MARRIAGE PREPARATION.


Today, Sunday, is the day we do Pre-Cana. This is a church-sponsored marriage preparation program and fulfils a couple’s mandatory requirement to attend a marriage preparation program. We do this each quarter and our part of the 6 1/2 hour day is a 25-minute talk on communication, facilitating small group discussions on the various topics and helping out where needed. We’ve been doing this for a long time, something in the range of 20 years.


Today there are 20 couples attending. This is a fairly large group and we attribute that to the June “rush”. Usually there are 10-15 couples. Besides communication there are also talks on marriage as a sacrament, family of origin, money and finance, and sexuality/intimacy.


A room full of people planning to be married has a unique atmosphere. The room is full of the joy the couples have in finding that one special person to spend their lives with. Many still glow the way young people in love do. The couples are older than we used to see and understand themselves and their partner better. Of course there are those few we see that cause us to wonder if they will make it.


The program usually starts with the Pre-Cana team being introduced. Then each of the couples is asked to tell us where they met, when they get married and what they like best about their partner. Through the years we’ve heard some interesting stories. Some met at bars, others were introduced by friends or were interested in the friend of the person they are marrying but somehow ended up together. The one that sticks with me is the couple that met on the interstate. He passed her and she thought he was cute so she passed him and smiled a lot. He passed her again and they signaled to meet at the next rest stop. It is not unusual to have at least one couple in each group that has met on the Internet.


Our talk is the 3rd one of the day and we give it right after lunch. This audience is so much more attentive that the 7th graders I used to teach religious education. In our talk we explain communication, the differences between men and women, listening, communication roadblocks, and fighting fair. We use a clip from the movie “Forget Paris” and some quotes of Morrie (from Tuesdays with Morrie) about marriage. We also share some positive quotes about marriage. There is so much negative spin put on married life in every type of media. We end our talk with these positive quotes to try to balance things out.


I know 6 hours; 4 times a year is not a lot of time to give. We’ve been doing it so long there is essentially no preparation time beyond gathering our materials together the night before. But I want to know how they always pick the Sunday with the best weather to have Pre-Cana.


We get a lot out of each session. For me it is some vital social contact in retirement. It also is nice to see the new crop of engaged couples starting their lives together. We don’t track any couples to see how they make out so we have no firm idea about what influence we may have had on them. It is nonetheless rewarding to share our knowledge and experience with them and to see them working with their partner planning a life together.
We like to think we helped some marriages in our work here.


In the past the evening after Pre-Cana was usually pretty hectic. We had to feed the kids and get ready for school and work. Now we can just come home and relax. We don't even take the Pre-Cana stuff out of the car. This is one of the benefits of retiring. The downside is we had to get old to be here!