The Triad is depicted as a triangle with three major emphases.
Most people can quickly and intuitively grasp the areas where mentors
can be useful. We summarize each of these here, but flesh them out in
much more detail in The Complete Guide to Marriage Mentoring.
PREPARING: Mentoring Engaged and Newlywed Couples
So often we think of a marriage ceremony as the culmination of a
courtship process. But in reality, it is only a beginning. It marks the
start of lifelong love, offering newlyweds the opportunity cultivate
positive habits right from the start that will pay off for them down
through the decades.
The engagement period and newlywed months for a couple offer an
especially important opportunity for marriage mentors. More than any
other time in their married life, this window of opportunity can be the
point at which they develop healthy habits that last a lifetime.
 To equip mentor couples for helping engaged and newly married couples, we created a resource entitled Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts.
This resource is the culmination of nearly two decades of studying
everything we can to help such couples get off on the right foot.
MAXIMIZING: Mentoring Couples from Good to Great
Sometimes the most neglected couples are the ones who are “doing
just fine.” These are the couples who aren’t coping with a crisis.
Their children are not acting out any more than is usual. They aren’t
struggling financially. From every indication they are committed to
each other and in love. They are good citizens and church attendees. As
we said, they are doing just fine. So what’s the issue?
To be frank, these couples may be missing out on something great.
Our friend and colleague Dr. Doug McKinley, a Christian
psychologist in Chicago, often says that the greatest enemy to a great
marriage is a good marriage. And he’s exactly right. That’s why so
few couples in a good marriage aspire to something better. They look
around at other couples and realize they aren’t doing too badly. At least we don’t have their problems, they think to themselves. We’re doing okay. And they are. But they’ve settled for the state they are in, and by default, they’ve become complacent.
 It doesn’t have to be this way. A good couple can make the leap to greatness – especially when marriage mentors are involved. Since poor communication and time management
consistently rank among the greatest barriers to a great marriage, we
created two resources that can be used to mentor couples from good to
great: Love Talk and Your Time-Starved Marriage.
REPAIRING: Mentoring Couples in Distress
Every congregation has them: couples who are battling addiction,
infidelity, infertility, loss, or some other serious difficulty. Often,
these are couples on the edge of despair, looking into the abyss. They
probably didn’t see their crisis coming and, besides, no amount of
planning could have prevented the jolt that has struck them. They may
have had little or no control over its occurrence – but they can
control their response to it. With hope and encouragement, with the
model of a mentor couple who has gone through it before them, they can
walk away from the abyss. Mentoring couples can literally turn couples
in crisis around and become instrumental in saving their marriage.
We need to be clear. In nearly all cases, the marriage mentors who
are coming alongside specific couples in crisis should have experienced
this crisis before them. In other words, the best mentors for a couple
struggling with loss are another couple who has successfully battled
loss. Of course, the loss does not have to be exactly the same, but to
gain respect and engender hope in the mentorees, they have to see that
you know what they are going through.
 We’ve created another resource to help in this area: I Love You More.
It is designed to show couples how minor and major problems can
actually increase a couple’s love for one another. Understood properly,
problems can become the tipping point for a deeper love between a
husband and a wife. |
