While teaching a marriage class at church, Richard learned of a major discrepancy in his experience in marriage versus his wife’s experience. They were given the task to rate their marriage 1-10, he thought it was a solid 9.5, but she gave it a 2. While at first he initially turned to blame and hurt, he soon felt humbled and got more curious. He expresses this as the game-changing moment where they began to hunt for a better marriage and ways to not become part of divorce statistics.
After this journey of improving his marriage, Richard realized that couples don’t know how to do healthy marriage. After this, he jumped ship on his secure career and started Live the Life, a faith-based non-profit. With its corporate headquarters in Tallahassee Florida. Live the Life has steadily grown and added regional offices in Jacksonville, Orlando, Panama City, Tallahassee, and San Antonio, TX. There are also new regional offices in Grand Rapids MI, and Wichita, KS.
Live the Life has provided programs and services in 16 countries and 39 states to date, and is recognized internationally in the marriage and relationship education field. Since 2011 they have served more than 186,000 individuals with relationship and marriage education programs, and have documented more than 5,600 saved marriages, saving taxpayers $227 million. livethelife.org/
Richard describes this growth in ministry as going through the refiner’s fire. It took a long time of hard work, staying faithful, and not seeing a lot of results, until suddenly it took off. Through a variety of programming, curricula, and partnering with many other organizations, they have now been able to see the reward of using real life application in their courses.
One of the hurdles Richard has seen in his career is the financial aspect of building a non-profit. He often describes it as building the plane while flying it. Until it took off, running a non-profit also meant doing everything himself and wearing many different hats.
He also recognizes building this non-profit has meant getting good at having boundaries in place to not neglect one’s own family and personal priorities. One way he has done this is by leaning on his faith and making sure to have a routine of quiet steady rhythms in the morning to set the tone for each day.
In thinking about trends he has seen in marriage education and intervention, Richard notes that the ‘success sequence’ continues to shine. He also has noticed working with couples in crisis, there has been a shift from men bringing up wanting more sex in marriage, to now women being the ones bringing that issue up. He attributes this change in the growing prevalence of pornography.
Richard identifies pornography as an important topic in relationship education. He believes there needs to be more honest conversations around it, without shame and blame. Facing its reality should also mean providing resources for individuals and couples who are seeing the negative impacts it can have.
When talking of predictions Richard has for the future of marriage education, he spoke to the idea that it seems like America is making a shift towards recognizing the importance of marriage once again. It seems there is some cultural change and the atmosphere is right for introducing more relationship and marriage education opportunities.
In working with NARME, Richard hopes to see members in all 50 states, more funding opportunities through resources like TANF funds to help each state focus on more initiatives, and selling out the NARME Summit.
A word of advice for professionals in this field- “this is a calling.” Richard describes this work as not for the faint of heart, so we need people who feel truly called to it and will answer that call. He also believes that while the work is hard and may be a process, it is worth it. It took nearly 30 years to see things really take off for Live the Life, so Richard advises to be all in and watch what happens.
