Kenneth R. Mitchell, Ph. D.
Eden Theological Seminary, Webster Groves, Missouri

Herbert Anderson, Ph.D.
Wartburg Theological Seminary, Dubuque, Iowa

ABSTRACT: We advocate the use of a family systems approach to premarital pastoral work, involving exploration of the families of origin of the intended spouses. Family systems theory argues that a marriage is like a merger of two corporations, each having its own stockholders; thus, adequate preparation for marriage involves coming to terms with the realities of one's family of origin and that of one's intended spouse. Exploratory techniques include genograms, house tours, family photo albums, and discussions of the rules and rituals in the respective families. Leaving father and mother is the central prerequisite to marriage.

Getting married—not just the wedding ceremony but the whole process of moving from single life to married life—is a process marked by several significant crises, some of them recognized, others hidden. Some of these crises have been surrounded by formal or informal rituals to help make the passage easier or safer. Bridal showers, often having the spirit of children's birthday parties, not only provide household goods and utensils but also attempt to allay anxieties about homemaking. Such rituals for women are often focused on the future. In contrast, parallel events for males seem to have a retrospective quality, aimed at bemoaning a supposed loss of freedom. The traditional stag party often promotes the myth of the untamed male beast; Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew draws some of its humor from the fact that it reverses the usual expectations that women will tame men after marriage. Planning the wedding itself is an elaborate ritual by means of which a delicate balance is maintained (until recently) between the interests of the bride's family and those of the groom's. Now, however, the balance that seems to need maintaining is that between the couple themselves and parents who have their own ideas of what a wedding should be. Clergy often experience themselves as caught in a power struggle at such points. Perhaps the so-called rehearsal dinner is actually a place where a truce is established, diminishing, at least for the moment, the tension between the various interests represented.

In each of these cases a ritual is used to manage the anxiety attendant upon a crisis. But none of them recognizes or deals with the crisis of leaving home, fundamental and necessary to the process of becoming married.* It passes unnoticed among the other transitions. A process beginning before and continuing after the wedding, it is easily overlooked. The wedding, a time of celebrating and a time when family ties are reinforced, may in fact obscure the necessity of cutting ties and the grieving that accompanies that cutting. But it is not long after the ceremony that conflicts arise, directly traceable to issues as yet unresolved in the process of moving out of one's family of origin.

The powerful emotional bonds most people have with their families of origin make leaving home no simple matter. Thus, it usually takes a number of years to become married. Family therapist Carl Whitaker speaks of getting a divorce from one's parents before one can really be married.¹ In a like vein, Salvador Minuchin writes about the problems and processes involved in what he calls "joining the marriage."² The biblical precept is right: you have to leave father and mother before you can cleave to husband or wife. Unfortunately, society, the church, and much premarital counseling literature put more emphasis on cleaving than leaving.

We intend to reverse that emphasis. We contend that leaving father and mother is the central task in becoming married. Premarital pastoral work should do the following:

Our experience in traditional premarital pastoral work has taught us that couples intent on being married are reluctant to examine their relationship with much seriousness or candor. The bloom is on the rose; all in the world that matters is right; and the couple is in love or in heat or both. People who want to marry tend to regard it as not in their best interest to reveal anything that might lead anyone to doubt the sincerity of their love or the viability of their relationship. For some time, these understandable impediments have led many ministers, including the authors, to think of premarital work in terms of churchly ordering, although Mitchell had earlier worked toward "reinterpreting the purpose of premarital pastoral counseling."³ As a reasonable goal, one hoped to establish with the couple the kind of relationship that would permit and encourage them to seek help from the church if marital conflicts became unbearable.

Our focus on the family of origin as a primary area of premarital work was precipitated by the application of a family systems perspective to premarital work. In a sense, it is a logical consequence of the recognition that the family as a system has a life of its own and therefore its own history, The systems perspective reveals that the family as a whole is greater than the sum of its individual members. It has a life of its own. Its drive for homeostasis is extremely powerful. Each part or member of a family system has certain roles that help to keep the system in balance. These roles are integrally related to rules and rituals that determine how the family functions. There exists a tightly organized interdependence; given that interdependence, a change in or the departure of one of the members of the family system affects the entire system.

