Catholicizing

[jethrien]

We got ourselves Catholicized this weekend.

Well, not really. Just sorta.


To get married in the Catholic Church, you have to go through a program called pre-Cana first. Basically, the idea is this - Catholics aren't allowed to divorce. So if they're going to marry you, they want to make really, really sure you've thought this all through.

So we (and, like, 100 other couples) spent all day Saturday listening to a marriage counselor and doing activities in a workbook.

All right, that sounds really cheesy. It wasn't. It was actually pretty cool. A lot of the activities were things like filling out forms on various topics - your own family history, your favorite things, your strengths and weaknesses, your fighting styles, your feelings on children, your financial history, how you wanted chores to get done - both with your answers and also with what you thought your partner's answers would be. Then you compared with your partner to see whether your own image of yourself was different from your partner's image of yourself, and vice versa. For us, there weren't a lot of surprises - we'd talked about most of this stuff before and we know each other really well. But even so, there were some things that were a little surprising. Just little things where one of us didn't realize how they were coming off to the other, or where one of us was totally beating themselves up over a "failing" that the other hadn't actually even noticed. And there were a couple topics we hadn't ever talked about - whether we'd want to adopt if we couldn't have kids of our own, for example.

And while we were pretty unsurprised by a lot of the stuff, I suspect there were a lot of people there who probably hadn't thought of some of it. I kind of wish there was a way to make this kind of program mandatory for anyone trying to get married. People definitely got out of it what they put in, but it's at least worth an effort.

It's also an impressively practical little program. It started with a prayer and ended with a mass, but it's not really about religion at all, except in the context of what role you each expect it to play in your marriage. This wasn't preaching - it's run by lay people, and it's really entirely about communication and making sure that you think and talk about all the issues that make or break a marriage. There were exercises on planning out a full budget for your first year of marriage, or exactly how many hours per week you ideally want to spend on every activity in your life. On how you fight, and how you make up, and how you choose where you're going on vacation. On warning signs and how to know that you should stop right now and put the wedding on hold. On what you expect out of sex and how you want to deal with your parents and in-laws. Really frank, blunt stuff.

Anyway, good program. Really interesting. Wish more people had to do it.

Comments

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

I think the motivation is less homophobia than pure selfishness, but I generally agree with you. I'd also add that many couples who get divorced should have gotten married in the first place, but with a legal system that more strongly discourages divorce. The surprisingly high number of divorces that involve one party or the other wanting "to find himself/herself" or "just being unhappy" (surprisingly, usually it's women filing these divorces) are more a symptom of bad divorce law than bad premarital counseling. But, requiring people to show fault in a divorce wouldn't let congressmen run away with their secretaries, and we definitely can't have that.

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

Correction: By bad divorce law, I mean "bad divorce law & culture encouraging divorce."

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's so much that the legal system should make _divorce_ more difficult as it should make _marriage_ more difficult.

I'm not sure I agree that "just being unhappy" is never a good reason to divorce. I agree that there should be hoops - if "unhappiness" is your reason, perhaps mandatory marriage counseling and a waiting period - but what purpose does it serve to trap someone who's miserable? Do you really think that it's going to help the kids grow up in a loving home when it's obvious to everyone that Mom is miserable and really doesn't want to be there?

I do think, however, that Britney Spears' quickie marriage/divorce does more to damage the supposed "sanctity" of my impending marriage than a loving, faithful pair of people who happen to be the same sex ever could.

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

I'd think someone who, after being married for a while, suddenly wanted to find himself/herself could have stood for a little more introspection before getting married. While I agree that perhaps making divorce laws too lax makes for people getting divorced when they'd be better served by seeing a marriage couselor and trying to find their problems so they don't repeat them, that's treating the symptom more than the problem. If you're willing to grab a no-fault divorce at the first opportunity, perhaps you're not mature enough to have committed to a marriage in the first place.

I'd like to walk into my marriage expecting it to be a life-long thing. If I had doubts about that, then I shouldn't get married now, I should get married when I feel I can make that sort of committment.

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

Agreed, definitely. But we've gotten to the point where people enter into a marriage expecting it to be a first marriage. It seems a bit odd to talk about a deterrent effect of fault requirements, but it's there. Count me in for both suggested changes.