I know a lot of people post on here about how they are nervous about this retreat and to be honest, we were too. However, we were pleasantly surprised so I thought I'd share with you a little bit about what happened.
We had a whole bunch of various sessions on communication skills, personality, family of origin, sex (nothing preachy about that), parenting, finances, natural family planning, etc. A financial planner came in to talk to us about the things we need to get before getting married like life insurance and power of attorney and he even offered a free session with him to find out more about balancing our retirement account. A counselor came in to talk about different parenting strategies and that was pretty interesting too. We also did some fun activities to express our love to each other and we enjoyed that. We wrote love letters to one another and put them in an envelope with a date and the church is going to mail them to us on our six month wedding anniversary. The food was really good and I wasn't expecting that. On Sat night, we had a chapel prayer with candles and we held our partner's hands and prayed over each other. On Sun, there was mass. We met a lot of really cool couples and there were board games so we got to play a lot of fun board games during the down time. We also got a workbook with lots of questions and activites about a ton of topics to discuss each week. I was really the most apprehensive about the sex portion especially, the natural family planning. I did not really want to hear them talk about mucus and cervixes but they kept the conversation so incredibly generic that it wasn't bad. They didn't talk about the church's stance on NFP or why you shouldn't use other contraception. They didn't really talk about what it was or how to do it. What they did talk about was why that couple had decided to use it and how it worked for them and the positive effects it had on their communication and sex life. I think overall, they really tried to be informative and they didn't give anyone a guilt trip about anything. I thought that was nice. So, overall, we had a nice time. I think it's a great idea for anyone who's engaged to go on one of these retreats. It really made us feel closer.