As our church consistory meeting was adjourning a couple of weeks ago, our senior pastor exhorted his flock of deacons to attend, with spouses in tow, an upcoming church-sponsored marriage seminar. After all, said he, it would be only a half-day affair and he and his wife would be attending. Proceedings would be conducted by the counselor who keeps an office in our church, discounts hourly fees for our congregants, but is not otherwise affiliated with our church. I remain entirely in the dark regarding exactly how this all works, but I digress. I suspect our intrepid pastor was railroaded into the affair and figured we deserved no better. So shamed, I had the event installed on our calendar within the next few days. What could it hurt?

Saturday dawned bright and cold. Because I neglected to consider arrangements for our daughters and possibly due to the serious implications of “marriage seminar”, our neighbors graciously took in our children for the morning. Julie and I arrived at the church on time.

We entered a room festooned with the accoutrements of a bush-league séance. Semi-darkened, tables adorned with flickering, scented candles in lovely etched-glass holders. A table in the back was loaded with all manner of goodies, from fruit to cheese to pastries; coffee, herbal tea, and cider to wash it all down. Nondescript background music was droning from a boombox propped on a countertop. Up front was another table at which business was being undertaken. Checks were being proffered for the seminar and, oh, as long as you’re here take a look at this $12 book from which we’ll be glomming today’s material.

Everyone looked purposeful enough. A few couples looked entirely too purposeful, as though this was another of many trade shows they’ve attended affiliated with a hobby to which they’ve recently become completely dedicated. There was one young couple but the rest of us clearly had been married long enough to do some serious damage. Our minister looked a bit apprehensive, nervously smiling and cracking wise, embarrassing his wife. There were two single ladies there, begging the obvious assumptions about absent husbands. Julie and I grabbed two chairs at the rearmost table. After all, we really didn’t need any of this stuff, right?

As soon as the counselor doused the music and commenced her presentation, I knew we were in for a long morning. Her voice and manner conspired to form an almost intolerable concoction of female Stewart Smalley and NPR announcer. All of her vowels were infected with that upper-midwestern nasally “y”. “M’yen v’yew th’yair world with blue gl’yasses and h’year with blue h’yearing eyaids”, she intoned. “Women see with p’yink gl’yasses and h’year with p’yink h’yearing eyaids.” Have mercy, another variation on the Mars, Venus dichotomy. Her tone was the intentionally measured, breathy timbre of someone willing to go to any length necessary to avoid the slightest provocation of conflict. Meaning to soothe and calm, she spoke softly and evenly, wielding her speach in a meter so apparently contrived as to border on condescension. I knew it had to be how she naturally spoke and immediately found myself wanting to meet her husband, if only to gauge the man.

She proceeded to address the petards from which marriages generally fall, albeit in shades of pink and blue. Her primary aim was to have us recognize that men crave respect whilst their lovely brides seek love. Our presenter then made the mistake of drawing a comparison between a SCUBA tank with its airhose and a “love tank with its supply hose,” forcing upon us the simile of air and love. At the very point I most doubted my decision to attend I heard her compare some innocuous, unilateral spousal offense with “pinching off that airhose of love.” I eased on over toward Julie while she was sipping her beverage and suggested that “pinching off the colostomy hose of BS” may be more apropos, at which point she almost blew cider out her nose.

Had a vote been taken in the room at that moment we would have been labeled “couple most likely to divorce.” Undaunted by my disrespectful disruption, our leader soldiered on, exhorting us to recognize how and why married folks offend each other without malice. The female of an enthusiastic 50-something couple in front of us wagged her arm in the air and announced that she had recently given her husband, Roger, permission to tell her when she was being disrespectful to him. She went on to say that she in turn would tell him when he was being unloving toward her. They had been to many such seminars, you see, and knew all about this. I couldn’t help but notice that Roger’s permission for anything had not been solicited.

We had moved on to the familiar generalities of male identity and female subordination when our favorite wife began earnestly waving her hand again. She told us all how Roger had recently been unemployed for almost a year and how she had prayed to God that he would not lose his manhood during this time. Her prayers were answered, she said, as he has undertaken his current job in as manly a fashion as she had hoped, or something to that affect. I took another look at the ample back of her willing dupe. Roger was built like a marine drill-sergeant; a bull of a man with the spread of his sixth decade only complimenting his considerable size. I was beginning to think this was some sort of joke until Roger picked up where his bride left off. He explained that their marriage was nearly done when they attended a popular weekend marriage bazaar that retrieved them from the brink. I think he teared up. The man was into this, all the way.

Just then the male half of another 50-something couple, immediately next to Roger and his siren, announced that men have been effectively neutered by a culture run amok; that women have done this and now they must reap the consequences. The substance of this must have flown over Roger’s head as he was nodding most fervently. Curiously, his wife was nodding as well. Perhaps I was missing something.

A man I’ll call Jim, feeling very strongly about his testimony, quite unexpectedly stood before his table up front and announced that his children quit respecting him the very day his first wife gave him a “time-out”, right in front of them. All in their twenties and thirties now, his children don’t respect him to this day due to that singular event. Although I spent a few seconds pondering the respect due a man who would allow such a thing to occur, I was really hoping we’d return to the previous gentleman’s assertion. After Jim went on to testify that he and his present wife had five marriages between them, had been married to each other for about 18-months, and were now leading a marriage initiative at their church to teach everyone else exactly how it should be done, I was sorely disappointed to witness a degeneration into a litany of pinched love-supply hoses. All was not lost, however, as the couples breakaway sessions allowed Julie and I conversation for the first time in many moons wherein we did not discuss business, church, school, or some other jealous suitor to our attention.

So, was it worth it? Did we learn anything? Was there a better way to spend a Saturday morning? Did Julie and I have fun? Did I have a sudden craving to watch True Grit again? Did I thank God for blessing me as He has with a wife like mine? Was I looking forward to freezing my backside deer hunting in the Alleghany foothills the following week? You bet.