Last weekend, my fiancé and I attended the mandatory
marriage preparation course offered through the church where we’ll be married.
When I say ‘mandatory’, I don’t mean that the Church ‘recommends’ taking this
course before the wedding [with good intention] but you’re somehow able to get
yourself out of it with a good enough reason before your wedding day. No. If
you (or better yet, your heterosexual partner) wish to be married between the
four walls of a Catholic Church, by a Catholic priest, and within the context
of the Catholic faith, you MUST take this course; otherwise, the Church will
tell you to take a hike and find another qualified individual to do your dirty
work.
Before embarking on my journey through Catholic marriage
prep, I spoke to many different couples who were already married by the
Catholic Church, just to get an idea of what I’d be walking into. As any fellow
non-believer might imagine, the stories I got from these couples were less than
favourable. Some couples said their prep courses were very focused on faith in
marriage (…and Jesus makes three); some couples claimed their courses were
about being fruitful and multiplying (…where birth control is sanctioned by the
devil himself); and other couples felt that their courses were less about
pre-marital counselling and more about reconciliation (…for the sin of
cohabiting before marriage). Needless to say, I walked through the doors of that
church with some non-Heather-esque preconceived notions about what the next ten
hours of my life would be like.
While the ‘scary’ things I’d heard from friends did play a
small role in our program outline, it wasn’t as bad as I’d been told. There was
a lot of one-on-one time, where we got to sit together as a couple and focus on
communication – just the two of us. There was also a fair amount of time spent
with a larger group of our peers, where we got to hear real stories from
married couples who had once been in our shoes. It wasn’t all bad; it wasn’t
all good. But it WAS a chance to get to know each other better without
distractions.
Here are some of the valuable aspects I took from our
marriage prep class:
1. We really focused on communication.
Too often as couples, we let ourselves get distracted by our surroundings – TV, internet and smart phones alike – which hinders our ability to truly communicate with each other. Even if we sit down to have a serious discussion at home, we’re never 100 per cent committed to the conversation because our favourite show is starting in ten minutes or the phone rings. During the marriage prep workshop, we put away our phones and focused solely on our dynamic as a couple, which helped us work through some tough issues and feelings that get tossed in the corner at home.
2. We got to understand our individual family dynamics and how they influence our decision-making process today.
Sometimes we forget that we come from different family
backgrounds and therefore, have different ideas about how to, say, divide the
household duties between us, or spend our holidays. This concept is not unique
to us; every couple goes through the same scenarios when they join two
different lives under one roof. Many couples don’t talk about their differences
and how to iron out the kinks because it can be an uncomfortable conversation
to have. Instead, we walk around ‘correcting’ our partner’s mistakes, all the
while secretly cursing their name because they haven’t yet learned that clean
socks should be rolled into balls instead of folded over. The marriage prep
program allowed us to look into how the things we do came to be understood as
common sense in our families of origin, and then talk about what we like and
dislike about how our family structures worked. This will save us a lot of
anguish in the future when planning large gatherings with both sets of families.
3. We dug deep into how we feel about our financial situations.
Even though we had already discussed the issue of finances several times in the past, the set of questions we were issued during this portion of the course went in a different direction than we thought to discuss. We both knew each other’s financial situations prior to taking the marriage prep course, but we never really focused on anything more than the numbers. In our couple’s text book, we answered such questions as: In what ways is money a source of conflict for us? What would I like to change? What, if any, concerns do I have about how you spend money? What is my chief goal for five years from now? Am I content with how our jobs/careers affect our relationship? Why? Essentially, we were able to focus on how we FEEL about money, instead of just focusing on the numbers themselves.
Open communication is the key to a successful relationship. Every couple should have these important discussions before agreeing to legally join their assets in marriage. It’s plain and simple: If you can’t talk openly with your partner about otherwise uncomfortable subjects, then you shouldn’t get married in the first place. To this logic, I whole-heartedly agree. And I’m glad my fiancĂ© and I had the chance to review our feelings and concerns in a controlled environment.
I’ve just expressed the positive aspects that I took away from Catholic marriage preparation. In my next post, I’ll go through the content that really boiled my blood.
Until next time…
Thanks for reading!
Heather, a.k.a. The Pretty Little Atheist
