MARRIAGE is now - perhaps more than ever before - a political
issue. It has even gained a new prefix, "traditional", to describe
a marital relationship between a man and a woman. But Harry Benson,
the communications director of the think tank the Marriage
Foundation, and founder of a course to help couples to stay
together, has managed to sidestep the politics.
Remarkably - even though the Foundation was set up by the High
Court Judge Sir Paul Cole-ridge to educate people on the benefits
of marriage - it has avoided being embroiled in the political
debate about same-sex marriage. Mr Benson prefers, instead, to talk
about "successful relationships".
And talking about relationships is how he makes his living -
first, with his course, which is now being rolled out around the
country by the Christian charity Care for the Family; and now with
the new edition of his book Let's Stick Together.
He did not start with the idea of counselling (although he did
complete a certificate, and a psychology degree). Rather, his zeal
to help other couples was born out of personal experience: the
rocky path of his own marriage.
He and his wife, Kate, married young, when he was a pilot in the
Royal Navy, and Kate, at just 19 years old, was in cookery school.
They seemed, to friends and family, to lead a charmed life. He was
posted to Hong Kong, then left the Navy, and forged a successful
career as a stockbroker. Two children were born. But underneath the
glossy veneer of their relationship, they had drifted apart.
His own background - divorced parents, and boarding school at
seven - meant that he was emotionally closed, and not disposed to
intimacy.
MR BENSON says that he knew nothing of the true state of his
marriage until, after eight years, his wife took him to task. "Kate
confronted me one day, and said that I was not the friend she
needed; and if I didn't get it together, then it was over.
"I realised I had to do something urgently - mostly, I admit,
because I was terrified of losing the children. I went to
counselling. I was very closed and independent, and I didn't
understand what Kate was feeling. I had a joint session with Kate,
and she said our marriage was still a mess, and burst into tears,
and went home.
"When I got home, she'd written me a 'job spec.' of what it
meant to be Harry's wife. There were some nice things in there,
some fringe benefits, but she said we weren't friends, and she
finished with 'Who cares?' It was the 'Who cares?' that really got
to me. I went and found her, and got down on my knees and promised
to change."
The couple have been disarmingly frank about their problems.
Kate admitted to feeling tempted by another man, and Harry owned up
to his inadequacies as a husband and father. In fact, frequently in
Let's Stick Together, he seems to take on himself all the
blame for their relationship problems.
He urges couples to confront their own failings, and stop
worrying about whether their partner will do the same. It is about
realising that "the buck stops with me," he says.
This approach has been popular with new mothers in the Bristol
area, where his course has been running. About 5000 have completed
it - most of them first-time mothers. The session lasts one hour.
"I'm not saying one hour on a course is going to change the world,
but it's a start," he says. "It's not rocket science. You don't
need to be a counsellor to run the course - in fact, it's much
better if you're not."
MUCH of the advice it dispenses can be easily digested in an hour,
even by exhausted mothers. It is the kind of relationship advice,
he says, that once might have been available through extended
families, but has now been forgotten: don't put each other down;
make time for each other; don't think the worst of your partner;
don't refuse to talk about the problem.
The tips may seem obvious, but, when they are spelled out to
couples, they can make a huge difference, he says. Measuring their
impact in hard statistics, however, is obviously difficult. The
course seeks to prevent problems' arising in the first place rather
than solve them later on. "If we'd been on such a course, I'm
certain we'd never have got into the mess we did in the first
place," he says.
The approach has certainly worked for his marriage. The Bensons
went on to have six children, and have now been married for 26
years.
The Let's Stick Together course is aimed at new mothers because
research has shown that it is in the early years of parenthood that
relationships are most likely to fail. Mr Benson's recent report
for the Marriage Foundation suggests that couples who get through
the first ten years of marriage have the same chance of staying
together as did their grandparents' generation.
