Marriage class plays national role

OKLAHOMA CITY -- Angel Williams was married for 11 years to a man who cheated on her, abused her, and then abandoned the family, leaving the stay-at-home mom without a high school diploma to raise two children. On welfare and with every reason to run away from marriage, Williams has a secret: She's still looking for Mr. Right.

"One of these days, I'd like to get married again," Williams whispers, trying not to disturb fellow students in a "relationship enhancement" class at a job-training center in Oklahoma City. "If I learn how to communicate with other people, maybe I'll get a good man next time."

The relationship class is part of the five-year-old Oklahoma Marriage Initiative, which has the ambitious goal of rescuing women like Angel Williams -- lifting them out of poverty, reducing how many babies they bear out of wedlock, and providing their children with better opportunities in stable homes. A statewide social strategy designed to encourage marriage and improve family dynamics, the state initiative has become the national model for President Bush's $1.8 billion proposal for similarly promoting "healthy" marriages and making family formation the centerpiece of the nation's welfare law.

The notion that government should foster marriage is controversial, smacking of bureaucrats in the bedroom and state-sponsored social engineering. Domestic violence specialists fear it will lock spouses in lethal relationships. Advocates for gay rights call it the handiwork of religious conservatives who want governments to continue to sanction traditional marriage only.

In Oklahoma, where the marriage initiative is a work in progress, the question is whether a marriage-education curriculum geared to middle-class couples can help women on welfare who lead distressed lives, with men often missing.

During one class session, Williams turns her attention to an instructional video and writes careful notes in her spiral notebook. In the first video segment, a middle-aged white couple demonstrate how to turn an argument over remodeling a family room into a constructive discussion. In the second segment, an affluent-looking husband and wife resolve a disagreement over whether to let their teenage daughter use the car.

"That's sweet," Williams said, nodding as the couple a world away from hers agree to allow the teenager to drive. "I think if married people took this class, it would save a whole lot of marriages."

At the beginning, that was precisely what the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative was about. In 1999, Governor Frank Keating, a Republican, set the goal of reducing the state's divorce rate, third highest in the nation, by one-third by 2010. The state brought in a team of academic "marriage ambassadors" to give entertaining lectures on strengthening relationships and got pastors to sign covenants to provide premarital counseling to couples.

In the last two years, the focus has shifted to a new mission that Oklahoma officials describe as strengthening families and benefiting children, who do better emotionally, economically, and in school when parents are married, social research suggests. But whether the first statewide intervention succeeds in changing human behavior in love and marriage is still an open question.

"We have intentionally taken a strategy that is counterintuitive," said Howard Hendricks, Oklahoma's human-services director and overall supervisor of the initiative, a $10 million effort to train hundreds of marriage educators to teach relationship classes across the state. "We believe that if we can provide the skills, we are going to be able to help people have healthier relationships," he added.

Convinced that marriage success can be learned, state officials have adopted the Prevention & Relationship Enhancement Program, a communication and conflict-resolution curriculum developed 25 years ago by sociologists at the University of Denver and used extensively by churches and the armed services in marital counseling.

About 1,400 PREP leaders have been trained in the last year and have offered free, 12-hour marriage courses to more than 12,000 Oklahomans. Last month, nearly 400 people attended a free, two-day Sweethearts Weekend in Tulsa to "obtain skills to sustain lasting love." Last year, a similar weekend workshop in Oklahoma City drew 750, and a Sweethearts event for Spanish speakers is being planned.

The marriage initiative, which has a $2.7 million budget this year, is tailoring the PREP curriculum for the Chickasaw tribe, and Christian, Jewish, and African-American couples. Chaplains at the state's 20 prisons are leading relationship classes for inmates; judges are steering families of first offenders into the program; Head Start and child-welfare agencies are helping enroll parents, and students in 250 high schools are getting the curriculum.

"Regardless of their personal circumstances, people still believe the institution is important and marriage is a good thing for themselves and their kids," said Mary Myrick, an Oklahoma City public relations consultant under contract to run the initiative. But it is "way too early" to know if Oklahoma's social experiment will work, she said.

Myrick's target audience includes Williams and her classmates at The Education and Employment Ministry. Marriage never has been their ticket to security, maybe not even an option, and the challenge is adapting a marriage-education course oozing middle-class values to women who are poor and whose lives are littered with broken relationships, drugs, jail, and abuse.

"Honestly, we kind of downplay the marriage part," said Alisa West Cahill, a social worker who uses the phrase "significant other" when she teaches the PREP class in Oklahoma City. At first a skeptic, Cahill now is convinced her clients and their families are learning problem-solving skills. She has made the relationship class a mandatory part of the job training.

From the outset, the Oklahoma Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault has been concerned about the state using federal welfare funds for marriage promotion and has monitored the initiative to make sure women are not coerced into the classes and, eventually, relationships with abusive spouses.

Officials in Oklahoma and Washington say marriage initiatives should follow the public-health model for tobacco and good parenting: Educate but not mandate. "We're focused on helping low-income couples build strong marriages and get equal access to marriage education services on a voluntary basis," said Wade Horn, assistant secretary for Children and Families at the US Department of Health and Human Services, which spent more than $6 million last year on research and pilot programs on marriage and family formation. With the administration proposing to pump $240 million a year into marriage programs, many states are looking to Oklahoma for a road map.

Williams, 42, says she likes PREP because it is building up her self-esteem -- "it's been down here," she said, pointing to the floor. But the students shrug when social worker Michael Jackson suggests they bring a significant other to the final relationship class. "It would probably be good for guys," said Williams, who does not have a boyfriend, "but it would be hard to get them to come."

Mary Leonard can be reached at mleonard@globe.com.