So a few months ago, we did our Pre-Cana classes through the Church. It was loads of fun and I really enjoyed the conversations it inspired. We even got a little certificate that showed we took the course.
This, however, was not the end of our Catholic marriage prep. We also had to complete a FOCCUS inventory and review it with another couple from our church. Well, we are halfway there because we both finished our surveys. We had to do it individually and without input from the other and then discuss together. In a few weeks we will get an appointment to view our results with another couple. I am really looking forward to that part.
I was a bit nervous about the questionnaire at the beginning because it came right out and asked if we were cohabiting. And the answer was yes. I was a bit nervous that the whole thing would be very preachy. But really, it wasn’t, most of the questions were simple ’agree’ ’disagree’ or ’uncertain’ multiple choice and covered family, finances and faith. There were a few questions about child rearing here and there but over all it was pretty low-key.
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Might as well get right to the point!
This weekend, Bossyboots and I had our Pre Cana, which is one of the requirements the Catholic Church places on people who are planning to wed. Our day started off in the usual way (of course!).
You call it Pre-Cana, I call it Marriage Prep…whatever you call it, I’m here to share today some thoughts on the required course for couples who plan to get married in the Catholic Church.
I’ll back up for a second. Mr. Turkey and I are getting married in the Catholic Church (not 100% sure I’ve shared that before).
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| This church, to be exact |
This was a decision we made together, with the influence of my parents, who are Catholic and raised me as such. To be honest, my parents’ preference would have been to have us get married in the church where I was baptized, had my first Holy Communion and was confirmed…but the 4.5 hour trip required to have the ceremony in upstate NY and the reception in Philadelphia probably wasn’t going to fly with our guests.
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:
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I’ve mentioned once or twice how large our wedding party is. Part of the reason it’s so large is that we’re counting everyone, including our two officiants. They are two men who each like a member of either mine or Mr. Kettle’s family. They are our pastors.
They both do pre-marital counseling for couples they marry. Mr. Kettle and I couldn’t decide which one we wanted to do our counseling, so we committed to doing it with both. Now, we didn’t think about how busy our schedules are. It’s been a very long time since we made that commitment, and we are just now going to our counseling sessions.
There are some similarities between the two sessions. We left each one feeling pretty good about our plan to get married. There isn’t much that was brought up (at least so far) that we haven’t already discussed in detail.
Also, Mr. Kettle and I are pretty well matched in a couple ways. For one, we’re both apparently teenagers when it comes to certain subjects. You know what I mean. We took a look at our counseling workbook, saw the word sex, and broke into giggles.
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Mr. Aardvark and I just got back from our pre-Cana, or marital prep class required by the Catholic church. For us, it was a one day workshop with about fifty other couples. We heard people speak about things from conflict resolution to commitment and everything in between. Going into this class I had no idea what to expect. As such, I was pretty nervous. However, it was a totally enjoyable day, and a nice way to spend a Saturday (aside from having to get up early to drive a few towns over). I did not look very hard, but was not able to find a breakdown of what to expect. So for your reading pleasure:
It started at nine in the morning, in the church basement. We were fed (yay food) and did a little ice breaker: line up by wedding date. I have to say, I knew April was coming fast, but it hit hard when we were clearly in the early part of the lineup. I’m talking first quarter here, people! Holy smokes, this thing is happening AND SOON (not as soon as the handful of couples getting married on 11/11/11 or 11/12/11—seriously guys, way to wait until the last second to take the class! Just kidding, but I was nervous for them when they said their dates!).
The rest of the day was split between hearing couples who had been married a while (30+ years) talk about things like commitment and communication, and working on a little work book where we would fill out questions about our relationship and marriage on our own and then share these answers with each other. That was one of my favorite parts of the whole day. Mr. Aardvark does not verbalize his feelings very often so to read some of his answers to these questions was very touching. We did not use the whole booklet during the class but I would really like to read/fill out the rest of the question individually and share them on our own time.
There were also little breakout sessions. You could pick from a few options, and these were smaller group discussions. We went to one on parenting which was interesting (a couple talking about some of their challenges and favorite parts of raising kids) but maybe not super helpful. The other break-out was on dealing with in-laws which was really not useful for us. It was all about creating distance from your parents and starting your own families. I think the guy said “cut the apron strings” about 20 times… but Mr. A and I have been on our own for years before we met, so those strings had been cut. Oh well. We did get to hear some funny stories, though.
One of the most interesting parts, for me, was the couple that spoke to us about NFP.
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Create the honeymoon of your dreams.
On Saturday, September 10th, Mr. Ball Cap and I attended our Special PreCana marriage preparation class. The Archdiocese of Chicago requires a marriage preparation course in order to receive the sacrament of Matrimony. We were able to choose from two courses: PreCana or Special PreCana.
