Pre-Marriage Counseling, Take 4

We went back to Houston this past weekend, and while we were there we met with the deacon for our next counseling meeting. To our surprise, he had changed his tune with regards to the extent of our pre-marriage counseling. We did a short exercise at the beginning of the meeting in which I had to close my eyes, and then describe what my fiancé was wearing. I got into trouble right out of the gate, because I described my fiancé as “he” and not by his first name. Apparently the use of pronouns is a sign that you are taking your future spouse for granted.

He then went over the results of our visit with the actual marriage counselor. “I can see why you didn’t enjoy your session,” he said. The deacon then went on to say that he had “had a talk” with the marriage counselor and how her interpretation of the FOCCUS results differed from his interpretation. Aha! We are vindicated! We’re not the most doomed couple in the history of Catholicism and I am not the worst bride in said history! The deacon didn’t merely disagree with her assessment; he went to bat for us!

This was possibly the best counseling session in the history of counseling, because the deacon then went on to tell us that we probably only needed to meet one or two more times, until right before the wedding. He did not even mention the need for us to go on a retreat. We spent the rest of the meeting discussing how we would raise our children in a dual-religion marriage. At the end of the meeting he went even further in his praise and told us that we were in the top 5 couples that he had ever counseled. This information was even better because my sister and brother-in-law had been giving us a hard time over the last time we had been in, when the deacon had given us the impression that we would have a long counseling process (see http://catholicweddinggirl.blogspot.com/search/label/Marriage%20Counseling). I went home to tell my sister that our deacon thought that we were an even better couple than she and her husband. All-in-all it was a very satisfying pre-marriage counseling session.