How can Mentor Couples help prepare couples for a life-long marriage?
Couples considering marriage or who are engaged can be given a premarital inventory that can predict with 80% accuracy who will divorce. Nationally, more than 200,000 couples a year take either the FOCCUS or PREPARE inventories. Of that number about one tenth break their engagements! Studies show that those who break an engagement after taking a premarital inventory – have the same scores as those who marry and later divorce. That’s how a bad marriage is avoided before it begins. If the premarital inventory is administered by a Mentor Couple, who have more time to give than the pastor, about 15% of couples break up before the wedding. At my church we trained 52 Mentor Couples who worked with 262 couples preparing for marriage. Of that number, 40-50 broke their engagement before there was a marriage. But of the 220 who did marry, we know of only six divorces in eight years. That is about a 3% failure rate.