Leaving home by becoming married (or for other reasons) is an event dynamically related to the family's history as a system. For most families, children growing up and leaving home is a painful but necessary process to which the family must and does adapt. Some family systems, however, cannot tolerate change; they will resist any member's departure. Getting married is only acceptable if you do not leave home. A systems approach to premarital work has made it possible for couples about to marry to examine their families' ability to let them leave home, and to differentiate themselves from a more "reluctant" family system. It provides a productive and even pleasurable approach for people anticipating marriage. Talking about one's family of origin is more familiar and less scary than examining a fragile relationship still in the process of formation.

In talking with couples prior to the wedding ceremony, we intend to increase their awareness of and curiosity about their families of origin. They are bringing to marriage a legacy of rules, roles, and rituals that sustained their own families. They are not ignorant about marriage even though they may have destructive attitudes or unrealistic expectations about it. For good or ill, our attitudes about marriage are unavoidably shaped by the families that first taught us what it means to be married. It is often disconcerting for an individual who had taken pride in being different from and better than the family that reared him to discover that family patterns are repeating themselves. We have found couples less resistant to looking at their families of origin than to examining their expectations of marriage, although it is nonetheless hard work to explore one's family legacy or to make what Halpern calls an "emotional family scrapbook."⁴

We use the term premarital pastoral work to denote what we do with couples to assist them in getting married. This term places proper emphasis on the work done both by the couple and by the pastor. It does not suggest that there is some painful problem to be solved (counseling). It does not suggest a ministry of sustaining through a difficult period (care). It is broader than education. In addition, the term work was adopted for use in this context and in others by the late Thomas W. Klink as a means of referring to the broadest possible range of intellectual and emotional exchange between pastor and parishioner; and that breadth of range is an important part of what we are seeking to accomplish.

Premarital pastoral work does not just begin when a couple requests a wedding date. It includes educational programs on marriage, male/female relationships, and sexuality, as they are appropriate throughout the life cycle. In the church's ministry there are numerous educational opportunities that function as useful preparation for marriage. For example, conversations with parents about their children leaving home may be understood as premarital work. The primary focus in such meetings is to encourage them to allow sufficient emotional space to ensure the development of a distinctive self; such differentiated selfhood in offspring makes getting married easier for them, and perhaps for their parents.⁵

Another dimension to be considered in premarital pastoral work is so-called relationship counseling, that is, work with couples of the same or opposite sex whose living together does not necessarily anticipate marriage. From a theological perspective that regards marriage between members of opposite sexes as normative, all relationship counseling is premarital work even though working with people who are living together may have more therapeutic parallels with marriage counseling.

Relationship issues arising from living together do need to be taken seriously with those anticipating marriage. But the primary focus of conversation with couples prior to the wedding is on being together in marriage. We regard the family systems perspective as the most useful way to make a bridge between past experience of being in a family and the expected experience of beginning a new family, without disregarding the fact of present cohabitation. A different method of doing premarital work is not required by the increase of cohabitation outside marriage. Living together, no matter on how intimate or serious a basis, is not the same as being married, nor does it necessarily hasten the process of leaving home. Indeed, the resistance to marriage displayed by a substantial proportion of cohabiting couples often represents—the couple's proclamations of independence notwithstanding—the inability of one or the other or both to leave home effectively.⁶

Premarital work is enhanced by the establishment of congregational guidelines for the marriage ceremony itself. Having a policy statement on ceremonial matters may diminish or at least refocus conflict at the time of the wedding. It may also encourage people to clear the church calendar for the wedding day as early as possible. With ample time between notification and the wedding, it is possible to space out pastoral conversations and to schedule premarital work that can focus on families or origin. There will, of course, continue to be people who decide to marry after a brief courtship; and it is necessary for pastor and couple alike to recognize that short notice diminishes the effectiveness of pastoral work.

