By Gretchen Keiser

Marriages, including those of long married people and people of faith, are struggling. Since September 1985, approximately 300 couples whose marriages were in crisis have tried a program in the archdiocese known as Retrouvaille to bring healing. For a significant number, despite serious crises, reconciliation has come about and they attest to the power of forgiveness. One couple volunteered to describe their marriage situation in hopes that it might give encouragement to others whom believes their own marriage crisis is “unhealable.”

When they dated more than 20 years ago, this couple talked, among other things, about faith and God and family. She was inspired by his piety and her love was grounded in a deep respect for her future husband.

They had a big family, both worked, and they were churchgoers and people who prayed. The strain upon their marriage seemed to her, at first, to be coming from their conflicting work schedules that didn’t give them much time to be together. She felt guilty that between work and childcare her husband had little free time.

However, for him the marriage lacked sexual intimacy. His practical ad gifted wife was not someone who easily shared her emotions. He was an open book.

Perhaps 10 years ago, she changed jobs, a sacrifice she hoped would make family relationships better, especially between them. It would be “that wonderful time of our life,” when, finally, the family became closer. “We’re going to play games stacked up from Christmases past with the kids,” she envisioned, but “it didn’t happen.”

Instead, her husband indulged long-delayed outside interests and devoted himself to the community, where he was well received and his talents admired by new friends. “I think pride began to play a part,” his wife said, turning to verify that observation with her husband. “It did,” he acknowledged.

Among the new people he met was a woman, also married, who seemed to appreciate him deeply. His feelings began to center around her, although in his own mind he did not want to jeopardize either marriage. He even talked to his wife about how he was feeling, attempting to bring them together socially but he could let go of neither relationship.

His wife tried to sustain a friendship, but later acknowledged her gut feeling that this was not a healthy approach. Her respect for her husband decayed as she saw him compromising their relationship in order to keep his friendship going. A crisis came the day she heard him apologizing on the telephone to his friend for having to be considerate of his wife’s feelings.

For over a year, while the children were busy, but aware something was wrong, the couple talked at length and analyzed from every side this crisis in their marriage. They became exhausted from the fruitless discussions. Eventually a “wall of silence” went up, the wife says, and she wanted “out” of the marriage. “I couldn’t conceive of loving someone I didn’t respect.”

“She had a blow-by-blow description of what was going on in my heart. The whole time I was driving her away further and further and further,” her husband recalls. “I didn’t want to lose her.”

While the relationship with the third person never involved physical contact, he said, “Emotionally I was having a relationship. It was adultery even though there was no physical contact. We were sitting on a lighted dynamite keg.”

This was “no high school stuff,” he adds. They made lifestyle changes to break contact between the families, but “the emotions I felt for the other person wouldn’t go away.”

He looked at their marriage and said, “to me it was unhealable.”

One day his wife was gone.

She says before she left she reflected and prayed. She left behind 12 envelopes, one for each day. They contained short articles, meditations and prayers she thought they each needed to read and think about. One was a news clipping on Retrouvaille. He was devastated, not knowing where she was, physically sick over it. Still he resisted attending the Retrouvaille program. One fear was friends would find out the marriage was in deep trouble. One day he called Father Bob Poandl, a priest familiar with Retrouvaille, and he says the priest spent more than an hour talking to him and convincing him that it was Retrouvaille the couple needed.

“We were very apprehensive,” he says. “There was so much animosity in that room it was like a fog.”

The structure of Retrouvaille begins each weekend with talks given by three couples and a priest. All the couples themselves have worked through serious marriage problems. After listening, there are structured, private talks between husband and wife alone. Group sharing is not a part of it.

Following the first weekend there are four follow-up sessions for the group. Additional couples give talks during the follow-ups, which are held on alternating Saturday mornings for two months.

Forgiveness is one of the critical elements in Retrouvaille. “In Retrouvaille, we say forgiveness is saying ‘I love you’ on a high plane,” the husband says. “To say, ‘will you forgive me,’ is a prayer. There’s a healing, a melting. God called us to begin again. That is a tool God left us.”

Stages for this couple included the – recognition that both played a role in the marriage crisis. His sense of guilt was overwhelming and the first to be acknowledged. His wife said his deep sorrow made it possible for her to “show forgiveness for him.”

Tougher to realize was “the input I had had into the breakdown of our marriage… I wasn’t very open with my emotions. He didn’t know me. We had missed a lot of opportunities of forming a warm relationship. For me that was tough to find that out about myself. I didn’t like that about myself. You have to forgive yourself to go on to change.”

He also had to struggle to accept that both had contributed, since he blamed himself entirely. Now, he says, they are learning to love one another’s weaknesses as well as strengths. She finds it possible to talk about her feelings and be more open with her husband and herself.

Two incidents that show the depth of change were a splurge trip they took together, something they would have been unable to be impractical enough or wise enough to do before. And in a recent family crisis, she was able to intervene courageously and speak words of hope and encouragement and faith that turned the situation for good.

Her own experience with Retrouvaille and the healing of her marriage, she says, “gave me the understanding that even though things look torn up, through forgiveness true warmth in relationships can be built up. Love does flower sometimes out in a desert.”

The next Retrouvaille program will begin the weekend of December 8-10 in the archdiocese. Two priests and approximately 10 volunteer couples sustain the work. Programs begin each year in March, June, September and December. Information is available at 294-5588 or 973-1523.