Teaching Marriage

You'd think LeHavre Buck was teaching at Comedy College. He was rolling out one story after another, laughing at himself through his teeth with the sound of a radiator just turning on. Half a dozen young people in desk-chairs at a Milwaukee YMCA chuckled along.

They were learning, all right. Mr. Buck is a pastor and he was teaching three couples how not to put asunder what God was going to join together. He was teaching them how to be married.

You can do that, says Mr. Buck, and he's not the only one. For half a decade, restoring marriage has been enough of a policy movement to attract both politicians and the skeptical gaze of PBS culture-war documentaries. Now, says Mr. Buck, whose Protestant congregation has been one of those nationwide taking part in the annual Black Marriage Day, the idea is spreading among those essential platoons of central city life, churches.

Diane Sollee, a former marriage therapist who founded a new group, Smart Marriages, aimed at obviating therapy, has been putting on conferences about promoting marriage since the 1990s. She drew 400 people in 1997. This summer, she's expecting 3,000. The idea that churches, which are all about helping people change their lives, can teach one to find marital happiness is catching on nationally, she says.

As Ms. Sollee sees it, the task is made easier because we now know why couples don't get along. It's usually the same things, she says. We know how they can change that, she says. The habits that keep a marriage healthy aren't complicated. Some people, however, need to be taught them.

So Mr. Buck was doing that on a Thursday night in a new Y in a battered neighborhood. He talked about alienation and withdrawal and how his wife adores "Boston Legal" while he doesn't but how he watches it anyhow just to be near her. They've been married 43 years. When he says this, it shocks young people sometimes, in a good way. "You're trying to bring them into a different understanding," he explains. "We're trying to show this is possible."

They don't ordinarily see it around them, he says. In one of his other jobs, Mr. Buck and a non-profit outfit, the Center for Self-Sufficiency, run abstinence classes for middle schoolers. They're really classes about marriage, says the center's head, Angela Turner, getting the idea to 11-year-olds that marriage makes it likelier you'll be happy and prosperous and that it's something achievable. Among Milwaukee's African-American children, a group that largely coincides with the city's poorest stratum, about one in four children live with both parents, a bit below the national figure of three in 10. "Children are not seeing how to do things differently," says Ms. Turner, and it shows in consequences ranging from poverty to dropping out of school.

Children want to do things differently. Polls of those on the edge of teenhood routinely show that, says Ms. Turner. Unmarried mothers say they want to be married, says Mr. Buck, only they don't know how to get it, how find Mr. Right, how to find even Mr. Halfway Decent, given how many young, poor men are either jobless or incarcerated.

This is the critique one hears of the marriage movement — that poverty depresses marriage, that joining two broke people merely doubles destitution. Mr. Buck isn't buying it: He recalls his childhood neighborhood, filled with couples of limited opportunity who nonetheless were more stable and happy — and mainly married.

In 1940, about 86% of black children were born to married couples, which led to progress, he says. It can happen again without waiting for urban economies to improve first. More than half of teens abstain from sex already: Teach them how to relate well and find marriage and they'll live happier lives, Mr. Buck says. And he isn't a right-wing think-tanker saying this, either — it's a man who delivers ground-level social services in an old industrial Midwestern city. Ms. Sollee, who runs her national group out of Washington, describes herself as very liberal. Ms. Turner's group gets federal marriage-promoting money that started being handed out under the Bush administration, but at least one candidate who has little good to say about President Bush, Senator Obama, talks up his support last year for a bill to reduce anti-marriage incentives in public assistance programs.

That marriage deserves promotion and can be taught seems to be an idea that's not so much transcended politics as simply sunk in under the skin. America had a 40-year fling with thinking marriage wasn't very important, says Ms. Sollee. "We found it didn't make anyone better off."

Whether pushing marriage will make a difference isn't certain. Once broken, can institutions that grew organically be restored artificially? Mr. Buck thinks so, as do others. Churches seem suited to the task. They're built on the assumption that humans are imperfect but capable of change, and marriage has long been part of their franchise. It's a big job, says Mr. Buck, but "you just keep plugging away at it."

One student, gathering her coat after class, thanks Mr. Buck, saying she had never seen how to be happily married because she'd grown up with a single mother. It's like validation of what he's been saying.

And what he is doing. "I believe it's going to save my community," he says.

Mr. McIlheran is a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.