The length of time between the initial notice and the wedding is not the only factor that limits the amount of contact between pastor and couple. Other demands on the pastor's time may create restrictions. Most pastors are unable to set aside unlimited time for premarital work. Sometimes the couple about to marry are not even in close proximity to one another until immediately before the wedding. That is a severe limitation when the primary focus of premarital work is on the viability of the relationship. But when the agenda is understanding one's own family of origin, effective work can be done even when the couple is separated. We do, however, regard conjoint premarital work as normative except in those instances, where distance prohibits meeting.

It is our intention to provide a perspective rather than a prescribed outline of premarital work. Some pastors may wish to meet for six to eight sessions. Others may work primarily in a group setting. Still others may have neither the time nor the inclination for extensive premarital work. From our point of view, the length of time is not nearly so important as the perspective we bring to the premarital task. We regard the family systems perspective as an advance over intrapsychic and interpersonal foci because it allows one to take seriously the impact of families of origin and the neglected crisis of leaving father and mother.

The initial meeting with the couple after they have requested a wedding date inevitably includes routine administrative and ecclesiastical procedures. Canon law, denominational statutes, or local expectations may dictate who is eligible to be married in a particular church and what is required of those who request the church's services. Beyond these procedural matters, the first meeting can be used to get the couple talking about their courtship. In some instances, the pastor may already know something about the relationship; even so, encouraging them to talk about "how they got to the point of wanting to be married" is a helpful beginning to this phase of premarital work. For already cohabiting couples, it is useful to clarify why they want to marry at this particular time. People like to tell their stories. It is important to notice whether significant events in a courtship are remembered differently, and to explore those differences. The couple is already displaying communication patterns that are on their way to becoming inveterated; the alert pastor may already begin to notice who is allowed to interrupt or contradict whom.⁷

At times, a more detailed and structured approach to the courtship material may be valuable. Stahmann and Hiebert have developed a "dynamic relationship history" as a way of helping couples gain some awareness of the dynamics and patterns of their relationship throughout the courtship. They suggest that pastors generate these data through a number of questions.⁸ Although many of the questions are very helpful, some seem unnecessarily specific and intrusive. Not every couple, for example, is willing to reveal to a pastor what they did on their first date. But general questions about attraction and decision-making during dating, or the resolution of conflicts during dating, may be useful data against which the pastor and the couple might eventually compare behavior from the families of origin. It should be remembered that data are not gathered for their own sake but to provide a ground for comparison with data from the family of origin.

If some time will elapse before the pastor meets the couple again, it is useful to give them an assignment that will ask them to look at their families of origin in an explicit way. Looking together at old family albums can develop a sense of each family's history and its values. The couple might talk with each set of parents about their own wedding days. When there has been a divorce in a set of parents, that may not he easy to do; often, however, sharing such information is crucial. The key is to introduce the couple to family exploration in an enjoyable way.

Some couples operate out of an ancient but erroneous myth that they are not marrying one another's families. In such cases it may take some work to convince the couple to enter into such explorations. From time to time we have found it useful to describe marriage as a consolidation of separate corporations, each of which maintains its corporate identity and loyal stockholders. The image is certainly not romantic, but it is unmistakably accurate.

We assume that both individuals have expectations for marriage based on what they have experienced and observed in the families that reared them. We are interested in helping people discover the stories, motifs, and attitudes that have shaped those expectations. The goal is to clarify each individual's relationship with his or her family or origin. This may be done in a couples' group or with one couple. We have found that the genogram is a useful and non-threatening way to begin. In some ways it resembles a family tree. What is different about a genogram is the stress on stories and traditions and emotional ties that go beyond mere facts. By drawing such a figure on a piece of newsprint or large art tablet, the pastor makes it possible for the couple to keep the sketch for future exploration.

The genogram is most effective in providing a picture of the whole family in historical perspective. In addition to, and in connection with, that picture, we are looking at four specific themes. The questions we ask related to those themes can give us and the couple an increasingly rich understanding of emotional connections in their respective families of origin.

