It was Friday night and the couples sitting there looked like couples always look on Friday nights — grief-chiseled faces were turned away from spouses and arms were crossed over chests to protect breaking hearts from any more pain. Then, after an opening Mass, Bob and Joyce Gillespie and the Retrouvaille team began telling their own stories of when they were living in misery, too.  

Over the next two and a half days, the team of three couples would give 13 presentations sharing about when their own marriages were in trouble and how learning what it means to belong to each other and to a faith community led to a re-awakening of their love. The team’s priest would talk about his own relationship issues. In the beginning, it was almost imperceptible, but, somewhere between the talks on Encountering Yourself and The Journey Ahead, the thaw began. It was hands held here, a hand on a knee there, a head on the shoulder in the back row.  

“The before and after is incredible,” said Joyce Gillespie. “On Friday night, the faces look like the saddest people in the world. At some point, you see people touching tenderly — it puts chills up your spine.”  

Started in 1977 in Quebec, Retrouvaille (pronounced re-tro-vi with a long i) is a Catholic based marriage recovery program that is open to people of all faiths or no faith at all. Some of the couples arrive for the weekend with divorce papers in their pockets. A number have already filed for divorce and some are divorced. Most are so angry, they don’t even really want to talk. When the Gillespies made their weekend, Bob hadn’t spoken to Joyce for two years.  

“Bob had lost his job and gone into a deep depression that went on for years. We had every issue — financial issues, anger issues, you name it, we had it,” said Joyce. “The only reason we lived together at that point was because we had no money for either of us to leave.”  

Just like the other couples on their weekend, it wasn’t that the Gillespies, who’d been married for 23 years, didn’t want to break through the stony silence, it’s that they didn’t know how.  

"The research shows that the couples that stay madly in love disagree to the same degree as couples that divorce. They argue over the same topics - -money, time, sex, and kids. The difference is, they know how to handle it," says Diane Sollee, director of the Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Education (CMFCE), an umbrella group based in Washington, D.C.