She was accepted into training as a Relate counsellor, which took several years of both study and practical learning, and included volunteering to receive counselling herself.

That was 20 years ago. Nowadays Jean sees 11 clients as a Relate counsellor each week as well running her own practice. Clients may be singles, couples or families. The starting target may be "eight sessions, but let's see how we go..." A day that
goes well is exhausting but uplifting, leaving Jean with a real buzz. A rougher day sees her washed-out and feeling she knows nothing.

Clients may arrive via an NHS referral, receiving eight sessions for free, or they may be self-funding. Problems presented to Jean in any week can include addiction to internet pornography or gambling,
racial differences, relationship friction due to money worries, infidelity or sexual problems, domestic violence, lack of balance in a relationship due to role changes or friction caused by "blended" families and the inherent complications of exes, half-siblings and
children living in different places.

Jean's approach to counselling is the Relate approach – what
the jargon refers to as "integrative" or "eclectic", using elements of cognitive behavioural therapy and psychodynamic therapy among other methods.

"We're all different, though," says Jean, a small and very calm woman with a direct gaze. "I'm more challenging and directive than some others. We all have the same basic training, but our styles vary. One client might find their first counsellor's way doesn't suit them and ask for someone different then come to me – or vice versa."

In her experience, clients, especially women, have become more literate in terms of the language of the emotions, and may even arrive for a first session having already read up on the subject and even having decided what kind of therapy they need. When a problem exists for a couple, sometimes the woman can't persuade her partner to attend therapy – although some of these reluctant men do
appear once they realise how much the woman is feeling
the benefit.

"It's good that people are finding out about counselling and therapeutic language, but it's usually after a good few sessions that a client really understands the meaning of the words
they've used when you first met them."

"Naturally there are people
who come in expecting the counsellor to quickly fix whatever it is. They say 'just tell us what to do'. But counselling and being helped is about finding your own solution. The counselling provides a safe environment and someone who will listen and acknowledge the problem. People are always stronger when they leave you, even if they are still working on the situation."

In 1938, a group of vicars, doctors and lawyers were becoming concerned about the threats to marriage – and possibly to the stability of society – of the growing rates of extramarital sex, venereal disease and divorce.

This group, part of the British Hygiene Council, was also pro-contraception – an attitude that didn't go down well with the Roman Catholic Church, which helped to fund the BHC. So
the group broke away and formed the Marriage Guidance Council, which later became the National Marriage Guidance Council.

The Rev Herbert Gray, whose vicarage in Rugby hosted the first HQ of the MGC, believed that sexual passion was the "driving force in life" in a partnership of "equals". That sounds progressive, but the view of the couple back then was still painted as the man winning the bread, with the woman as the financially dependent homemaker and mother.

Early counsellors tended to be articulate, well-educated vicars' wives, the so-called twinset and pearls brigade. These volunteers had their work cut-out: the usual relationships problems had been augmented by wartime affairs, babies born out of wedlock or fathered by men other than the absent husbands, loss of partners and women coping as single parents. The immediate post-war period saw an unprecedented spike in the divorce rate, too.

Despite its roots in Christianity and the plentiful supply of
vicars' wives with time on
their hands, the NMGC was a secular organisation, a pioneering force in the drive to uphold the strength of
marriage as a pillar of society in the face of a rapidly-changing world.

Seventy years on, the challenges are different but as great as ever. The original aim of discouraging sex outside marriage has, of course, failed spectacularly, with 2.2 million people co-habiting and 43 per cent of children now born to unwed parents. In this year's British Social Attitudes Survey, 70 per cent of people said there was nothing wrong with sex before marriage.

The NMGC stayed very much concentrated around the Rugby area for many
years until the 1960s, when it spread nationwide. In the 1980s it became Relate. Today, its 2,300 (and 80 per centfemale) counsellors see
150,000 clients a year in 600 locations including Relate centres, schools, children's centres, Connexions, Sure Start and GP clinics.

In the last couple of decades, Relate's work has become increasingly professionalised, with counsellors undergoing years of training including diplomas, degrees,
postgraduate study and membership of professional bodies.

Today most counsellors are paid for their work, with clients coming to them either privately, via GPs or primary care trusts or other agencies or employers. Those who self-finance can pay up to £35-£50 an hour, dependent on how much local authority grant is given to the charity in a particular area.

The variability of council funding is a worry to Relate,
as loss of such support means the charity may no longer be able to help poorer clients in the future.

Relate's work includes counselling, sex therapy and family therapy, and it also teaches social skills to children. Once only heterosexual couples were counselled. Now singles, gay people, trans-sexuals and folk of every religion or none are helped.

Peter Bell, a Relate counsellor since 1991, is the charity's head of practice. He says one noticeable change in recent years, apart from the number of problems associated with blended families, is the increasing willingness of men to seek counselling, "... even police officers and fire officers, people in traditionally macho man jobs. On the whole, men tend to find it tremendously eye-opening, learning all sort of things about themselves and their partner in the process."

Bell says that, for all the changes in society and its moral views, the underlying problems many people face are the same as they were decades ago.

"A lot of it boils down to the conundrum of how do you get close to someone and stay close to them intimately when there are lots of parts of them you don't understand."