Marriage Preparation Questionnaire Review

Bookly here.

We got the call last night from one of the marriage preparation class facilitators. Our couple's questionnaire results are in and they want to meet with us privately to go over them.

The first thing Smartbottom said to me after I hung up the phone was "I can see it now: 'You guys scored a little differently on your thoughts around what God's role is in your romantic life. (Bookly – Um, God creates life; Smartbottom – Thank God for our romantic abilities?) Lets talk about these differences.' And we'll look at each other and tell them we already talked about it and agree. Then there will be an awkward moment as they weigh us on whether we can be rescued." She's probably right. It isn’t that were unfaithful to our religion. It’s that we aren’t such strong believers that we think about God in everything we do, especially our romantic life. We’re spiritual, not religious. Spirituality is not religion. Religion divides people. Belief in something unites them.

Anyways, to make matters worse, this private meeting is at the house of one of the facilitators. And it just so turns out that I went to school with one of her daughters, for twelve years.

That's just great! I can just imagine that these overzealous religious facilitators will find our questionnaire responses & review answers a little contrary to their safe and secure little world and that they will talk with their daughter about us. "I saw Bookly tonight! You remember him, right? When you were in grade 4 he's the kid you punched in class and blamed by telling the teacher he was kicking your desk, when all he was doing was minding his own business, bouncing his knee and drawing. Anyways, he and his fiancé think God doesn't have much of a role in their romantic life! That's strange for a Catholic raised couple, isn't it? But is this how couples in your age group tend to think?"

I may be jumping to conclusions, but we got the sense that this kind of thinking will occur. People, we just want to get married. We’ll work with you on preparing for our marriage as part of our desire to have it sanctified by the church, but please don’t measure and judge us based on your religious conviction.

Marriage Preparation Class #1

As part of the church-sanctified-marriage qualification process, we have to attend 10 + 1 marriage preparation classes. Yay!

As you might already know, I am an introvert and therefore I dislike being in groups of people, especially people I don't know. But, there we were, sitting in this windowless room for our first class, looking back and forth at the rest of the couples, who I might add mostly seem to be naïve and truly in need of this course. Bookly kept smiling at me and was whispering a little joke in my ear when the facilitators came in.

Oh, yeah! Here's a quick story about Bookly and how he may have already set the tone for how him and I will be perceived in this class. He called and left a message with the marriage prep class facilitators to call him back with the details of the first class. When the wife of the facilitation team called back, he didn't look at his call display and just answered the phone expecting it to be me, "Hey Hon..." She was not impressed, especially when he started laughing at the situation. So when she walked in only to see Bookly uncontrollably whispering and snickering in my ear, she must have thought he was going to be too much to handle, given the look on her face.

Anyways, the first thing they did was insist on taking our pictures as a couple so they can show the new class off to the church congregation. Given the similarly annoyed and uncomfortable reactions of everyone else in the room, we weren’t the only ones just learning about this. After we watched a few couple’s awkward and predictably playful bickering about "come on… oh come on…" "no! I don't have my face on!" we just stood up to volunteer and get it over with, secretly trying to make the seemingly naïve couples feel as immature as they were acting. Really people, you’ve got to learn to roll with the punches – you’re getting married after all, a simple picture shouldn’t be a problem.

After the pictures were done and we were sitting down, the facilitators pulled out a thick pile of booklets – 180 question questionnaires. All of us couples were then told, for the first time, that we’re to fill out these questionnaires (over the next 1½ to 2 hours) and that our answers will show each individual of the pair what things we’re in agreement on, and which things we need to discuss – therefore also determining the topics that will be covered over the rest of this marriage preparation course. Then it happened. They separated the men from the women for the questionnaire.

As my brat of a man walked out of the room, he looked back with a slightly mocking, mostly empathic expression, wagging his pinkie finger goodbye to me.

Goodbye Bookly, I'll miss you.

Only 10 more classes to go.

Church Boundaries?!?

Bookly and I were raised "Roman Catholic", and we want to get married in a Catholic church. But we’re not strong followers of the Catholic faith. In fact I originally wanted a wedding outdoors and it didn't matter if we were married by a priest. But the church portion of our wedding was an necessity for Bookly, partly because he wanted a "preemptive maneuver to placate any strong Catholic followers in his Irish-Catholic family" (yes, he talks like this), and mostly because he wants (and he convinced me too, obviously) our marriage to be "officially sanctified" in the traditional sense.

Anyways, as if planning a wedding isn't fun enough, the first church related hurdle we came to was that we don't live within the "boundary" of the church we want to get married in. Evidently, a church has a problem when people from their boundary get married in some other church’s boundary. So we had to have an interview with the priest so he can fill out an application form so we can get the "OK" for us to use his particular church, all because of these boundaries.

Things have been officially OK'd and we've cleared this hurdle. But we're already coming up to our second church related hurdle - Marriage Preparation classes start soon. I wonder what surprises are in store for us.

What is the BIG day?

The BIG day is our wedding day! October 6, 2007!

And I'll (Smartbottom) be using this category to update everyone on the planning and preparation of our wedding!