'Marriage checkup' aims to prevent problems

'Marriage checkup' aims to prevent problems     By Sharon Jayson, USA TODAY     ORLANDO — An annual physical exam and twice-yearly dental checkup are supposed to protect your health. Now there's a move for married Americans to do the same to protect the health of their unions. So far, 171 couples in the Worcester, Mass., area are getting a Marriage Checkup, part of a clinical trial funded by the National Institutes of Health. With questionnaires and two in-person sessions, the free program provides personalized feedback to keep relationships on track and circumvent trouble, says psychologist James Cordova, who runs the project at Clark University, where he's an associate professor. "This is a health issue," he told a session of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies on Saturday. Some 3,000 are attending the three-day meeting, which ends Sunday. "Your marital health doesn't catch your attention until it really starts to hurt," he says. "By that point, sometimes irreversible damage has been done." The marriage checkup is not therapy but an information service, Cordova told the nonprofit membership group of psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers. "We're able to help them identify exactly what it is they're doing that is keeping them healthy and make sure that whatever their areas of concern are aren't potentially problematic in the long run," he says. Cordova says an estimated 12 million couples — about 20% of all marriages — experience some significant level of distress. And he says about 5% of couples who marry are already distressed. Marriages deteriorate in stages, and he says a marital checkup can catch small issues before they grow big. Karen Wachs, a graduate student in clinical psychology working on the checkup, says the program gets people to think actively about their marriage. "People can describe themselves as being good friends and saying that they have a good relationship, and have this stuff going on underneath the surface and they're not aware of it," she says. Preliminary results suggest that couples are benefiting from the knowledge the program provides. "Couples are feeling more like a team," Cordova says. "They're feeling a greater sense of emphathy and understanding towards each other — a greater sense of accepting each other, warts and all." Study participants range in age from 20 to 72, though most are in their mid-40s. They have been married anywhere from less than a year to more than 50 years, with the average marriage around 15 years. Three-quarters are in first marriages. Cordova says once they have more results, it's possible the checkup could be replicated by those outside the therapy field to use in churches or other settings. The Marriage Checkup aims to have 200 couples by April. Those who have participated for a year are now getting their one-year booster checkups, Cordova says.

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