For over four decades, Worldwide Marriage Encounter has been a leading movement in offering married couples the gift of a weekend experience to enrich their relationship.

If you have been married for many years, the weekend can help you enhance communication, renew commitment, and rekindle romance.

If you have been married for a short time, you can learn new skills you will need to stay close through the ups and downs of life.

“Our Worldwide Marriage Encounter weekend is the best thing we ever did for each other and for our marriage” is a phrase that has been heard from couples married for a couple of years, as well as couples married for decades.

The positive effects are not limited to just the spouses; the entire family will benefit from the growing love as well.

Marriage Encounter is designed to give married couples the opportunity to examine their lives together. A time to share their feelings, hopes, disappointments, joys, and frustrations, and do so openly and honestly in a face-to-face, heart-to-heart environment with the one person they have chosen to live with for the rest of their lives. It’ is a weekend to rediscover their relationship. Every marriage deserves that kind of attention!

The emphasis of the weekend is on communication between husband and wife, who spend a weekend together, to concentrate on each other. It is not a retreat, nor a marriage clinic, nor group sensitivity. It is a unique approach aimed at revitalizing Christian marriage.

What happens at a Worldwide Marriage Encounter weekend?

A team of Catholic couples and a Catholic priest give a series of presentations. Each presentation allows you and your spouse a rare opportunity to look at yourself as individuals, then to look at your marriage and relationship to one another, and finally to look at your relationship to God, the Church, and to the world. The weekend starts at 7 p.m. on Friday and runs until about 4 p.m. on Sunday. Worldwide Marriage Encounter invites all married couples to renew the romance, revitalize your marriage, communicate more openly, find deeper intimacy, focus on your spouse, and share the joy with the one you love by attending the Worldwide Marriage Encounter weekend.

The next weekend in the Diocese of Birmingham will be March 8-10 at St. Bernard Abbey in Cullman. For more information or to register, visit www.wwme.org or call Frank and Kathryn Wessling at 205-530-3607. The abbey is located at 1600 St. Bernard Drive, Southeast.