The Marriage Mission, with Les and Leslie Parrott

LES (PhD ’90) and Leslie (MSMFT ’89) Parrott have been helping couples strengthen their relationships for decades. Bringing together their different perspectives as a clinical psychologist (Les) and a marriage and family therapist (Leslie), they have created relationship assessment tools, training programs, and, most recently, Loveology.org, a free online platform offering short-form video resources on some of the most salient issues couples struggle with today. The Parrotts are the authors of several books, including the bestselling Save Your Marriage Before It Starts.

JOY NETANYA THOMPSON: You’ve been working in the field of marriage and relationships for a long time, and I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of changes. What are your thoughts on the state of marriage and couplehood in the US today? What’s changed, and what remains the same?

LES PARROTT: There’s so much negative thinking around the future of marriage because there’s more cohabitation and people get married later in life. But the research shows that the vast majority—86 percent—of young people in their 20s plan on being married. And not only that,
they plan on being married for life. So when we hear negative news about the prospect of marriage and the family and its importance, it’s sometimes overreported, in my opinion. 

LESlie PARROTT: But put that alongside what we know to be the reality of the fallout of the last few years that we’ve all been through [as a result of the pandemic]. It’s not only marriages, but all relationships and family life have undergone a level of stress that they haven’t been asked to carry before. So we do know there’s also a tsunami of relationship issues unfolding in the lives of people, just based on the long-term ambiguous crisis and need of the last couple of years. We’re keenly aware that there are unique needs right now for people in relationships.

JOY: Yes, it’s interesting to see how, even now that the pandemic is not the same public health emergency it was in the first couple years, it’s still taking a toll on individuals and on our relationships. I’ve definitely noticed it in my own circles. What other major challenges do you see facing marriages and relationships today?

LES: The first thing that comes to my mind is mental health and emotional well-being. One of our mantras since we graduated from Fuller is that your relationships are only as healthy as you are. So one of the most important things you will ever do in your relationships is work on who you are in the context of them. And I think that’s more important than ever right now.

JOY: It seems like your new site, Loveology.org, is a great place to start for people wanting to explore emotional and mental health within their own relationships. I love the tagline: “Here for the hard parts of happily ever after.”

LES: Loveology was born out of the need we are talking about here, particularly in moving beyond the pandemic. Because what we’ve discovered is that people are looking for answers to very specific relationship questions. And because of the nature of our work and our networks, we can bring together some of the world’s greatest experts in these spaces. So if you have a question about setting boundaries with your in-laws because they’re interfering with your parenting, who is better to answer that question than Henry Cloud, who wrote the book Boundaries. We’re nearing 2,000 videos at this point; they’re searchable and they’re all free. This was a nonprofit we started out of the pain of the pandemic.

LESlie: It’s pretty exciting for us to be a part of releasing the insights of other people we’ve worked alongside toward these big goals of getting people healthy and having better and better relationships. We’re so excited that we can put it in a form that’s so accessible. And this becomes a tool for marriage champions—counselors, pastors, or mentors— because now they can get equipped to deal with couples who have questions that are outside of their expertise and comfort zone.

JOY: Loveology seems like a modern take on the work you’ve been doing for decades, providing resources for couples who are really trying to figure out how to have healthy, happy marriages.

LES: It’s like so many things in life: you see a need that nobody’s meeting. Soon after we graduated from Fuller, I was doing a postdoctoral fellowship in medical psychology at the University of Washington, and we both began teaching careers at Seattle Pacific University. We noticed in our work with our students that those who were seriously dating and getting engaged were really struggling to prepare for lifelong love. So we started this pre-marriage event called “Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts,” which got a tremendous response. The next year we were getting double the numbers and it just started growing and growing.

JOY: And that’s still such a huge need. I think lots of couples today aren’t sure how to prepare for a healthy marriage, or maybe even know what a healthy marriage looks like, since so many of us come from divorced or dysfunctional homes.

LES: Exactly. Early in our career, we offered a class on our college campus, like a Relationships 101 class. And that was not an easy thing to get approved through the provost’s office.

LESLIE: [laughs] It wasn’t considered that rigorous.

