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Marriage Prep - long question :o)
posted at 2/2/2012 2:31 PM EST
on theknot.com
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Joined on
01-02-2011
SEATTLE 5364295770355284
Posts: 11
First: 2/2/2012
Last: 3/19/2012
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I've been a lurker here for a little while, and have grown so fond of you wonderful Catholic women. I converted to the RCC a little over ten years ago, but all of my family and most of my friends are Evangelicals, and I've been yearning to have someone to discuss some of my concerns with.
Currently my fiance and I live about 3 hrs apart. We decided to do our marriage prep with his parish which is a very traditional and joyful Dominican parish. We love it there because the Mass is very reverent and the church is bursting with large families. We will be getting married in my parish (because that is where the majority of friends and family are) which is more liberal and informal. Sometimes the masses make both of us uncomfortable (loud talking in the church before and after etc), but we both adore the new priest (who actually grew up in my fiance's church) who is slowly making changes and bringing back some reverence and tradition to the parish.
So, for our marriage prep with the traditional parish, we were asked a bunch of questions, and once they ascertained that we were virgins not living together, that we were commited to NFP, and both had a strong faith with regular Mass attendance, confession etc, they basically said that we would just go over our FOCCUS results and then have one more session after that where we planned our ceremony.
The other parish that we are getting married in wants us to have had 12 hours of conseling. They usually do these big watered-down group classes that we don't think would really have much value to us, as we already feel like we are very strong in our faith and intend to 'follow all the rules.'
So while, we don't really want to go through the big group class thing, I was hoping that we would have some more individualized counseling, where we worked on communication and what marriage would actually be like etc. We've been together over a year, but we definitely have some issues that we continue to fight over.
So I guess my question is this: If you did big group classes, did you feel like you got anything out of it? Were they more focused on the very basics of being married in the Church or did they really enrich your marriage? Did any of seek counseling with a private counselor? What was helpful?
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