The follow-up sessions

The weekend isn't the whole program

The weekend retreat puts the tools in your hands. The follow-up sessions are where you learn to use them at home. They're the second phase of the program. Six weekly sessions, about four hours each, run in the weeks right after the weekend. Time to practice, reflect, and build on what you found together. For an hour-by-hour breakdown of the days that come before this phase, see what happens on a Retrouvaille weekend.

You don't do it alone. Each session takes place with the same couples who came through the weekend with you. The presenting team stays available for questions between sessions and after.

What the six weeks cover

Week 1: The Five D's

Desire, Dialogue, Discussion, Decisions, Doing. The first session reviews what you learned at the weekend and pushes the listening skills further. Five plain words for five things that, used together, start changing the way a marriage runs.

Week 2: Personal exploration

A look at the family you grew up in and how it shaped what you expect from a marriage now. Spiritual life is part of this session if it's part of yours. The point is matching personal growth to a shared direction so the two of you aren't pulling in opposite ones.

Week 3: Making decisions

Commitment, love, forgiveness, and trust are decisions, not feelings. They get renewed every day, or they don't. This week looks at the actions that show those decisions and the ones that quietly undo them.

Week 4: Conflict management

Disagreements aren't the problem. The way couples handle them is. This week works on managing anger without weaponizing it, and on keeping a fight from becoming the thing that ends a good week.

Week 5: Intimate connection

Intimacy is emotional, spiritual, and physical, and the three feed each other. Real intimacy grows out of trust and communication. This week is about how to keep tending it instead of waiting for it to come back on its own.

Week 6: Marriage as vocation

The last session puts your marriage in a wider frame: family, faith if you have one, and the community around you. It also covers how to stay connected to that community after the six weeks end, so the changes you made don't quietly fade.

How the sessions work

Each session is about four hours. Depending on your local community, sessions may run in person, on Zoom, or as a hybrid. That flexibility is what lets busy couples actually finish.

The setting is confidential throughout. Sharing is invited, never required. The work is between you and your spouse, guided by couples who have done it themselves.

What the survey says

• 76% of couples who complete the program are still married five years later.
• 95% of attendees would recommend the program to a struggling couple.

Those numbers come from Retrouvaille International's 5-year follow-up survey of 5,236 couples. More detail on the full methodology behind the numbers.

What comes after week six

Completing the follow-up sessions is not the end of the journey. Couples who finish the program are welcome to join monthly community meetings, regular gatherings where post-program couples continue to practice the dialogue tools and stay connected to the broader community. Between sessions and after the six weeks, the dialogue questions resource offers prompts to keep the conversation going at home, and the dialogue writer walks you through drafting a letter step by step.