How Others Are Promoting Family Life

Published October 30, 1980. Last week I had the opportunity to attend the National Council on Family Relations in Portland, Oregon. Each year, this group holds an annual meeting which attracts upwards of 1,000 people from the United States and several other countries. Besides conversing with numerous people from the United States, I had a delightful conversation with a professor from England and another with a woman who is a family life educator from Australia.

After attending four days of lectures and discussions. I came away convinced that most of the people or groups represented had a common goal: to promote and stabilize family life. It’s true that the means to achieve this goal differ, but ultimately the desired outcome is the same.

Since I was representing Brigham Young University, I was interested in what other religious groups are doing to promote marriage and family life. Father DeBlanc from Louisiana, representing the Catholic Church, shared with me several interesting things his church is attempting to do, and apparently successfully, to help Catholic couples have successful marriages.

I was also able to attend a session directed by a Quaker couple, David and Vera Mace. As many of the readers know, I have frequently quoted them in this column because of their apparently genuine desire to help others find greater fulfillment in marriage. And it was a pleasure to finally meet them in person.

The Maces have been married nearly 50 years and have traveled throughout the United States and many other nations of the world trying to assist other married couples. I felt the sincerity of their efforts when reading some of their books. This perception was reaffirmed all the more when meeting them in person. It is a touching scene to watch an elderly married couple sit before a large audience and describe their desires, struggles, and successes in attaining what they wanted, and still are working for in their marriage.

The last day of the conference in Portland I bought a book written by the Maces. It is simply titled “How to Have a Happy Marriage.”

On the flight home to Salt Lake City, I was reading the book and was particularly impressed with their final comment on the last page. It is something they wrote in December while crossing the Atlantic on the liner Queen Elizabeth from England, their active country, to their present home, America. The quote is as follows.

We married couples have been so furtive and secretive about our married happiness that many people have grown cynical about marriage altogether. It has been said and written that marriage is an overrated and outmoded institution; and the tens of thousands of gloriously happy married people have never raised their voices to deny it.

We have been told in all seriousness by an able man and a keen observer of human affairs that he had scarcely ever in his life come in contact with a successful marriage.

Why, we ask ourselves, are the best married people hiding their light under a bushel? Is it not time that some of them emerge from the seclusion of their happy, peaceful homes and begin to “sell” marriage to a generation rapidly becoming cynical and disillusioned about it?

And that is what the Maces are trying to do . . . “sell” marriage to those unaware of its rewards. And by the way, their thoughts were not recorded last December. They were written in 1947, nearly 33 years ago.