Be Prepared

Like every good girl scout or boy scout knows, throughout life one must always “Be Prepared”. So as The Boy and I now head off into this adventure of marriage together, that is precisely what we did this weekend. We got “Prepared”.

I’m not sure if it is true of every denomination today but I think its fairly common now that if you wish to be married by a member of the clergy within a church, you are required to take part in some form of marriage preparation. For us this is going to be two days across a weekend spent with similarly pre-wed couples as we learn about...well actually, I don’t really know what we are going to learn about but I assume it will have something to do with conflict resolution and maintaining open lines of communication within a marriage. You know, do not call each other names, its not productive and all that jazz. Oh, and probably some stuff on sex-ed thrown in as well. What this so called preparation also meant for us however was a long questionnaire to identify what our individual views and expectations were heading into the marriage. This was called Prepare.

When we sat down to have a chat with the Rector of the church, he stressed that there were no right or wrong answers in this questionnaire. We couldn’t actually fail. It wasn’t a test and it wasn’t designed to ascertain whether our marriage is going to last or even whether we should be getting married in the first place. Although I think if they ever find an accurate way of measuring that, it could save a lot of people significant heartache and money! Anyway, the purpose for which this questionnaire was actually intended was to highlight over a broad range of issues within marriage what our “areas of strength” and our “areas of growth” were. Don’t you just love that? We’re not going to have areas of “weakness” in our marriage. That would just be too depressing. We are going to have areas that require “growth” instead.

So we were given our booklets which actually contained no questions at all but rather statements to which we could strongly disagree, disagree, agree or strongly agree. Unless of course we couldn’t make up our minds and were undecided. We had to fill out our answers by colouring those little circles on a separate answer sheet and it was just like being back in high school. We were told that the answers should be our first or gut response and though we were encouraged to discuss our answers with our partner after we had completed all the questions, we were to refrain from discussing anything while we were actually filling it out. Which was a completely unrealistic expectation when he left us alone sitting right beside each other on the couch!

To be fair, we didn’t actually ask or mention to each other what answers were being given but there were several points during the process where one or the other of us would burst out laughing and just have to tell the other one what number we were up to in the booklet. Which also made the process a bit of a race to see who could finish first (I lost). I can’t remember now all the statements that we found hilarious but I have a feeling that many of them were related to expectations of the marriage. Probably statements like “Once we are married we will have a perfectly smooth relationship”. I think my first reaction to statements like that is how dumb would you have to be to put the answer “yes”!? I don’t know ANY married couple who has had a perfectly smooth relationship. I think disagreements come with the territory. Well, you know, unless you’re a doormat.

So we filled out the 160-odd responses so that some little computer could tally up our stance on whether we thought women with children should be in the workforce, doing most of the housework and having personal hobbies of their own. Whether we had discussed with each other how we were going to spend our money, who was responsible for taking out the trash and the roles our extended family would play in our lives. And in the end, I think that is what they really wanted to know. About the discussion I mean. Not who was going to be taking out the trash. Everybody will have their own views and opinions and not all of them are going to be perfectly in synch so what they want to be able to see as you head into your marriage is what the most likely areas that you may experience pitfalls are and have you been able to (or can you) discuss them openly.

Going into the Prepare booklet, I thought we had it covered. We’ve pretty much discussed everything at some point or another so we know where the other one stands on a lot of issues. When it came to reading the wording of the statements however, there were some that I realised I wasn’t completely positive about. There were also those that, because of the wording, I probably gave an answer that could be taken out of context such as whether I agreed that a mother should stay at home because children require a full time parent. As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t really matter which parent stays at home and since The Boy and I have discussed the possibility of him not working if I could potentially earn more and we could afford it, I didn’t actually "agree" with the statement.


On the whole though, I think we are pretty much in accord with each other on how we intend to be as man and wife. There is a lot we have yet to learn, sure, but we have a strong basis of communication in our relationship already and even though we definitely don’t always see eye to eye, we do always talk about it. Eventually at any rate. When we were discussing everything on the way home, we seemed to have felt the same way about a lot of things. One of the things that I found interesting though was that I often to look at things like this more in black and white than shades of grey and I tended to strongly agree or disagree to a large number of the statements. The Boy on the other hand stayed a lot closer to the centre. We have yet to speak to the counsellor about our results, which may well be another entry in itself, but having now gone through the "Prepare" booklet, I do think it was a worthwhile experience.