Family Ministries.org describes the classes as follows:
PreCana is designed for engaged couples in their twenties with no special concerns. They are designed to cover topics that will help you in your married life.
Special PreCana is recommended for couples if one or both are at least 30 years of age or older; or for those who were previously married, or for couples who are living together, or are civilly married for less than six months. This class utilizes the dynamics of regular PreCana, but more emphasis is placed on the areas of married life to which the more experienced couple can relate.
Through short talks, sharing of the facilitator’s own experiences, group exercises and personal reflection, engaged couples are guided through topics useful for a successful future marriage. Some of the topics presented are: the changing nature of marriage, personal growth, and couple adjustment, mutual decision-making, the elements of effective communication, conflict management, intimacy and sexual expression, financial planning, sacramentality, goal setting, the extended family, where to find help and counseling for marriage, and interfaith marriage.
Because Mr. BC and I are both in our 30s and we are living together, we chose to attend the Special PreCana class.
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…a marriage is a lifetime.”
I’ve spent a bit of time focused on small-ish details that sent me reeling back into wedding planning. Don’t get me wrong—I wouldn’t have devoted several posts about battling to flower victory if it weren’t important to me.
Image via Openview
Mr. Parasol and I are now a couple months into our engagement, and we have done absolutely no wedding planning. We haven’t set a date, researched any vendors, or even decided what we want for our big day. To be fair, we intentionally put off any definitive wedding planning because we want to savor the joy of simply being engaged without all the stress of planning.
We still aren’t totally certain we want to have a wedding anyway, and given that Mr. Parasol and I have so much on our plates right now, we barely have time to think about planning a wedding. We are both finishing up our graduate degrees, deciding where Mr. Parasol will go to law school in the fall, and coordinating another relocation. Needless to say, wedding planning is the furthest thing from our minds.
But even though planning for our wedding isn’t a top priority, Mr. Parasol and I do take planning for our marriage very seriously. We are blessed to attend The Journey, an amazing church community in New York that offers engaged couples a 12-week course to help prepare them for marriage. And no, it’s nothing like the crazy premarital counseling Robin Williams forces on Mandy Moore and John Krasinski in License to Wed.
Image via Rotten Tomatoes / Film by Warner Bros. Pictures
The title of this post is definitely tongue-in-cheek, as I love to fall over laughing anytime I hear “Well, my therapist says…” It’s OK for me to fall over laughing, because usually I’m the one who says it. No hate mail please; add it to my religious conversion mail pile.
My ex-fiance was a dillhole, and when I left him, I was somehow super depressed because I didn’t have to spend the rest of my life with that dillhole. The irony of love: pining for jerks. I was “gently nudged” by my parents to see a therapist. A nice lady that is financially obligated to pay undivided attention to me for a solid hour? She sounded just like a hooker, but without the chlamydia… I was intrigued.
I met with my decidedly un-hookerish therapist once a week for months (she wears cardigans and sensible shoes.) Going to therapy was like class.
Mr. Snow Cone and I opted to spend this warm, sunny June weekend cooped up indoors. What could possibly cause us to ignore the good weather and deny ourselves any time in the sun? We were on a Catholic Engaged Encounter weekend, fulfilling our marriage preparation requirement to get married in the Catholic Church.
Image via Ohio Marriage
The set-up of the retreat was pretty straightforward: there were 26 engaged couples, and three presenting couples who have been married for any number of years. We covered a wide spectrum of topics, such as forgiveness, family, communication, disagreements, and careers, among others.
Our marriage-preparation class was helpful in making us take a constructive look at our relationship, and I hope we remember to use some of the techniques in the future. Two of my favourites were “appreciations” and “pinches.”
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!
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This is not an exaggeration.
As I mentioned before, we are having a Moravian pastor marry us. She is the pastor at my childhood church in Wilmington, NC. The thing is, she is relatively new there…so she was not the pastor when I was growing up, and I have only met her a handful of times. When we started our pre-marital counseling, there was a lot of getting to know each other that needed to be done.
But before we met face to face with our minister, she asked Mr. Magic and I each to take an online survey through a program called Prepare-Enrich. I was worried it was going to be really intensive and open-ended, essay style questions, but it was actually relatively quick and painless with a Likert scale format. Here’s a shot from their “About” page:
Image from Prepare-Enrich
I immediately took my quiz and then nagged Mr. Magic to take his. After that, we set up our first official pre-martial counseling session with our Minister, hereafter known as the Minister of Magic Wedding, or just Minister of Magic, primarily because there just can’t be enough Harry Potter references in my life. She seems much more competent than this Minister of Magic…
So. Pre-wedding counselling. We came, we talked, we conquered.
Image via GraphJam
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:
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