Pre-Marriage Counseling, Part 3

Well, I've relayed the trials and tribulations of the process so far (http://catholicweddinggirl.blogspot.com/2007/10/and-so-begins-saga-of-pre-marriage.html and http://catholicweddinggirl.blogspot.com/2007/10/pre-marriage-counseling-part-2.html ), but I have yet to talk about the first meeting with the deacon who will be performing our ceremony.

Normally, the parish requires the couple to wait two weeks after meeting with the counselor to meet with the deacon, which we found out, was so that the counselor could compose her letter of recommendation to the deacon. We (and by we, I mean I, because I'm the Catholic person in the relationship) convinced the marriage coordinator at the parish that we could overlook the two-week waiting period, since we were coming to Houston from Austin. It's not that we were incredibly eager to start our counseling, but you can't set the date at the church until you've met with the deacon. I thought my fiance was being paranoid (we were 14 months away from our date), but we (I) set up the appointments for the same day.

As I relayed in my first two posts, the counselor less-than-loved me and thought my fiance was really amazing. Well we went back to the church that afternoon, and she was still meeting with other engaged couples, so we saw her walking around behind the receptionists window. Since it was near the start of the hour, my fiance grabbed a newsletter from the end table and stuck it up in front of his face. Very mature, I know. A few minutes later, she came out and saw us, with my fiance trying to hide behind the paper, a little embarrassing.

The deacon called us into his office, and was very pleasant, it seems like this meeting was a get-to-know-you sort of thing. He did ask to see the results of the FOCCUS test, since he couldn't see the marriage counselor's report yet. He saw our responses, and there were several categories that we were to discuss with him where we had "bad answers" ("bad answers" are any answers in which you disagree with your future spouse, or you agree, but the answer is not the "right" one as designated by the test). Most of the questions we "missed" were in the religion-related of the test. He looked at the two of us, sitting expectantly for his verdict on his couch, and he said, "Well, it looks like you two really haven't talked about some of these things, have you?" "No," we said in unison. "Well, OK, I think we'll probably need to meet about once a month - about 6 times total, and then I'd like for you two to sign up for the marriage retreat offered by the diocese." Boo, we thought we'd only have to do one or the other.

Then he got down to business, and asked about the wedding date and time we'd like. There are two venues at the church, and we thought we'd go with the smaller venue, and go with the later time, so we could move right into an evening reception. He looked at our date, and our time was already taken! That's almost impossible, we thought we'd have the first pick. The deacon said that if we had any chance at all of the couple moving the date, it would be this couple, since they've changed their date 4 times. Aargh, well, we're keeping our fingers crossed.