LES: It ended up being the largest class on campus. Filled up the auditorium. There was always a waiting list to get into it. But one night, early on, I remember Leslie said, “How many of you grew up in a home with both biological parents intact?” And only half the hands went up. And that’s when we realized, oh my goodness, they don’t have healthy models of lifelong love. And that added fuel to our fire. Then about five years in, we wrote the book Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts, and that suddenly gave us a national platform: we were on the Today show, we were talking to Barbara Walters and Oprah and all the usual suspects, talking about launching lifelong love.

JOY: All that attention makes sense—everyone wants lifelong love but most people are at a loss about how to achieve it. Considering the theme of this magazine issue is “family,” what would you say is the significance of a couple’s marriage in the larger ecosystem of the family? What kind of an impact can a happy or unhappy marriage have on a family?

LESLIE: That’s a big question. And as a systems thinker, I love the many interlocking systems in a family. For the last six years, I’ve been serving as a mentor to mothers of preschoolers. And when I started, I was overwhelmed with the depth of marriage issues these young moms were coping with in this season of their lives. What I thought would be a compartmentalized experience where they’re learning parenting skills quickly morphed into this deep emotional wholeness work. It’s relationship work—and mostly marriage focused—so that they have the resources and the resilience to be good parents. Over and over again, I think, wow, the underlying issues of how we connect with each other are so epic. Mentoring these mothers has reaffirmed my sense that the goal is a healthy marriage so that even these precious little preschoolers have a chance to be nourished and flourish.

JOY: Bringing it back to your current work together, though your methods or modalities have evolved, what would you say your hope is for the future of marriage or couples now? How can the church be a part of that?

LESLIE: We have what some call a “BHAG”—a big, hairy, audacious goal—that has really been our overarching vision and our call.

LES: It’s what has guided us for the last two decades, and it’s this: to see the divorce rate reduced by a third in local churches in our lifetime. For every single percentage point that we drop the divorce rate, the lives of more than a million children are positively impacted.

LESLIE: That’s for one single percentage point. It would be one of the greatest social revolutions the church has ever seen to drop that rate by double digits. It would have a ripple effect for generations. And it gets to that whole idea of building healthy marriages that build healthy families that build healthy churches. And that’s what I think is a light in the world; that’s what we’re called to, our overarching mission.

LES: And we’re pretty optimistic, by the way, about that. Part of our optimism hangs on assessments. Our research shows that to really move the proverbial needle in a positive direction, a reliable and valid assessment tool does that more than just about anything.

LESLIE: That’s why we, our team, built an assessment called SYMBIS—which stands for Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts—for counselors, clergy, and coaches to use with couples (SYMBIS.com). And another for all couples called Better Love featuring the Five Love Languages (BetterLove.com). Research reveals that simply taking the assessment lowers a couple’s chances of divorce by 31 percent. How? Because it gets them talking with each other about what matters most.

LES: Not only that, it increases a couple’s level of contentment and satisfaction by 30 percent. Also, those encouraging numbers come from independent research and are actually fairly conservative.

LESLIE: That’s just somebody who’s interacting with a series of the right assessment questions on their own—even without a counselor. Of course, a competent counselor adds even more value to the process.

LES: Really, a good assessment does two things: First, it heightens self-awareness, and that’s one of the hallmarks of emotional health. You can’t change anything unless you’re aware of it. That’s why you hear psychologists say “awareness is curative.” And second, a good assessment deepens your capacity for empathy. Leslie and I have long said that empathy is the single most important skill set we have as humans. When you hone your capacity to see the world accurately from another person’s perspective, everything changes. Empathy is a rare and valuable gift. It’s like handing somebody a gold bar.

LESLIE: Circling back to what we’ve been through in the last two or three years as a culture, and all the relationship strain and stress: what we do know is that the couples who are thriving are those couples who are practicing mutual empathy. That really is the super skill that stands out, that makes marriages resilient no matter what the strain. So anything we can do to cultivate that is, like Les would say, the point of our spear.

LES: Right. We know what works and what doesn’t work. And that’s why we’re pretty optimistic about our mission—because we now have the tools to realize it in the lives of countless couples.