Weddingbee Blog

Mr. D and I have really started to gear up for the wedding. Starting next month, our wedding events begin. My fantastic mad hatter tea party bridal shower is next month, my bachelorette weekend is in February (as is Mr. D’s dude weekend), and the wedding (dum, dum, duh, dum) is in March.

Holy shit, things are getting real.

In preparation for the big event, Mr. D and I are starting to tie up some of the loose ends (fonts for the invite, setting the rehearsal dinner time, yada yada), but we recently began something that is making us focus on the reason for this big shindig: pre-marital counseling.

Back in June we took one of these things:

Image via Foccus Inc. USA

It was the FOCCUS questionnaire for our pre-marriage inventory. For those of you not familiar with it, it’s a ton of questions asking you about different aspects of your life with your partner. We filled that bad-boy out separately and then agreed not to talk about it until we began pre-marital counseling. Remember how I said that a bonus of our church was to get six months? Um, yeah, we didn’t get to it until three months before the wedding. Oops. Luckily it’s still enough time to do what we need to do, we just don’t get to go at a leisurely pace anymore.

Well, we finally had our first session, and I was pleasantly surprised at the results of the test. We were tested on the following categories:  Lifestyle Expectations, Friends and Interests, Personality Match, Personal Issues, Communication, Problem Solving, Religion and Values, Parenting, Extended Family, Sexuality, Finances, Marriage Readiness, Marriage Covenant, and Cohabitating Couples. Only in two of our categories did we score under 60% (which my church considers to be a “problem” area): finances and extended family. Our highest scoring category was marriage readiness, which we scored a whopping 90% on.

As far as how our session went, we talked about the first four categories: lifestyle expectations, friends and interests, personality match, and personal issues. Some very interesting things came up during our discussion, such as how we divide up household chores. I can honestly tell you that in the seven years that Mr. D and I have been together, we have never had an actual discussion about who is supposed to do what as far as keeping the house in order. I always just assumed that what have done in the past has always worked. Turns out, not so much. Mr. D actually had some problems with it and had never thought to vocalize it. After some discussion, we have finally officially decided who is in charge of the dishes (and guess what? It’s still him! ).

Our church does not require pre-marital counseling, but they highly recommend it. Now I see why; it’s helping us tackle the issues that we never really thought of and may not have talked about until after the wedding. Plus it is meant to give us each a better idea of what the other is expecting out of this marriage. And the best part? It’s giving us some great communication skills to utilize from here on out. I can’t wait to see how our future sessions play out and what kinds of great conversations they hold.

Did you and your partner utilize pre-marital counseling (mandatory or otherwise)? Do you recommend it to others? What have you learned most from it?