1. Emotional closeness to others in the family is important. Who is close to whom in the family? Closeness may, by the way, be thought of in two ways. It may refer to affectional ties: to whom did a particular family member feel close? But it may also, and perhaps more importantly, refer to working relationships in the family: who could work closely and effectively with whom over a period of time? Structural family therapy lays emphasis on this second question in trying to help troubled families.

In exploring this theme, we do not restrict ourselves to the primary or nuclear family. Sometimes there are ties that cross generations or reach far out into the extended family. Understanding transgenerational family alliances is a significant dimension of tracing the dynamics of family life.

Two other concepts are closely related to these. The first is the triangle, defined by Murray Bowen as the most stable unit in intimate human relationships.⁹ The two-person relationship, or dyad, is inherently unstable; couples almost invariably add to their relationship a third element as an unconscious move toward stability. This third element may be another person, an object, or a pet; for young couples, it is often a significant parent or the first child. It is therefore important to help the couple identify how they functioned as members of a triangle in their families or origin.

A second concept of importance is the influence of birth order on membership in family networks. Walter Toman's book Family Constellation speculates usefully on the consequences for marriage when a younger sister of sisters marries a younger brother of brothers, and so on.¹⁰

2. Naming is a second specific to which we are attentive in making a genogram. It is often a clue to the ways in which expectations are passed on from generation to generation. In this regard it is important to pay attention to nicknames, as well. Some families rarely call members by their "official" given names. We believe that the exploration of given names and nicknames is of more potential significance than the exploration of the question whether a bride-to-be will retain her maiden name or insist on a hyphenated last name, for given names tend more often to carry emotional freight from previous generations. The repeated appearance in a family of a particular name often signifies the emotional importance of a particular person; it may also signal that the family in which this phenomenon occurs is extremely emotionally enmeshed with each other.

3. At marriage, it is usual that one spouse joins the family of the other for all practical purposes, and that the other spouse does not reciprocate. We therefore explore the question: Who married into whose family? Did your father marry into your mother's family, or vice versa? For some families, a particular bloodline is primary, and a new spouse is an outsider. We have found this line of exploration to be more productive than the traditional and sometimes limply humorous discussion of in-laws and out-laws.

In the family of one the authors, the writer's mother had a sister who owned a collection of expensive chinaware. The sister died in 1967, leaving her entire estate to her husband. When he in turn died in 1973, his will divided his estate among various persons, leaving the chinaware to his sister. The writer's mother has remained incensed about this incident for the past seven years, claiming that "that china was Nancy's, and her husband had no right to give it away outside the family." No matter that Nancy had obviously intended the china to become her husband's to dispose of as he pleased, and no matter that at his death it was clearly his. The china, in mother's eyes, clearly belonged in the family, and her sister's husband had somehow no right, since he had married into the family and was "only an outsider," to allow the expensive antiques to leave the family's possession. This incident should not be seen as an incident of selfishness or greed; the indignation focuses around an outsider violating family custom rather than missing an opportunity to own valuable china.

4. Family myths and traditions are of striking but subtle importance. Eliciting stories about grandparents is one way to begin to identify valued traditions. Sometimes we have suggested that each couple develop an imaginary coat-of-arms that would reflect what is valued by each family. Under the coat-of-arms may be placed a family motto. At other times, we have simply focused on the clarification of values from each family of origin. That is especially important when the values differ. If one family of origin is work-oriented and the other works only to have time and money to play, it is likely that conflict will arise in the new family concerning work and play.

If premarital work is done in a group setting, it is not possible to make a genogram of each person's family. One or two genograms are enough, however, to spark a useful discussion about the issues identified above. In a group setting, other methods can be used to generate a similar awareness of family dynamics. We will ask people to find a partner other than their intended spouse, and with that partner to describe a grandparent, discuss the celebration of holidays, recall a positively and negatively valued member of their family, and indicate who is presently the most important person in their family of origin.

