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Mr. Raspberry and I were supposed to start our marriage prep classes on Thursday, but our class has been moved to the beginning of February. We are getting married in a Catholic Church and decided to do the program at the church we go to, rather than do the Marriage Encounters weekend retreat, which some of our friends have done.
We are excited to explore some of the hot topics through religion and look forward to having some healthy debate about the church’s views and our beliefs.
Will you and your fiance be doing a marriage prep class through your religion?
Yes! We already had two sessions and are having our last session sometime in March. Interestingly, we meet with the pastor as a couple instead of as a class. I’m sure there’s benefits to both! Anyway, best of luck! 
At our church they have an 8 week program. You go and meet one on one with a younger couple who are leaders in the church. You also get assigned “homework”. Since my fiance and I live together and our church requires you to live apart until you get married once you start the counceling, we will not be doing ours until the final 8 weeks though.
I am sure many of you have seen this, but this article in the times has been circulating often lately, and applies to this discussion.
We’ll be starting our sessions soon as well… the hard part is that Mr. Lemon’s the Catholic, but hasn’t been to mass in forever. So… it’ll be interesting
I’m an ex-Catholic, FI’s an ex- (or perhaps lapsed) Baptist, and we’re having a destination wedding with a non-denominational Christian minister. I would like us to do a marriage class, but I don’t know how or where, and we can’t afford anything expensive.
Jen,
If there’s a university in your area you might want to see if they offer classes or sessions on a sliding scale through their marriage and family therapy or counseling psych programs.
For ours, neither I nor my fiance are particularly religious, so we’re not planning on counseling in that manner. We may have a few sessions through my university if we can squeeze them into our schedule. Otherwise we’ve went over all of the big issues that we’ve though of or come across.
you will really enjoy your classes and find them as an opportunity to grow both together and in your faith
We’ll be starting sometime this month- meeting with our pastor and his wife. It will be pretty casual though from what I hear. I’m looking forward to it! ^_^
We attended Pre-Cana about a month before our wedding. It was interesting & wasn’t what I expected. The host couple gave us homework the first night…to write each other a love letter saying why you wanted to spend the rest of your life with him/her. The homework was given on Friday night & we weren’t allowed to exchange & read the letters until we left Saturday afternoon (it wasn’t the “retreat sleepaway” weekend).
my FI and I went through a 5 week session with his pastor from the church he grew up in. Each session we addressed diff topics such as family, money, education, kids, and responsibilities. We actually went through with the sessions before we got engaged! We heard many stories of ppl who broke off their engagement after going through these sessions. We wanted to make sure we’re on the same page before engagement. It was really good that we got to address these issues that we otherwise would probably not talk about ourselves and we needed the 3rd objective voice to mediate our conversation. We are asking one of FI’s pastor friend to be our officiant and he asked us to go through with his own series of premarital counseling again. I’m looking forward to learning more about my FI through each session!
I am Catholic, but FI doesn’t practice any religion. We attended the Engaged Encounter retreat, as required by the church we are being married in. For us, many of the topics were redundant, as we had discussed many of them (including all the questions in the NY Times article) long before we even got engaged. We had also done the FOCCUS test and reviewed the results with our priest prior to the EE weekend.
Also, the “exploration of hot topics” turned very ugly during our session. A few of the extremely strict, conservative Catholics didn’t really discuss topics as much as they judged anyone in the room who didn’t agree with their viewpoint. They were quite vocal and dominated the “discussion” to the point where people were actually scared to ask the moderators a question or to add their own opinion. I’m sorry, but any conversation where somebody refers to a woman’s body as a “wastebasket for human life” in ANY context is pretty offensive to me.
Even the priest performing our ceremony was pretty appalled when we told him what had gone on during our weekend retreat. He commented that sometimes the quality of the experience depends on the quality of the weekend’s moderators. I hope any of you that do this have better moderators than we did.
ldsgroom and I have been through a Temple Prep class recently, a requirement for anyone going to the Temple, especially of you are going to get Sealed (Our church’s flavor of being married).
It’s a 6 week prep class that discusses the spiritual aspects of family and how it connects to the Temple. The first 5 are before you go to the Temple, the 6th one is completed after you’ve been.
Most brides go for the first time the same day as the wedding day, where as most men go when they prepare to go on their Mission.
Since I joined up with his church, I have a year before I can go to the Temple, and since I don’t want to do it all in one day, I’m going near my 1 year anniversary of joining, so I can contemplate and reflect on what all I get from the experience.
I’ll have a a good 5 months after that for when we go through and get Sealed and married.
The counseling is something I really want to do separately from church. Sometimes I think people who want something really bad, like kids, financial security/sucess, will “put their faith in higher things” and that’s all well and good, but practicality and logic need to be included in there.
Funny thing for me, I used to be the gal who interrogated the guys I dated with direct to the point kind of questions, and ldsgroom was the first guy to beat me to the task, with the exact same tactics on all the taboo things you never say on the first date: Politics, Religion, Sex, Computers, Kids, Music… you name it, we covered it.
I thought our classes were pretty silly. It was for a Catholic Wedding and I was surprised how little Catholic dogma there was — nothing discussing how marriage was a sacrament or what it meant to be married in the church. Just the usual secular stuff about talking about kids and budgets and chores. I thought that if you hadn’t talked about that stuff before you got there you had real problems.
Anyway, friends recently got married by a judge. They didn’t need to go through any counseling and have only known each other a year and that was long distance. I was shocked to hear from the girl how she was looking forward to how marriage would change her new hubby and alter some annoying habits he had. She was serious. She has never lived outside her parents’ home and will have enough adjustmetns to that since she is 30, but because she is 30, I would have thought that she would have considered some of the big questions and would know that marriage isn’t something you do to change someone. So, maybe these classes are useful. I think this couple would have benefited.
We’ll be doing premarital counseling, but no specific classes….we’re not religious at all.
HI there,
My fiance and I just started our marriage prep classes last week and so far we are really enjoying it. It is a five week session with one Saturday class. We have met some really nice couples, all of which are just around our age, and the couples who lead our group are really nice.
I think it is a great idea. I have friends who had to do very little for their precana and honestly I think they could have used something a little more in depth. It may bring up issues you have addressed or it can just reinforce the areas you are a good team.
Best of luck! By the way are you getting married in DC? I’m getting married at Holy Trinity in Georgetown and our marriage prep (as they call it there) meets on Thursdays nights too.
I was wondering if there is a chrisitan pre-martital class?
I am looking for a pre-marital counseling retreat in the Dallas area? Willing to drive. Any suggestions?
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Mrs. Raspberry, DC/New York Age and Occupation in 07: 24, Owner/Chief Creative Director Fiance's Age in 07: 24, Special Investigator for the government Engagement Date: August 5, 2006 Wedding Date: July 2007 Venue: The Roycroft Inn, East Aurora NY About Me: I love wedding and event planning. I am having a great time with all of my DIY projects and can't wait to share them with all of the WeddingBee Readers (some have to wait until after our wedding)! Other favorites include: cooking, running, tennis, knitting and making crafts. Mr. Raspberry and I also have two dogs - Gewurz, a 2 year old yellow lab and Stella, a 1 year old old cock-a poo.
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