Weddingbee Blog

As the month of March began, Mr. Funnel Cake and I went through a whirlwind of stressful events when I tried to resign from work and found out I was legally obligated to stay there until the end of 2011. Crazy, eh? We thought so.

After lots of tears and turmoil, I was finally granted my release. And somehow, among all this drama, we were able to complete our marriage preparation class!

I mentioned earlier, our first encounter with Father John was a little abrasive, especially for an emotionally fragile woman like me. After our brutal interrogation interview, I had almost thought Father John would tell us to just forget it and that we weren’t welcome in the church. It turns out Father John is just a cynical Scott with a good sense of humour!

(Image via The Frisky / Editing by me)

So in great need of a mental break, we headed to the English Mission in Zürich on a Friday evening to begin the class. Father John encouraged us to help ourselves to the beer and wine provided and we spent the evening and the following day going through the course motions.

From Canadians, Americans and English to Dutch, Slovakians, Indians, Italians, a few Swiss and more… we were a very international group of 20 couples or so. Only two couples shared the same nationality as each other. Everyone else was a mix, with some people using ESL (English as a second language) as their common tongue.

I have to say, it was extremely comforting to meet such a large group of Catholics who were also in international relationships. Many people came from long distance scenarios and had also completed civil unions prior to marrying in the church for visa reasons or were already living together. (In sin, gasp!!)

Multiculture, yay!

(Poster via Allposters.com)

The thing we had in common was that we were all still looking forward to marrying in the church. There were a lot of people also doing their civil unions in Switzerland and planning their church weddings abroad. Thank god, we are not alone! We are not that weird. (Or we are all that weird…?)

I really enjoyed the course and we both were glad it was pretty liberal and not too heavy on the religion. It definitely made the course activities more approachable for us.

Did you both enjoy your marriage preparation class? Was it liberal or conservative?