Since its beginnings in Australia in the mid 1990s more than 1000 couples have attended a Celebrate Love seminar in Australia, New Zealand or England. Sydney coauthors Byron and Francine Pirola are the founders and principal developers of the seminar. ‘The content and exercises’, says Byron, ‘are designed for couples in stable, loving marriages.’ ‘We all hit periods of disillusionment in our marriage,’ adds Francine. ‘At these times, some couples just knuckle down and wait it out, and eventually, things usually do improve. Others unfortunately start to come unstuck.’

Celebrate Love is a remarkably effective way to help couples start afresh. The seminar offers couples the opportunity to get to core issues that are dividing them, deal with them and then start afresh. Feedback from these couples typically tells the same story: they had no sense of anything lacking in their marriage; they just didn’t realize how much more it could be. When people saw colour television for the first time they wondered how they could ever have been satisfied with black and white. Couples say that Celebrate Love is like seeing their marriage and their future together in full, living colour.

One of the key insights in the seminar is an appreciation of male and female differences. Recent studies in brain science have shown that even from before birth, there are structural differences in the brains of men and women. As adults, these differences are initially one of the things that attract men and women to each other. However, for many couples, they become a source of frustration and hurt because they are not well understood. The seminar teaches couples about ‘Smart Loving’. ‘Most people give love the way they like to receive it’ explains Francine. ‘We assume that if we feel loved when some one sits down and listens to us, for example, then that is what the other likes too. In fact, a lot of people don’t feel loved this way.’