July 12, 2009

Pre-marriage "Counseling "

Future Mr's uncle will be marrying us therefore we don't have some of the more strict requirements of pre-marriage counseling. We did, however, purchase 'Before "I Do": Preparing for the Full Marriage Experience' so that we can at least get some of the aspects of pre-marriage counseling that I think are important. We have only completed 4 days of the book but I can already feel us getting closer. I like it because it forces you to ask each other questions like "What is your definition of love?" and "How will your relationship represent God to society?". These are questions that we would never ask each other without this guide. It's also nice to be able to do this on our own schedule when we can really sit down and talk to each other in depth rather than in a quick session with a minister.
What do you think about pre-marriage counseling? Did you have to go through a church or were you able to do it on your own?

7 comments:

  1. Catholic wedding= pre-cana. Our diocese does a weekend long retreat. It was pretty awesome (I mean, aside from the horrible food and the creepy roommate I had) because we would have a married couple talk for about 20-30 minutes about one topic and their personal experiences, and then the priest would spend maybe 5 minutes talking about Scripture and how marriage should be, and then we would break off for about 30 minutes as couples to privately discuss our thoughts, goals, opinions, etc. We repeated this for a ton of different topics: how we want to incorporate religion/spirituality into our own relationship, finances, how to "fight", our goals for our marriage, our goals for ourselves and how we would work that into our marriage, how we were going to incorporate religion into raising our kids, how we would deal with inlaws/holidays/pressure from family, etc. We had a great experience!

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  2. We are somewhat doing something similar - I have a book, and we just discuss some of the things I read about. Its interesting because you may not think about things like - "where do you want to spend all the holidays, etc". Its totally different when you are just boyfriend and girlfriend for a few years!

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  3. We had 3 meetings with the priest...2 meetings and a workbook with a couple in the church that has been married for 30+ years, and a full-day 14 hour pre-cana class @ a catholic church.

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  4. we met with our pastor. It was a great expirience.

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  5. We did pre-marriage and it was very interesting. Our sessions were over several months with our Pastor. She asked some very straightforward questions. I am glad we did it.

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  6. We met with a former pastor at our church. First he gave us paperwork to go through, questions to ask each other and other assignments. Once we completed it, we had a day long session with him. We loved it!

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  7. Love premarital counseling! Our church required we meet with a mentor couple (they assigned us a couple that had a healthy marriage) and we met with them for 8 weeks and read the book "Preparing for Marriage" by Dennis Rainey and then we met with our pastor twice.

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