I am not religious. The SO jokes that if I put my finger in holy water, the water would start bubbling. I sometimes call the Holy Bible the greatest fiction story ever told. That's the kind of non-religious person I am.
The SO on the other hand is fairly religious. She's been baptized and did her First Communion, Confirmation and Reconciliation. Thus, we're getting married in a Catholic Church.
I really have nothing against religion. Before I was staunchly against organized religion and felt that it was used as a system of power to oppress and subdue the masses. This was partly driven by my History education, which gave me numerous examples of Church utilizing their God-vested powers to subjugate and exploit the uneducated masses. Having met the SO, talked to her about religion and attended several Masses my views have changed. I feel that religion, more specifically, faith is actually quite helpful. It serves to provide values in a person's life, offers support in times of stress and pressure and provides a community of friends who are more than willing to provide aid in times of need. Anyways, I'll still never really be religious so I was quite anxious when I had to attend....
I don't even know why I was anxious. It was probably because I wasn't sure what we were gonna do for the 44 hours we were supposed to be there. Were they gonna try to brainwash us? Was this some sort of secret cult meeting? What kind of food were they gonna serve? Jesus cakes?
So we got there and didn't realize there were gonna be so many people. 58 couples attended our session and they came from all over LA County. We met couples from Pasadena, the Valley, Palmdale, etc. How uur accommodations were gonna be was another big question.
Turns out the DePaul Center is?/was? a large seminary so they had two buildings that were dorms. This was my "room". They had like 20 of these pod like rooms on each wing of the building with the bathrooms/showers in the middle. There is no ceiling above my room so you can hear the wonderful cacophony of sounds from all your other male dorm mates. Luckily our wing did not have crazy loud snorers.
The hallways of our dorm looked like this. Hence, I did not go to the bathroom in the middle of the night for fear of A) seeing a tiny little girl standing at the end of the hallway B) a skeletal zombie hand shooting out of the curtains C) a priest standing there waiting for me (I kid, I kid)
The days were filled with all kinds of talk with topics like "How to Argue Fairly", "Natural Family Planning", etc. Basically the weekend is designed to get you to open up to your SO and discuss how you feel, what your expectations are and how much you love each other. Of course this openness does lead to issues and we heard from another couple that the previous week 3 couples left after the first day after they realized they weren't ready for marriage. Kudos for them. Better that they realize this now than after they're married. Although the thought of losing all of our deposits makes me think maybe divorce is cheaper. Do you have to return wedding gifts if you get divorced? Haha...
The SO is just as bad as I am at taking things seriously so we weren't the best participants in this engaged encounter. Partly because we've discussed a lot of the big issues such as kids, financial management, living arrangements, parent care, etc. so no big issues came about. The only time I saw her genuinely excited and interested was when she heard the ice cream truck go by. I've never seen that girl run faster.
I don't even know what that is. It's like radioactive ice cream. I'm never feeding my kids this. Only organic, soy ice cream with no preservatives and non-natural ingredients. Haha jk. Go ahead offspring. All the chemicals only make you stronger.
The one thing we did discuss that we have never talked about was "What do we do if we can't have kids" Scary thought but I'm glad that the weekend encounter made us think about our contingency plans if this ever happened: We're adopting.
In the end the encounter was pretty enlightening. The SO called it couples therapy since there was a lot of clapping, group discussions and people opening up about their feelings for each other. I also realized that the Bible really was like Pirate Code, they're more what'd you call guidelines than actual rules. The influence of religion on this whole encounter weekend was fairly minimal. Yes, they had Mass and they did suggest to pray as the first step before making a decision. Other than that, it wasn't intrusive. I'm glad.
Marriage is a scary thing. It's supposed to be a union of two lives FOREVER. Seems pretty crazy when you think about it. FOREVER. I can't emphasize this enough. F.O.R.E.V.E.R.
After this weekend encounter and now more than ever, I feel like marriage is just a giant problem solving case. It's a continuous series of questions that are thrown at a couple. How successful they are in solving those problems is how well their marriage will work. Who will take care of the kids? Where will we live? How are we going to afford this? When will we decide that our kid is just leeching off us and not providing any benefit (question my parents ask themselves) Why did I marry you?
It's why, to put it realistically, you need a good teammate and a partner. One who is smart, capable and flexible enough to work through all the issues life throws at you. The care and affection that you have for each other just makes you want to work harder together to make things work. But, in the end, the forward progression of marriage and life cannot be made without those decisions made with your partner. I'm hoping that our marriage is more like Warren Buffet's management committee and less like Enron.
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