5. Roles, rules, and rituals. Several characteristic dynamics of family life may be useful in helping individuals about to marry to understand more clearly their relationship to their families of origin. If these issues do not emerge naturally in a discussion of genograms, we take the initiative in raising and exploring them. We organize these questions around three headings: roles, rules, and rituals.

Changes in male/female relationships in and out of marriage are taking place rapidly in present-day society. It becomes, therefore, crucial to determine how each individual's parents carried out the role of husband/father and wife/mother. If the couple needs some structure for recalling these patterns, we use a sentence completion method beginning "Father always. . . " and "Mother always . . . ." Usually it is enough to begin the discussion of roles by asking how decisions were made, who carried out the garbage, or how parents divided the disciplinary responsibilities.

Other roles in families are less easy to define but equally important. We are familiar, for example, with the role of "scapegoat" or designated problem-bearer which is often located with one individual for the sake of maintaining family equilibrium. Families assign other roles for the purpose of maintenance and survival. Somebody is designated to be the responsible one, another to bear pain, another to express the family's emotions, still another to be mischief maker, and another to be the "camp director" or organizer of family recreational activities. Ideally, these roles rotate within the family, and one person may carry more than one role. Sometimes, however, a particular role is identified almost exclusively with one person. Helping people identify a dominant role which they played in their families of origin is a way of acknowledging the legacy each brings to the creation of the new family.

Understanding family rules can be a quest after elusive game because the rules that have the most power in our families are often unspoken and unrecognized. At times, asking people to identify a well-known family saying is the way toward understanding the rules that had the power to govern them. A saying such as "Idle hands are the devil's workshop" usually hides a bundle of rules against sloth and in favor of hard work.

We have also found it helpful to ask people to indicate which emotions were acceptable and which unacceptable in their families of origin. If the same emotion desired in one family is forbidden in another, the premarital couple will need to find ways of living with or resolving such differences. Such differences may, however, be precisely what attract individuals to each other. Marriage and family therapists have long known the orderly, stolid, rule-burdened individual who married a "free spirit," only to find that the free attitudes which looked attractive are so antithetical to the family rules that they become intolerable instead of liberating.

The third area of exploring one's family of origin has to do with rituals: patterns of behavior that are predictable and thereby provide some stability for the system. One way to identify a family ritual is to ask people to complete the sentence, "Our family would always . . . ." The way in which family members say hello and goodbye tends to be ritualized. Celebrations of birthdays and holidays are usually ritual moments. One of the authors came from an open-presents-on-Christmas-Eve family while his wife was accustomed to opening presents on Christmas morning. They now open presents on Christmas morning, but there is a feeling for one of something being missing. One couple anticipating marriage identified the Sunday noon meal as a time about which they would have to resolve very different traditions.

If we seem to have said very little about communication and conflict in the family, it is because patterns of communication will be evident in the discussion of rules and rituals in a family. Virginia Satir's Peoplemaking¹¹ is a useful additional source for study of communication patterns; a more careful discussion will be found in the study by Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson entitled Pragmatics of Human Communication.¹²

In asking about conflict, we assume that it was present in each family of origin. We do not ask whether parents fought; we ask how they fought, and how they resolved their differences. When someone says that they never saw their parents fight, it is clear that for them family conflict was a matter reserved for times when parents could express differences away from the children. Some people grow up seeing open conflict but seldom seeing its resolution. In other families, it is clear that the father is the only one who is permitted to express anger. In still other families, the children are designated as peacemakers. Again, our purpose is to identify the family pattern and each individual's participation in the interactions that make up that pattern.