He studied divorce patterns since the '60s, and found that the
seven-year itch was a myth: marriages were most likely to fail in
three to six years. Using an analysis of official divorce figures
for England and Wales, he found that a couple getting married today
would have a 20-per-cent chance of divorcing in the first ten years
of marriage. After that, the risk would fall dramatically: to about
13 per cent in the second decade, six per cent in the subsequent
ten years, and only two per cent after that.
HIS report also suggests that, despite the widely held belief -
and government rhetoric - about family breakdown, divorce has
declined over the past few years.
Where families do break down, it is more likely to be where the
parents are in a cohabiting relationship rather than married. "The
current rates of family breakdown show that 45 per cent of all 16-
year-olds have seen the breakdown of their parents' relationships,"
he says.
"Among the 55 per cent who are living with both parents, 97 per
cent of those parents are [still] married. Marriage is
unquestionably the best means of making a relationship work for the
long term."
And the first ten years are especially critical. "The first ten
years is when all the potential for change exists," he told The
Daily Telegraph. "If we could help people to decide how to
form stable relationships, divorce rates could plummet."
Fluent when talking on his subject, he is less eloquent when
talking about his faith, although his conversion to Christianity
informed his dramatic career-change from finance to helping couples
to weather their relationship problems.
A self-declared atheist, he became a Christian in Hong Kong.
Kate had been a "churchgoing Anglican" before, but it was out there
that her faith was transformed, he says.
The couple got to know a missionary working with drug addicts in
Hong Kong, Jackie Pullinger. It was after this, Mr Benson says,
that "a series of bizarre things happened to me, and I got well and
truly walloped, and became a Christian."
Neither the course nor the book mentions his faith. The course -
which at one point won govern-ment funding - is open to all
parents, gay or straight, although just one lesbian mother attended
among the 5000 who came. "The charity's doors are wide open," he
says.
Yet his position at the Marriage Foundation is as a "salesman
for marriage". And the Foundation's interpretation of marriage is,
by and large, the traditional one, although its aims and mission
carefully say nothing about sexuality. Its founder, Sir Paul
Coleridge, has criticised the Government's same-sex-marriage
policy, saying that it is a "minority issue", and that effort
should be put into supporting marriage.
The foundation believes that the biggest threat to successful
relationships, and marriage, is not same-sex marriage, but
cohabitation.
"I despair of government - all governments - in recent years,"
Mr Benson says. "The key to family breakdown is the trend away from
marriage. The whole debate about cohabitation has to happen, but
people do not want to have it.
"When birth control came in, in the 1960s, it broke the link
between marriage and childbearing. We have to get to grips with the
whole birth-control issue. It led to cohabitation, which is fine
for most couples, but when couples move in together, things become
a whole lot harder when things aren't working.
"If you are courting, you have time to see if things are
working, but cohabitation is trapping people into relationships,
and some go on to have fragile marriages, and have children . . .
and for some couples, a baby is a constraint too far. These couples
have never really made a decision about their future: the inertia
of living together runs on before they have committed fully to one
another."
It is a language that few others are using today when discussing
relationships, but Mr Benson's views are grounded in the thousands
of hours that he has spent discussing and coaching couples in the
best way to strengthen their relationship.
He is now stepping back from his hands-on position with the
course. He will stay at the Marriage Foundation, but now that his
course has been taken over by Care for the Family, he will no
longer run sessions himself.
He has moved his family out of Bristol to the Somerset
countryside. He still intends to write and advise on relationships;
he is currently writing a book with his eldest daughter on
father-daughter relationships. He will continue to focus on
marriage, too: not just his own, but also his children's.
Summing up his mission, he quotes Jeremiah 29 and God's
instruction to the exiles: "Build houses and settle down; plant
gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and
daughters; find wives for your sons, and give your daughters in
marriage, so that they, too, may have sons and daughters. Increase
in number there; do not decrease."
Let's Stick Together: The relationship book for new parents
by Harry Benson is published by Lion Hudson at £6.99
(Church Times Bookshop £6.30); 978-0-74-595399-1.