Fully Prepared

Well we can now consider ourselves fully ‘prepared’ for marriage. As far as the church is concerned at any rate. Our birth certificates have been sighted so that the notice of intent to marry may be lodged more than one month and a day in advance of the date in question (and they know that neither of us are grasping for an Australian passport out of the proceedings) and we have now received our feedback from the ‘Prepare’ exercise.

As there is actually no ‘pass’ or ‘fail’ for this process, we can’t actually say we did ‘well’ (or otherwise for that matter). It appears however that we do have genuine areas of strength as opposed to areas of strength by proxy which is nice. That is we don’t have some level of discord in absolutely all areas but only utter discord in a few of them. Instead, we actually have areas where we really do see eye to eye. Oddly enough however, they weren’t necessarily the ones that we expected.

Once we arrived at the counselling session, we were asked to identify on separate worksheets what we thought would be our three main areas of strength and our three main areas of growth. All the statements to which we had previously responded had been designed to come under headings such as expectations of marriage, personality issues and family etc. Our answers had been sent off for a computer to tally up accordingly and we now had to predict what the final result would be. Or that is the result from that particular day – we were advised that over time, the answers we gave to those statements would most likely change and may have even changed already. Which was also a reason they gave for not giving us a hard copy of the actual results. Apparently its not constructive, especially later in a marriage to bring up things along the lines of “but you said when we were engaged that you were happy that I had hobbies of my own and now you’re complaining that I want to take up macramé three nights a week while you look after the kids!?!”. Or something like that. Anyway, across the board The Boy and I felt that Communication would be one of our main strengths and indeed it was but one might have to question occasionally what we communicate about because nothing else was as unanimous!

It was also odd to find that on a list of 10-12 different categories, on face value I would identify an area as one that required growth whilst The Boy felt that it was one of our main strengths and vice versa. The Boy felt that we did not really have too many personality issues between us as we genuinely liked each other and got along quite well. I on the other hand thought that we probably butted heads more than was actually necessary and this was badly done by us on occasion. Apparently I was correct in this particular instance (it was a primary area of growth for us) however The Boy had it right when he thought that our Relationship Roles were unlikely to cause us major issues. I guess its all a matter of perspective though really and it depends on what information you choose to focus when you are making your decision.

Any imperfections on your good set of anything may stick out more in your mind than those on the ratty old set that you’ve had for years. Just as when say your computer normally works great but then inexplicably freezes you might get a whole lot more irritated than when your old printer that has never worked smoothly the first time around, still doesn’t work properly (no matter how good the finished product may be in the end). I think both of us found this in the results that were presented to us. Just as we saw things that probably do need improvement, we were able to look at something that was already good and think well, it could still better in the grand scheme of things. I guess it was good to know.

I don’t think we really took much more away though. Apparently Financial Management is a bit of a growth area for us and the councillor lady was advising us to set up a budget and identify what our essential living expenses were and therefore what money we would have left over for ourselves and our savings. She was listing things such as food and cars and rent and thinking it was a great solution to our apparent while I was sitting there thinking that the itemised budget we already have would scare the pants off her with the detail that is contained. Any financial issues that we might experience are definitely not going to be for want of an adequate budget. Our main challenge is just sticking to the damn thing!

The other aspects of the session we actually found a little frustrating. These were the assertiveness exercise and the conflict management exercise. For the assertiveness task, we had to list three things that we wished our partner would do more often and communicate that. The partner then had to repeat back what they had heard because apparently when we have an issue we don’t want to know how it will be solved or even if it will be solved, we just want to know that we’ve been understood. I’m sure there are areas in my life where that might apply however for the most part, if I ask The Boy to do something, what I really want to know is if he’s actually going to do it and quite possibly even when. To be honest, if I’m tired and cranky then I sometimes don’t even care if he understands or not.

For the conflict management exercise, I guess it wasn’t so much an exercise but a series of guidelines that are designed to help you resolve conflict. You need to make a time to meet up in neutral space, you need to write down and agree on the actual conflict, you should discuss and note down all the solutions tried to date then you are to brainstorm possible new solutions (without comment or criticism from your partner). After that, you get to evaluate each of the proposed solutions individually and decide on the one that will be the course that you try to pursue. Now I don’t actually think that there is anything necessarily wrong with this approach but neither do I think it would be productive for us to follow each of the steps to the letter. We already have an adapted form of most of these steps which makes up our usual method of conflict resolution. And maybe we’re still too young at this life partner thing because we both seem to think that for some things, you do have to just agree to disagree... At least we’re still resolved on doing that together though.