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Sasha Townsend |
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Sasha Townsend |
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Marriage
Enrichment and Education
When Bobby proposed to me on
September 7, 2005, I was overwhelmed with emotion. Bobby
Find A Free Workshop! About the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative... The Oklahoma Marriage Initiative exists to change the divorce culture in Oklahoma by giving the couples the tools they need to have wonderful relationships. Couples can have romantic, satisfying, lasting marriages -- the kinds of marriages that we dream about before we get married. Couples put many, many hours into their weddings. As my area coordinator Amanda Carter put so well, it is certainly worth 12 hours of your time to invest in your marriage!
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and I had been dating four years (it was our four year anniversary of
dating when he proposed). This was the day I had been hoping and dreaming
about, but along with all of this excitement soon came a sense of dread.
Would my marriage fail like my parents had? How I can be sure that in 15
years, I won't be ready to call it quits too? Even though I loved Bobby
with my whole heart, and I continue to love him more with each passing
day, I wondered, can this last? Like many children of divorce, when things
are going well in my life, I'm filled with more anxiety than ever. I can
handle the worst of times, because I have handled them before. Chaos is
never a problem for me. But in the best of times? I have a tendency
towards worry and waiting for the other shoe to drop. My faith in my
heavenly Father helps me through this, but my human nature and experience
has led me to fear that at any moment, everything may all fall apart. When
things are going well, I have so much more to lose. Over one million
American children have experienced the divorce of their parents every
year, and that means that over 30 million adult children of divorce have
grown out of these families, and are hoping to find lasting love
themselves with few role models on what a healthy relationship looks like.
When
I begin to worry about anything, my first response is always "Pray!" and
my second response is "Get informed!" I believe in marriage and I believe
in the power of education, and I know that couples can have lasting love
if they can preserve the best parts of their relationship and communicate
to handle the ups and downs of married life. The photo on the left is me
laughing with Bobby on our wedding day. This is what joy looks like! I
pursued training with the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative because I believe
that this kind of love and joy can last a lifetime.
In
addition to the training provided by the Initiative, my educational
background in psychology, my work with children of divorce, my research on
divorce, marriage, and remarriage, classes in Human Development & Family
Science at OSU, and my personal experiences with my own family and in my
marriage prepared me for this role. I teach couples how to improve their
communication skills and protect and nurture positive aspects of their
relationship, through