A second goal of premarital pastoral work is to encourage the process of leaving home that has ordinarily already begun. As will be noted in the case that follows, the ways in which we remain emotionally attached to our families of origin are often outside our awareness. Leaving home has more than one purpose. It is first of all a significant aspect of the ongoing process of differentiation by which a distinct self is formed. That process is necessary even if one never marries. Jay Haley has identified leaving home as a central task in the movement toward personal maturity.¹³

The process of differentiating a self is complex, made up of many events. Taking part in such a process successfully may mean, for example, interacting with one's family of origin but consciously refusing to play the role one has always played or been assigned. It may mean the self-conscious, deliberate violation of a family rule, or the refusal to take part in a confining family ritual. In any case, if the self is not sufficiently differentiated, becoming married is a difficult task. Undifferentiated individuals will often seek to be absorbed in marriage in ways which recapitulate early family experience. After several years of marriage, some still think of themselves primarily as son or daughter rather than a husband or wife. Family rules may make it easier for male children to marry and differentiate than for females, as illustrated by an old anonymous rhyme:

A man's a son till he takes a wife,
But a daughter's a daughter all of her life.

In any case, emotional ties to families of origin are not easily severed, but leaving father and mother is necessary for the development of a separate self. Marriage should be a coming together of two distinct selfs in a unity that enhances rather than diminishes each one's particularity. Wedding ceremonies in which bride and groom each snuff out a candle in favor of a "marriage candle" symbolize a brutal violation of self for the sake of marriage; they stand for a process psychologically unhealthy and theologically unwise.

Leaving father and mother is also necessary for the sake of the marriage. One must leave if one is to make a relationship that is going to become primary. That process, as we have said, is usually not begun and certainly not completed with the wedding ritual. In this regard, it is useful to ask people to recall an incident that has already occurred, which formed a critical moment in the process of leaving home. One of us recently encouraged a young man to discuss at length the difficulty and firmness of his choice to sell a prize heifer which was "his" yet which was to be kept as part of the family herd; the choice was met with great opposition from his father, for whom the gift of the heifer was an unconscious means of tying the young man to his family of origin in a dependent way.

We hope to encourage couples to understand that becoming married takes time and that it is made up of a number of events dynamically similar to the one mentioned above (though perhaps superficially quite different). If getting married is the occasion for leaving home, then understandable ambivalence about separating from parents may be projected onto the one who is "responsible" for the separation. Even when families eagerly encourage their children's departure and eventual marriage, the bonds are strong and deep, and not easily done away with.

The third focus of premarital work is on helping the couple see more clearly their relationship to each other in the light of their relationships to their families of origin. Premarital work can enhance the process of leaving—and joining—by asking questions that recognize the need for and the difficulty of changing our loyalties. We have found the following questions useful.

1. What is thereabout your family of origin that you want to be sure to include in the new family you are forming? Our intent is to be explicit about how much they would like to recapitulate their first family experience. In a way, it is like collecting the emotional "dowry" of attitudes, traditions, and patterns of interacting that each person would like to contribute to the marriage.

2. What is there about your family of origin that you would not like to continue in your new family? This is a rather tricky and subtle question, more so than at first appears. People may have an easy time answering it and yet be emotionally connected to their families of origin by means of rejection and anger. It is particularly critical to explore an "emotional cutoff" from one's family of origin, particularly an attitude that denies all influence and rejects any present or future contacts with the family of origin. Such attitudes are strong signs that the person holding them is not free to cleave to another person in marriage.

3. What will keep you closely attached to the family you came from, and what will make it easy to leave? For those who believe that leaving father and mother means not loving them any more, this question may be a challenge. At some point, the couple, and both sets of families of origin, need to hear loudly and clearly the message that loving does not mean holding on. This question, with its rather futuristic orientation, is paralleled by the following one:

5. What can you as a couple do to assist each other in the process of leaving home? This last question moves in the direction of some change in behavior as a result of the family exploration. Couples often need considerable encouragement to make these changes. Our intent is to continue the process of leaving home and to foster the development of the marital alliance. It is leaving father and mother that makes cleaving possible.

As the process moves through these latter questions, the third goal of premarital work begins to be accomplished. Exploration of families of origin inevitably enables the couple to see their relationship with more clarity. They will often discover significant parallels on their own initiative; thus, we have found it beneficial to postpone any explicit interpretation of such parallels until the initial exploration is complete. Others, however, may find it useful to draw the parallels along the way. Either way, there is usually ample material for the couple to examine about their own relationship.

