Every child in school has experienced the fire drill at various points from kindergarten through 12th grade, and even well into college. In California, children practice not only fire drills, but earthquake drills as well, and many universities have drills for various campus warnings and terrorism.

So I propose the following: couldn’t marriage drills be equally as important as all of these other emergencies? And if so, why not make them available to students as early as college? These “marriage drills” could be done in the same manner as all the other emergency-based drills: through role playing and acting out different scenarios.

Think about the objective of a fire drill: preparing against the chaos that is typically our default response to an emergency. The marriage drill would replace ingrained, negative instincts with practiced behavior that, through repetition and simulation, would become rote.

Drills address a wide variety of situations encountered at various stages (the first year, the first seven years…) of marriage and would encompass everything from day-to-day problems to actual crises. By learning how to replace negative default responses with positive, learned behavior, couples will be given the skills to proceed with caution through any potentially incendiary situation that threatens to derail their marriage.