"ALL things of value need regular servicing and maintaining," it says here. So, let's see: there's car maintenance courses to attend, keep fit classes to go to, the annual central heating checkup to arrange. The piano needs tuning, the washing machine has to be serviced and the bike needs oiling. That it? Apparently not. We've forgotten the most important thing of all marriage.

As of next month, couples who want to give their marriage a good going over can enrol in the first Marriage and Relationship Maintenance Course to be run, appropriately enough, by Marriage and Relationship Counselling Services (MRCS), a Dublin based organisation that has been working in the field for 35 years.

Marriage is still as popular as ever - you only have to look at the women's magazines and bridal glossies to see that - but marriage breakdown is another thing altogether. In the absence of divorce, figures are lamentably unreliable. One guesstimate is that one in eight marriages end up permanently on the rocks. Whatever the true figure, it's certainly evident that more and more people are treating seriously the idea that a loving partnership is something that should not only be cherished but maintained as well. Which is where Claire Missen comes in. As course tutor, she has drawn up a set of goals that couples can aim for, one of the most important ones being the setting aside of time for each other.

"It's the easiest thing in the world to forget to do this," she says, sitting in her office, high over Dublin's Grafton Street. "I often ask people to make a list of how much time they spend on different things. They'll list doing the shopping, taking the children to school, g&ing to a football match, cooking. Squeezed in there somewhere will be a couple of hurried minutes with each other. You'd be surprised at the number of people who never go out together. They may go somewhere with the family or for a drink with friends but never alone with each other. I'll draw their attention to this, to the amount of time they spent together before they got married and compare that with now."

The idea for the marriage maintenance course stemmed from the comments of a number of people who had attended a premarriage course but later returned for counselling when they ran into difficulties with their relationship. "Many of them said that they wished the earlier course had been further down the line," says Claire. "They felt they didn't really know what questions to ask because they didn't know what lay ahead. This course should be the answer. It's for married couples or people in a committed relationship who are doing alright but who want to attend to what needs to be done to keep the relationship in working order."

So what needs to be done and what do you need in your tool kit to keep that relationship ticking over as smoothly as it can in these changing times?

"One thing is to recognise that times are changing," says Claire. "Women are not going to be the sort of wives and mothers their own mothers were and we need to look at how men have to learn to be fathers probably in a way different from their fathers."

One obvious difference is that both partners will probably be working. What happens if one partner is earning more than the other? "That has to be dealt with," says Claire. "We have a saying here - deal with the pinch before it comes to the crunch. If one or other partner feels something is pinching them continually, niggling away at them, then there's something wrong that needs to be looked at."

In her book Equal Partners Good Friends, marriage counsellor Claire Rabin - who will probably be contributing to a later course - sets out three ways of apportioning time, money or whatever the commodity is: one way is simply to divide it in half; the second way is to share it out proportionately - whoever gives more gets more; the third way is a division according to need - the partner cooped up with the children all day needs time out of the house on his or her own. The partner who has been out at work all day needs a quiet half hour by the fire with the newspaper. Simple, isn't it?

It is, of course, nothing of the sort which is why Claire Missen sometimes sets up the sort of flow chart you might see in an office, showing all the tasks that have to be done, by whom and when. It will soon become clear that no one person can perform them all satisfactorily - which is where the working partnership comes in.

This is all very well. We all know about equality and sharing and men finding the feminine in themselves and women becoming assertive and ambitious in the workplace but at the end of the day, who is it that replaces the lavatory roll, cleans the bath and makes the dental appointment for the children? These are the tasks that, traditionally, some men have considered too trivial to deal with. So how does Claire Missen go about changing that behaviour? "I sell the benefit of change," she says. "More time together, less arguing, none of this `why should I do it?' business.

"The thing is that there have been enormous changes in marriage over the last 40 or so years. Take something like the supportive network for women. In the old days, the women met during the day, neighbours came in for an afternoon cup of tea, there were plenty of people to chat to. Now with a woman working, she doesn't have that structure and she looks for it instead from her partner. And that's something else couples have to deal with the different ways in which men and women communicate. They say women talk to think while men think to talk. Men are more focused. They'll talk through a decision while women will talk out a decision."

THIS difference in ways of communicating can lead to arguments. "But arguing is okay," says Claire. "It's how we argue that's important; we have to learn to fight as friends."

For homework, she plans to give people a checklist which asks questions like what winds me up, what winds you up, how do I act when I'm angry, how do I wish I acted when I'm angry, how do I wish you acted when you're angry. (It all sounds horribly like a school report: if you're not nice to me I'm going to write it all down and show it to her.) No doubt that sort of sly manipulation would never get past Claire Missen. Married herself and with two near adult children, she started her professional life as a probation officer. For the last 14 years she's been working for MRCS where she's more recently been devoting her time to working with children of broken marriages. She feels strongly that a marriage maintenance course can go a long way towards avoiding a break up.

"Once the honeymoon is over, the hard work begins," she says. "In the old days, people stuck it out when things went wrong. They had to. Now, there's more choice and people tend to walk away instead of working through the difficulties." Another difference is that couples are marrying later. The disadvantage of this is that they tend to be more settled in their ways, maybe less ready to compromise. The advantage, however, is that - assuming age brings wisdom - they are more likely to choose a partner with whom they can settle down forever. Forever? Now there's a word that brings the cynic out in me but not in Claire Missen: "Most people who come here do genuinely believe that their marriage will last forever - that's why they want it to work well."

So, feeling the pinch? Gender tension making you uncomfortable? Want to shift the power hierarchy? Enrol now for that marriage maintenance course: Dublin Writers' Centre. February 15th and 22nd. Cost: £130. Telephone MRCS: 01-8720341.