So. Pre-wedding counselling. We came, we talked, we conquered.
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No, no, it certainly wasn’t as cynical as that image suggests, I promise!
The weekend was run through Engaged Encounter, which is a Catholic organisation that runs these courses all over the world. There were about 20 couples present, so it was quite a big group. The overall gist of the weekend went something like this:
- Presenting couple talks about a subject to the group
- Group encouraged to ask questions and go into subject further
- One person within the couple leaves to go to their designated ‘personal sharing space,’ while the other person remains in the conference room
- 15 minutes of writing time in a journal form—independently
- Couple meets together in ‘personal sharing space’ to read other’s answers and discuss them, as well as looking into other questions/prompts
I’ll admit it: initially, I was nervous. While we’re both Catholic by faith, Mr. Jaguar is much stricter than I am—and I’m always wary of having things forced upon me without my choosing. Thankfully, my fears turned out to be nothing. First of all, while YES, there are certainly very ‘Catholic’ viewpoints in all of the presentations, they are mainly focusing on the relationship aspect, first and foremost. Things like communication strategies, forgiveness, life priorities: they relate to couples of all faiths and religions. And, while this may not be true of all Engaged Encounter weekends, I never felt as though I was being lectured to or having any views imposed on me—you could basically take the information given and do with it whatever you choose.
It was a LONG weekend. We were there from 9AM-9PM on the Saturday, then again from 9AM-4PM on the Sunday. Both nights we came home completely drained. It was a good kind of drained, but all the same… we were exhausted. Be prepared for coming out of it feeling like you’ve run a marathon. The one thing I will say about our particular course? They definitely aimed it at couples who hadn’t been together for very long. Some of the questions, the very basic questions, were covered in great detail…and these were things that we’d covered in our own relationship years ago.
Mr. Jaguar and I went into this with similar ideas in mind—we weren’t in it to learn something new about the other, but we were curious to see what we would find out about ourselves. After nine years together, there’s not much that we don’t know about each other, you know? It was reassuring to share answers with each other and realise that we are on the same page about the big life decisions we’ll need to make in the future: and the things we have different viewpoints on are ones we’ve come to love and accept about the other. We have a good little partnership, he and I. Now it’s time to battle down and just get hitched already!
Did you and your partner ever go through pre-wedding counselling? How did it go for you?
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