About Marriage Rediscovery

The program, and the name

The weekend started as Marriage Encounter, became Retrouvaille in 1977, and runs today as Marriage Rediscovery. Couples have been using it to put their marriages back together ever since. For a full overview of the program itself, see the program overview.

Marriage Rediscovery presents an updated version of the Retrouvaille program. See how it's different. If you have heard of Retrouvaille or know someone who attended, you are in the right place.

What a weekend covers

When you come to a Marriage Rediscovery weekend, you get:

• A Friday-evening to Sunday-afternoon structure
• A written-dialogue technique couples have used since 1977
• Six post-weekend sessions over the months that follow
• Veteran couples on every team, several with 20+ years on the program

We rewrote the materials in 2023, the first full refresh in 25 years. The bones are the same. The cultural references caught up.

The miracle of this ministry

We have watched marriages most people had given up on come back to life. Couples who walked in barely speaking walked out with a way to talk to each other again. We do not engineer that. We hand couples the tools, and we get to witness what happens. After enough weekends, you stop calling it luck.

How we relate to the wider program

Marriage Rediscovery is independent and is not affiliated with, sponsored by, endorsed by, or approved by Retrouvaille International. Our presenting couples and clergy came up through that tradition over decades of volunteer work, and our program draws on that experience with refreshed materials. If a Retrouvaille International weekend fits your calendar better than one of ours, we will tell you that and point you to it.

Why "Marriage Rediscovery"

The French word "Retrouvaille" means "rediscovery" or "the finding again." That is what happens on the weekend. The word is also hard to spell, hard to pronounce, and hard to type into Google at midnight when you are desperate.

Marriage Rediscovery keeps the meaning. It just makes the door easier to find.

Who actually runs the weekends

The couples on the front of the room have been where you are. Some of them faced exactly what you are facing. They are not counselors. They are not therapists. They are couples who almost did not make it and want to tell you what worked. Learn more about who we are as a ministry, and read success stories from couples who came out the other side.

They know what it feels like to live in the same house as a stranger. They know what it feels like to wonder if any of this is salvageable. They are the proof that it can be.

Thousands of couples have sat where you are sitting, wondering if it gets better. A lot of them ended up with a closer marriage than they had before things broke. They did not expect that. Neither did we, the first time we saw it.

How we are organized

Marriage Rediscovery is a 501(c)(3) non-profit run by volunteers who came through the program themselves and stayed to help the next couples through. After the weekend, those couples become part of our community for as long as they want to be.

Our communities cover Florida, the Northeast, and the Southeast. Anyone can call any of those communities. The job is the same.

This is not a business. It is a ministry. Nobody on the team is paid. People do this work because somebody did it for them.