and wives have been instructed that each day for the rest of their lives they must take ten minutes to write "love letters" to each other and ten minutes to "dialogue" about them. This is "10 & 10," the movement's trademark. They are also urged to attend follow-up meetings and spread the word to friends.

"When one writes about it, this process sounds preposterous; when one is there, it is impossible not to feel its power," reports TIME'S Ruth Galvin, who attended last month's Woburn meeting with her husband John. "It sets out to make people face their deepest feelings about the contract that they made on their wedding day -- and it succeeds. When they discover that they can trust each other even with their fears, the couples seem suddenly to comprehend the meaning of love." Indeed, the process is so popular that on a typical weekend, 115 Encounters are in operation in the U.S. The majority, including the Woburn meeting, are under the aegis of "Worldwide" Marriage Encounter, headquartered in St. Louis, which has a national program budget of around $1 million. Including the various autonomous branches which employ some 20 full-time priests, the movement may spend ten times that amount. A slightly smaller, less doctrinaire group called "National" Marriage Encounter works out of Chicago.

Besides renewing individual marriages, the two Encounter movements hope also to renew and strengthen the Catholic Church. Says Father Ed Schramm, executive priest at Worldwide headquarters: "The future of the church is in the deeper appreciation of relationships, and Marriage Encounter can be a gift in speaking what that means. To me, it takes the words of Paul about loving as Christ loved and that nothing else really matters. Those words jump alive when a couple sees that loving each other really makes a difference and that the world needs that in them."

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