We haven't done much in the way of decision making and wedding planning since my last post. We have done a lot of marriage preparation, though. James and I are Catholic and are marrying in the church. As such, we are asked to participate in a number of marriage prep appointments - with a facilitator from the parish, with the priest who will be marrying us (Fr. Sean Prince - St. Bede), and a pre-cana course. We've started or finished all of these sessions, and overall I have found them to be useful.
When meeting with the facilitator from St. Bede, we completed the FOCCUS inventory and have been going over the results. This has provided us with some insights - we agreed to be honest when answering the questions (...because that's the point...) and some things were upsetting and others just informative. (For the record, I have only cried twice.) One of the biggest things we have realized is that we have made a lot of assumptions about our future and how we expect things to go, but we haven't actually DISCUSSED some of these things. For instance, family is very important to both of us, but our personal experiences growing up have been different. Even though both of our sets of parents were and still are happily married, different parents took different roles for each of us. This will affect how we expect each other to act as parents. Another area that we need to think about and discuss is budget and finance. We've had some general discussions, but not nearly specific enough. We finish our meetings with the facilitator this weekend.
Meeting with Fr. Prince has been really nice but also challenging. James and I live together. This is not in agreement with the Catholic church's preferences. So, Fr. Prince challenged us to live as roommates instead of as a couple - because if we are living that way now, what will change when we get married? Why are we getting married, and more specifically why are we getting married in the church? Good questions to think about. He's also spent time getting to know us.
Finally, we attended a pre-cana course this weekend. This was probably the most tedious to get through, but I think that may have been because we have had a lot of the conversations with our FOCCUS facilitator and Fr. Prince (finance and budgets came up again, dealing with conflict and emotional intimacy were topics). Of course, there was some new information and tips learned - just not 10 hours worth of it.
When James and I talked to our friends about this portion of the time spent before the wedding, most think we have so many obligations to fulfill and a lot of meetings to attend. Many don't see the value in doing all of it - or any of it. I have to disagree - I think it is an investment in our lives together. We now know more about each other and have discussed things that we thought we'd covered but had only barely scratched the surface. We have tools for "fighting fair" and red flags for common problems. Do I think this will somehow prevent these problems from happening to us? Of course not. But we may have some knowledge or tools to deal with the problems.
After completing these exercises, I recommend that couples do some sort of marriage preparation. Why go into the rest of your life blind? Many studies and research have been done on these topics, so learn from it! Why not prepare yourself for the marriage journey, just as you would for any other journey you're about to embark on. It certainly hasn't hurt our relationship... My advice: spend time investing in your marriage instead of only in your wedding day.
