Tuesday Tales: Marriage for Life

 

This year marked the second time Ryan and I have attended the Marriage for Life Conference in Holmes County, Ohio!  Our friends have gone for several years, and last year they invited us to go along! We said yes and were so glad we did. It was an easy yes for this year, even though we (okay, I) got a little nervous the closer we crept to the weekend, because the forecast did not look that great!

                The conference has been around for almost twenty years now, and it has grown significantly over the years. The main conference is held in Berlin, Ohio (Holmes County) and they offer several date options! Each conference is identical in content, but you can choose if you want to go Friday night/Saturday morning or Saturday evening/Sunday morning. (This year they also added a Thursday night/Friday morning for one of the weekends.) It’s just overnight, with the hopes that this makes it doable for parents of small kids who have to find childcare. Donors help keep the cost down, so the charge for each couple is as minimal as possible.

                Last year they also added a weekend in Cleveland, Ohio, and we heard at this year’s conference they’re looking at other locations, too!

                Ryan and I headed out mid-morning on Friday and had a great day to travel.

                This year’s speakers were Dave and Ashley Willis, who have written several books and have a podcast on intimacy. The first session (on Friday night) gave several ideas about how to do marriage even better. I should pause here to say that Ryan and I were surprised at how many people asked us if we were okay when we said we were going to a marriage conference. Many of them equated a trip to a conference with a crumbling marriage and hoped we weren’t struggling. So I want to say…we are doing great! But we also believe in investing in our marriage and learning skills to keep right on doing great! This session gave us some of those tools!

                We sat with our friends and all of us stayed for the Newlywed Game. You might remember that last year we were contestants for that game, and I was most relieved it did not happen again. (Ryan was sad.) It was a lot more fun to watch other people play!

                Saturday morning, we went in for session two, which was on intimacy. I was impressed that they were able to teach on a delicate topic with such care.

                We had a break and then the final session was on the power of words. It was a powerful session – for marriage and for life in general!

                Last year after the session, we hung around to meet the speaker, but this time we wanted to get on the road so we could try to get home before the bad weather began.

                Each year features a different speaker, but we are looking forward to next year already! If you have a chance to attend, we highly recommend! (The couples ranged in marriage time from 27 days to 52 years, so it's literally for everyone!)