What PREPARE/ENRICH Actually Tells You About Your Relationship

I remember the first time a couple came back to debrief their PREPARE results looking a little pale. They were engaged, excited, doing everything right — and they'd sat down with this instrument that David Olson had built over decades of research, answered questions about their relationship, their families, their communication patterns, their finances, their expectations. And the report came back and said, in its careful, data-informed way: here are your strengths, and here are the places worth talking about before the wedding.

The man looked at me and said, "I didn't know she felt that way."

She looked at him. "I didn't know you felt that way about it either."

They weren't in crisis. They weren't broken. They were two people who loved each other and had been talking past each other on a handful of things that mattered a great deal — without knowing it. The assessment didn't create a problem. It surfaced a conversation they hadn't had yet. And once they had it — really had it, with us in the room to hold the space — they left with something they didn't have when they came in: clarity, and a genuine sense of what they were building together.

That's what PREPARE/ENRICH actually does. Let me tell you why it works — and why, after all these years of using it, I still believe it's the most important gift we can give a couple.

The Science Behind the Tool

Dr. David Olson spent his career at the University of Minnesota and his life's work on one central question: what makes relationships work? Not in the abstract — concretely, measurably, predictively. What do couples who thrive have in common, and what do couples who struggle lack?

PREPARE (for pre-marital couples) and ENRICH (for married couples) emerged from that research. They've now been used with more than four million couples in more than a dozen countries. The psychometric foundation is strong — this isn't a pop psychology quiz. It's a validated assessment that measures the dimensions most predictive of long-term relationship satisfaction and stability.

Nancy and I were trained directly by Dr. Olson. I don't say that to impress you — I say it because it shaped how we use the tool. Understanding how he built it, what he was measuring, and what the research actually showed about those measures changes how you hold the results in a debrief. You're not just reading a report. You're working with a portrait — and the portrait is built on a lot of careful science.

What It Measures

The assessment covers eleven relationship areas — what the tool calls SCOPE areas, each of which has its own subscales. Here's what's inside:

Each partner completes the assessment independently. The results identify areas of strength — places where you're genuinely aligned and building from solid ground — and areas of growth, where your answers diverge in ways worth exploring. Not warning signs. Conversation invitations.

The Debrief Is the Heart of It

Here's what I want you to understand about why PREPARE/ENRICH works: it's not the report. It's never just the report.

The report gives you data. The debrief — the conversation Nancy and I have with a couple after they've completed the assessment — is where the real work happens. The data gives us a map. But maps don't tell you about the terrain. They don't tell you about the specific history that produced a particular answer, or the fear underneath a pattern, or the hope that's driving an expectation. That's what the conversation surfaces.

What I've found, after years of doing these debriefs, is that the most valuable thing the assessment produces isn't the areas of concern. It's permission. Permission to talk about things that couples haven't had the right moment, the right language, or the right courage to bring into the open yet. The assessment creates a kind of neutral ground — a third party in the room that isn't me and isn't Nancy. It's the data. And somehow, having the data there makes it easier to say the thing you've been holding.

For Engaged Couples: PREPARE

If you're preparing for marriage, let me make this simple: there is no better investment of four to six hours of your time than walking through PREPARE with a skilled facilitator.

Not because it will tell you whether or not to get married. It won't, and it shouldn't. What it will do is ensure that when you walk down that aisle, you've had the conversations that matter — about money and children and family and conflict and sex and expectations and what you're each walking in with from where you came from. Those conversations are hard to have on your own. They're easier when someone has built a structure around them and is sitting with you to hold the space.

I've worked with couples who were genuinely surprised by what the PREPARE results surfaced. Not alarmed — surprised. Pleasantly, importantly, usefully surprised. They thought they knew each other's views on children. The assessment revealed they'd each been making a quiet assumption about something they'd never actually discussed. That conversation, before the wedding, was worth everything.

I've also worked with couples for whom the assessment surfaced things that were genuinely significant — patterns of concern that warranted more than a brief debrief. In those cases, we've had honest conversations about what we found and what we thought it meant. That's part of the facilitator's job. Not to decide for you, but to make sure you're deciding with clear information.

For Married Couples: ENRICH

ENRICH is for couples who are already married — and its power is often underestimated because it's associated with "fixing" something. That's not what it's primarily for.

Nancy and I have led couples through ENRICH who were perfectly happy and simply hungry for more. More depth. More intentionality. More of what they'd built in their early years and felt slipping into the background as life got full. For those couples, the ENRICH results are a kind of inventory — here's what you've built, here's what's working beautifully, and here are some places you could invest for even more of what you both want.

For couples who are struggling, ENRICH does something else: it helps both partners feel seen. When you're in the middle of a difficult season, it's easy to feel like the whole relationship is broken. The data almost never says that. What it usually shows is a relationship with genuine strengths and specific, addressable challenges. That shift — from "this is all wrong" to "here are the three things we need to work on" — can be the difference between a couple that gives up and a couple that gets to work.

What the Research Actually Shows

Dr. Olson's research has consistently demonstrated that couples who complete PREPARE/ENRICH and go through facilitated debriief show significantly greater improvement in relationship quality than couples who don't. The assessment predicts, with meaningful accuracy, which couples will report high satisfaction three years later — and which will struggle.

More importantly, couples who identify their growth areas early and have guided conversations about them fare measurably better than couples who encounter those same issues without preparation. Prevention works. Intervention, when needed, works better with a clear picture of where to focus.

That's the promise of this work: not that we can guarantee a relationship, but that we can give you a much clearer view of what you're building and what it needs — early enough to do something about it.

Why We've Kept Coming Back to It

I was trained by David Olson. I've been using his instrument for decades. I've debriefed it with couples who were nineteen and couples who were seventy. I've used it with couples who were ecstatically in love and couples who were on the edge of something breaking. And every time, I come back to the same conviction:

Relationships get better when people see them clearly. That's it. The enemy of a good relationship isn't conflict or difference or difficulty — it's blindness. It's not knowing what's actually happening between you, or not having a language for it, or not having the conversation you need to have because you don't have the tools or the space or the permission to have it.

PREPARE/ENRICH gives you the tools. Nancy and I provide the space. And you bring the permission — the willingness to look honestly at what you've built and what you want to build, and to do the brave, rewarding, sometimes uncomfortable work of growing toward it together.

If you're engaged, or if you're married and want something more than you've been experiencing — I'd love to have a conversation about whether this is the right next step for you. It probably is. I've never once had a couple walk out of a PREPARE/ENRICH debrief saying it wasn't worth it.

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A Note on Process

The assessment itself takes about 35-45 minutes online, completed independently by each partner. We schedule a debrief session — typically 90 minutes to two hours — to walk through the results together. Most couples go through three to five sessions total, though we tailor the process entirely to what you need.

The instrument is the beginning. The conversation is the work. And the work is worth it.