Three topics, however, warrant special focus. If they do not arise naturally from exploration of families of origin, the pastor needs to raise them. Earlier premarital literature has frequently suggested their importance, but not in the context of a systems approach. We propose that these issues need to be looked at from within a systems perspective.

The sexual dimension of marriage is of great importance. Some have suggested that couples talk with physicians about sex in marriage on the faulty assumption that since physicians know about anatomy they know about sexuality. One of us had at one point an extensive counseling practice among house officers in a major teaching hospital; the sexual misinformation and ineptitude among these young physicians was as great as in any other population.

Sex inventories may be used to identify gaps in the couple's knowledge. Books have often been used to convey information about sexuality when discussion of the topics seemed difficult. Knowledge about male/female sexuality is indeed important. But so are attitudes. Attitudes about sexuality are generally formed initially in our families of origin, even when sexuality was a taboo topic. Children seldom know much about their parents' practice of sexual intercourse, and if they do they are reluctant to discuss it, even with each other. But attitudes about sexuality are conveyed in many ways. Asking how affection was shown in one's family of origin often identifies patterns that have already begun to show in the new relationship. This focus on attitudes toward sexuality in families of origin effectively circumvents much embarrassment in discussing the couple's present sexual activity, and is far more useful in supporting the couple's search for a gratifying sexual relationship. Whether a couple is sexually active before marriage is less determinative of the quality of their sexual relationship in the marriage than the attitudes they brought with them from their families of origin.

The second theme needing special attention is money. During the depression era and immediately thereafter, money was often the battleground of other underlying conflict. Though not always so conflict-laden an issue today, the management of money is still an important topic for a premarital checklist. Withholding money, like withholding sex, is a way of exercising power in a relationship. In addition, the money issue is often the key to understanding issues of dependence and independence in a marriage.

It is often the case that middle-income families have the most conflict in this area, because poor families know where their money must go, and wealthy families have enough money to do as they please; but middle-income families must make choices, and it is the process of making mutually agreeable choices that arouses the most conflict. So we ask questions such as these:

• When your parents argued over money, what was the issue?

• Who kept the books and wrote the checks in your family of origin?

• Was money used in the family to win favors or patch up quarrels?

• How would you like to handle money differently from the way your family of origin did?

It is important at the least for couples to be aware that money management can become the occasion for serious power struggles in marriage.

The place of religion in family life is a third area deserving special attention. A shared faith commitment and a set of common values are stabilizing factors in marriage. Since it is difficult, however, to ask the couple about religious matters without eliciting either defensiveness or artificial agreement, it is again more beneficial to begin by asking about the role of religion in each family of origin. In some instances the parish pastor will already know the families' patterns. Tension arises in marriage when there is wide disparity regarding the importance of active involvement in a community of faith. It is therefore not so important that people agree on what they believe as it is that they have similar levels of commitment to the importance of belief. Indifference on the part of one partner can be quite detrimental. In this matter, as in all the others, the goal of premarital work is to continue and sometimes to begin the process of exploration that will enhance their awareness of the lingering influence of each family of origin. On the basis of that understanding, the couple will make the difficult choices that constitute the hard work of getting married.

The process of leaving home is, on the one hand, a complex and difficult matter. On the other hand, it is also the process most necessary for the establishment of a gratifying and workable marital relationship. Premarital pastoral work which has as its focus the encouragement of people to leave home and to be, at the same time, aware of the great power of the patterns learned in the family of origin is, in our opinion, the kind of premarital work that is the most helpful in establishing a good marriage.

We have referred to a number of techniques that serve to clarify relationships to families of origin, to encourage leaving home, and to help couples see more clearly the salient features of their relationship to each other. But the techniques are not so important as the attitudes with which pastors approach couples, or the images in the pastor's mind. If, as pastors, we can see behind every couple about to be married a host of other family members dancing that family's particular dance, and if we understand that the "dance steps" each bride and groom know best are the steps they learned to tread in their families of origin, we may have a more profound influence on that bride and groom than if we and they are trapped into the false assumption that they are only marrying each other.