precana let down

rombacja

FI and I did precana this past weekend. We were very disappointed. It just seemed that the couple leading didn't want to go any further than skin deep. We spent 2 hours on communication skills and fair fighting. We then had a 2 hour lunch where we were supposed to write love letters to our partner. Then they shoved finances, sex, and domestic violence into the last hour, and then let us go 2 hours early. I realize that some of the couples in the room were probably pumped we got off "easy" but we were really looking forward to the day and getting to know more about ourselves and our relationship. That did not happen. The loved  letters was a lovely idea, but I honestly know how my FI is feeling about me and we communicate well. I was hoping the day would raise issues that we haven't thought through before. There was little mention of faith or values or the church at all. We still have 2 meetings with a couple in our parish and a mtg with our priest which I'm sure will be better, but I'm feeling very disappointed.

any one else feel let down?

mica178

In Response to <a href="http://forums.theknot.com/Sites/theknot/Pages/Main.aspx/cultural-wedding-boards_catholic-weddings_precana-let-down?plckFindPostKey=Cat:Cultural Wedding BoardsForum:615Discussion:0c205faa-5c05-40ae-878b-ba7ed5088015Post:2dc27eae-4af6-4a73-8c43-7021849094ae">precana let down</a>:
[QUOTE]FI and I did precana this past weekend. We were very disappointed. It just seemed that the couple leading didn't want to go any further than skin deep. We spent 2 hours on communication skills and fair fighting. We then had a 2 hour lunch where we were supposed to write love letters to our partner. Then they shoved finances, sex, and domestic violence into the last hour, and then let us go 2 hours early. I realize that some of the couples in the room were probably pumped we got off "easy" but we were really looking forward to the day and getting to know more about ourselves and our relationship. That did not happen. The loved  letters was a lovely idea, but I honestly know how my FI is feeling about me and we communicate well. I was hoping the day would raise issues that we haven't thought through before. There was little mention of faith or values or the church at all. We still have 2 meetings with a couple in our parish and a mtg with our priest which I'm sure will be better, but I'm feeling very disappointed. any one else feel let down?
Posted by rombacja[/QUOTE]

I felt that our EE was as deep or as superficial as we wanted to make it.  H and I are into trying to push for the deeper conversations, so it was fine for us, but we both acknowledged that it'd be easy to stick to the easier way out and gloss through things.  Luckily for both of us, we feel the same way about pre-marriage prep, so we took the small seed given us by EE and pushed for more.

We're doing group couples counseling right now to help a couple engaged couples in their pre-wedding preparation, and the priest again is allowing the engaged couples to take the superficial route.  It's really disappointing.  I love our priest, but the icky, uncomfortable relationship stuff probably isn't his forte. 

I'm so sorry that you were disappointed by your experience.  If possible, could you take some of the precana material and make a date with your FI to talk about some of the stuff in greater depth?  Even if it's not something sponsored by your church, it would be worth it for both of you to get this stuff out in the open before you're married.

Calypso1977

that's really too bad.

id inform the parish of the experience.  while im sure the couple teachign is volunteer, the priest may be assuming that engaged couples are getting what they need for marriage prep.  he may very well like this feedback, and know taht they cut some of the most important topics short (or omitted some entirely) so you could all leave 2 hours early.

rombacja

thanks ladies - yes FI and I went through the book over the weekend to try to get a little more out of it and we have some more stuff coming up with our parish (precana was in a different parish) so hopefully that will be a little more inline with what we're looking for. FMIL suggested we attend an EE weekend since this didn't lead to much, but I think we're going to see how our parish centered stuff works first.

bel138

Ours was pretty awful. We had a priest that was filling in last minute. When we told our parish priest, he actually said, "They let HIM do it?" You could see the shock on his face. It was also an entire weekend, and I feel like we didn't cover much at all. We had a lot of free time to do worksheets and stuff. Obviously, we told the parish priest that it wasn't the experience we hoped it would be. And we were already doing several meetings with him as part of the prep, so I wasn't as upset.

newlyseliski

We had a pretty good experience at ours and felt that we had a good breadth and depth of topics... but the letdown part for me was how many couples seemed to ignore or dismiss a lot of the advice and talks that made them uncomfortable and assumed that all the other attendees felt the same way!  One couple at our table said something to the effect that they didn't know the weekend would be so religious-y and that they found that aspect annoying.  Yes, many of the talks discussed the theology of the sacrament of marriage and encouraged couples to discuss how they'd practice their faith together as a couple, but it wasn't necessarily expressed in a forcible way.  Why do these couples want to get married in the Church if they have absolutely no interest in the sacrament or their Catholic faith?????  

