Ask marriage leaders what newlyweds need and how parishes should respond, and one answer keeps coming back: other couples.

The 2026 Marriage Leaders Survey asked five different questions about the first five years of marriage. Each question’s responses were analysed separately, but we also took a step back and viewed the answers as a whole – and one idea surfaced near the top of four of them: connection with other married couples.

  1. What couples need most in the early years: peer connection was the most-mentioned need (about 35% of responses), with mentorship from an experienced couple named separately by another 20%.
  2. What early marriage formation should aim for: almost 25% of answers alluded to peer mentoring from couples further down the marriage path, with more years, experience and wisdom to share.
  3. How communities should respond: mentor couples (about 31%) and small peer groups (about 21%) were among the leading proposals to form the village around couples and young families.
  4. How do couple’s participate in the mission of the Church: a quarter of leaders saw newlyweds themselves becoming mentors to engaged couples.

One Australian priest summed it up: what matters most is “a sense of belonging within a community that can give support and encouragement, exactly what the Church wants to and needs to be!”

Two flavours of the same idea

Leaders described this connection in two ways.

  • The first is informal belonging – friendships with couples at the same life stage, newlywed gatherings, small groups.
  • The second is structured mentoring – pairing a newlywed couple with a couple further along.

Both answer the same need: no couple should face the early years alone.

Fostering connection, not attendance

Here are four tips for parish leaders.

  1. Keep groups small. Two or three couples around a meal will form friendships a parish hall of thirty rarely does.
  2. Bring questions, not just a speaker. Prepare a short set of conversation prompts that move past small talk – what surprised you about married life, what your parents’ marriages taught you, where you have felt God in the past year.
  3. Pair, then group. Match each newlywed couple with one mentor couple, then connect several newlywed couples with each other. Leaders distinguished both as needed.
  4. Invite newlyweds to give back early. Couples a few years into marriage can mentor engaged couples. It deepens their own sense of belonging in the Church and gives them a meaningful role without overloading them.

The most effective resource in your parish may already be sitting in the pews. The task is to introduce couples to one another.