Engaged Encounter

Good morning! I hope everyone had a lovely weekend  We had our Engaged Encounter weekend, and have lived to tell the story. Before going into it I want to thank anyone who sent up a prayer for Bryan and his roommate situation. We walked into his room and……… it was a single! We were cracking up. I wasn’t so lucky, but oh well. 

There has always been 1 thing in life that i would recommend highly to anyone and everyone. Studying abroad. Not just traveling, but studying. I studied in London for a month, and although not much studying was done I really got to experience the city and what it is like to live there. Anyways, that is beside the point. After this weekend I can now say that I highly recommend 2 things for everyone in life. Studying abroad and some form of marriage prep course. Whether it is the weekend retreat or weekly counseling. 

Bryan and I have always had pretty good communication when it came to life stuff. We had had the “who is going to take care of the checkbook” talk. The “how many kids and when” talk and the “life goals” talk. We have lived together for a few months now so we have already figured out the chores situation. I wasn’t too sure what we would learn from the weekend, but I was excited about it. 

The weekend was intense. We got there Friday night at about 7, went straight into the conference room and started through our book. We got to bed at about 11.  Saturday morning we were woken up at 6:45 and did it all over again with a break at lunch, finishing up at about 10:30. Sunday morning it was up again at 6:45 and we finished up at about 3. Have I said it was intense? 

There were no group discussions. No one was asked to share. The leading couples would talk about the chapter, then we would separate from our fiance, answer questions, then reunite and go over what we had written down. We got to write a love letter of sorts to each other and also a prayer for our marriage which the priest prayed with us. I was disappointed that there was no trial run of the wedding day kiss, but oh well There were only a few surprises in our answers, but nothing bad (he was surprised that I wrote NO for if valentines day was important to me ) and the weekend gave us a chance to have more in depth conversations about things we had already touched on. Right now I am in a transition with my job and it was good for us to sit down and really discuss what we expected of each other financially and career wise. Would he be ok if I was “just a receptionist”, if that meant I could be home more with the kids and build up our freelance business and maybe go back to get my teaching credential. (He would ) 

I think I will begin posting a few questions, maybe one a day or one a week, that I found helpful that you may want to discuss with your fiance.  I know that not everyone is required to do counseling, and I am not sure if there are non-catholic weekends, so if you weren’t planning on doing any counseling, maybe the questions I post will just be good jumping boards for dinner time discussions. Of course I forgot to find a starting question this morning, so I will try for one this afternoon, maybe tomorrow morning.  If you have any questions for me about my experience feel free to leave me a comment or email me at heather {at} wemetinabar {dot} com.

Happy Monday!

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