We did get a pretty awesome workbook at the retreat that we're going to try to go through in more depth during Lent.  I could maybe see if there's a way for me to scan a pdf of it if you'd be interested!

christyhal

We thought our EE overall was very good, though both lead couples were one Catholic and one non-Catholic.  So I thought it was odd that in a Catholic program where most of the engaged couples attending were both Catholic, there was no lead couple who could give the *full* Catholic perspective.  There was rather more discussion of living in a mixed-religion relationship than I would have liked (as it did not apply to us or to the majority of the attendees), and not a whole lot of focus on anything specifically Catholic.

rombacja

In Response to <a href="http://forums.theknot.com/Sites/theknot/Pages/Main.aspx/cultural-wedding-boards_catholic-weddings_precana-let-down?plckFindPostKey=Cat:Cultural Wedding BoardsForum:615Discussion:0c205faa-5c05-40ae-878b-ba7ed5088015Post:4a82f23b-1644-47cb-90be-522d1353d2fe">Re: precana let down</a>:
[QUOTE]We had a pretty good experience at ours and felt that we had a good breadth and depth of topics... but the letdown part for me was how many couples seemed to ignore or dismiss a lot of the advice and talks that made them uncomfortable and assumed that all the other attendees felt the same way!  One couple at our table said something to the effect that they didn't know the weekend would be so religious-y and that they found that aspect annoying.  Yes, many of the talks discussed the theology of the sacrament of marriage and encouraged couples to discuss how they'd practice their faith together as a couple, but it wasn't necessarily expressed in a forcible way.  Why do these couples want to get married in the Church if they have absolutely no interest in the sacrament or their Catholic faith?????   :( We did get a pretty awesome workbook at the retreat that we're going to try to go through in more depth during Lent.  I could maybe see if there's a way for me to scan a pdf of it if you'd be interested!
Posted by newlyseliski[/QUOTE]

This would be great if you could PDF it!!! I'd really appreciate that!

GardeniaLily

Our classes have been horribly boring. THey're being taught by a couple who apparently has been doing it for 7 years, though you'd never know that. I'm not a teacher by any means, but *I* could teach this class way better than them. They basically just look at each other (not us--who is the only couple there, by the way), and say/mumble sentences about the packet we had to read, often ending in a "....?" like they're looking for their partner to say "that's right! Now let's talk about the next topic...." except that never happens. There's lots of nodding and reading as they never read the packets beforehand and have to review on the spot about what that week's topic is about. Even as far as the sex talk went--they actually said, "we dont' talk about sex, so you can just read that on your own" and that week's class was only a half hour long. And the only reason it lasted that long is because there was 29 minutes of small talk! ugh.

I could go on and on about this. Overall, yes it's been excrutiatingly disappointing. Basically, it'sbeen an hour-hour and a half of mumbling question marks and shrugging by them while we just nod every week for six weeks. It's awful. Our last class is this week, thank goodness.  

FI is terribly pleased about it, whereas I am not. His friends told him about how their classes went and how they were all awfully "touchy-feely" and he was just oh-so-happy that ours wasn't anything of the sort.

BrideBling82

Well my FI and I did the EE weekend and it wasn't bad but I felt since I gave up my whole weekend it would be better. We had two couples talk to us; an older couple that had been married for over 40 ys and a younger couple that was married for about 10. I really appreciate them being honsest about their roadblocks in marriage but it would have been nice to talk to couples that had been married for 6 monthes, 2 yrs and 5 years so we would have a better idea of what to expect. The weekend was very much about together time with your future person and I liked that....but we didn't have any kind of incentive to talk to other couples. Which was fine but at the end of it on Sunday they were like I hope ya'll made friends and exchange numbers. I was like how..we didn't have time to get to know anybody? We also had the notebooks which I thought was a good idea, but I didn't like the mandatory love letter....me and the FI don't work well under pressure we like for our thoughts to naturally flow.

Not to offend anyone...but a lot of the couples there already live together and have joint bank accounts. Well me and the FI were odd balls bc we live seperately and we will have to move into an apartment when we get married. We felt that we were the only ones abstaining and living apart. This was the first wedding prep thing we have attended since seeing the priest so I'm hoping there is more. Either way I think the EE weekend is a good idea but I think it could have been organized better so we could have gotten more out of it. FI and me talked about everything and we noticed that we know things even though we've never talked about it...we just know. SO it was nice to reaafirm that we are intuned with one another.

MissAngel

In Response to <a href="http://forums.theknot.com/Sites/theknot/Pages/Main.aspx/cultural-wedding-boards_catholic-weddings_precana-let-down?plckFindPostKey=Cat:Cultural Wedding BoardsForum:615Discussion:0c205faa-5c05-40ae-878b-ba7ed5088015Post:bed5f095-a640-435d-b562-4e3859dce7a2">Re: precana let down</a>:
[QUOTE]We thought our EE overall was very good, though both lead couples were one Catholic and one non-Catholic.  So I thought it was odd that in a Catholic program where <strong>most of the engaged couples attending were both Catholic</strong>, there was no lead couple who could give the *full* Catholic perspective.  There was rather more discussion of living in a mixed-religion relationship than I would have liked (as it did not apply to us or to the majority of the attendees), and not a whole lot of focus on anything specifically Catholic.
Posted by christyhal[/QUOTE]

I think that happened to be the weekend that you went on.  At my weekend there were a lot more interfaith couples than I expected so I'm sure they had to make it fit to the average attendee.

It's also about what you want to get from it.  There is no couple that is a "model couple" for this kind of thing and it IS a volunteer effort.  There may be a lot of couples around you that are doing this or that, but you don't attend an EE weekend to see how they are going to live their marriage, it's how YOU will be living your married life together.

We ended up just ignoring everyone else around us and focusing on US.  That's the whole point of the weekend.

MopsieB

Rombacja: You must have gone to St. Pat's because we had the EXACT same experience! They let us go about an hour early...Even though we did the "over 30" pre cana, it still seemed geared heavily towards immature/inexperienced couples who lack in communication skills. As I've said in other posts, if you and your fiance have been together for awhile, you know each other well and don't need this class. But the church always makes you take it, no matter what. (at least we got let out of the NFP!)