Catholic Brides: First Mtg post FOCCUS Inventory

Following, we're doing this Thursday night!

We did this, and had this meeting also. The Deacon basically shared the level of agreement we had on the total questions, but we did not go through each individually. It was SUPER brief! It probably depends on the person though, ours was super laid back and very sweet overall, so it was more of a brief conversation then going through line by line. Good luck!

I had no idea we had to answer 170 questions... yay marriage prep :/

No, you won't go over each question, usually just each section

We loved it and proved very enlightening.

Also, if you didn't "match" all your answers, your priest won't threaten to not marry you! It is used as a guideline as to what to discuss.

Hope you enjoy it as much as we did!

@Teresa - It's not bad at all. It sounds time consuming, but I didn't mind it. It was more like Yes/No questions, and most of them are very straightforward topics.

Angela, did you find they asked some of the same questions over in another section worded differently?

@Tina Yes, some it was definitely repetitive. For example something about Finances may sort of correlate to something in the Family Values section, etc. But overall, I didn't mind it at all! It actually did get us to talk about one item we hadn't discussed yet.

We had such a fun time at our Pre-Marriage classes!

When we went over our FOCCUS results he briefly went over each section and really only went in depth on the areas that we had different answers, both were neutral or things that he thought we should make time to talk about on our own.

I had this back in January....for us we went over only questions where we had different responses or if we both selected the "non-preferred" answer. It was about an hour and a half. Some of it was beneficial but really FH and I have talked about the important things.

BTW, the amount of questions has to do with the upfront "about you" section. FH has been previously married and has kids from that marriage. That added a bunch of questions. (Yea us...said sarcastically).

Overall I'm looking forward to the discussion. I'm not concerned the church would refuse to marry us. Just given the volume of questions we had to answer, I didn't want to be there until midnight going through each question.

I agree they asked the questions a couple of different ways. I wish the questions were better tailored to the situation. I had to answer questions about FH disciplining MY kids from a previous marriage. Ahhh...I don't have any kids...he does. Plus his kids are 27 and 26...no disciplining them. Again if the system was better tailored to the situation it would give the results more credit.

We are getting married in a Baptist Church (but I was raised Catholic, and converted as an adult). We had to do an assessment called PREPARE/ENRICH before we started our pre-marital classes, and it sounds similar to yours. Our questions were tailored to our situation, a co-habituating couple with children.

We were advised not to discuss the questions with each other as we completed our individual questionnaires, and to wait for our results. Our Pastor did not go through every question, but did tell us in which areas our relationship is already strong (we answered similarly/same) and which areas will be more challenging (we are polar opposites).

If it is similar to our session, it may last about an hour...so don't worry about being there all night going over the questions!

Last year when we went through it, we went over every single question. It didn't take as long as I thought though. We also answered the questions in front of each other but separately on our papers. We had almost identical answers on everything!

We only had to go over the responses where H and I differed in our responses, or the ones that don't match the "preferred" Catholic response. It still took three meetings :/

Same as PC. It takes a little time but it isn't too bad.

A lot of things didn't apply to us but we also had to answer the extra sections because we fell into the category of DH not being Catholic and the fact that we lived together before marriage.

We didn't go over each thing. Just our most and least compatible in a little more depth, and if we both chose the not preferred answer.

Hopefully your priest will have a little fun with you lol. Apparently FH said that I drink too much and act inappropriately. He couldn't remember putting that and our priest would NOT let us live it down lol, made for some good laughs!

In one of the questions I said that FH was competitive. I interpreted the question to be around playing games. Yes, he likes to win. FH took the interpretation in a whole other direction (I don't recall what it was at this point). Oh well, an easy explanation. Besides each of these questions are up to the person's interpretation of it.

We had our 2nd meeting last night. We didn't go over each question but did discuss the ones we didn't agree on. I actually liked going because it made us discuss certain things we hadn't thought about. Plus, I really like our priest.

Audrey makes a great point. We both misunderstood or misinterpreted a couple of questions. Easy to do!

Done that meeting. We went through the questions we had different answers on. Some were how we understood the question (double and triple negatives were the worst). Some of them we both answered unsure on and you have to talk about your unsure responses. We marked unsure when we could not figure out what the question asked. Some were an actual difference of opinion and they wanted to talk about those before we chose a date to determine if we needed to do some counseling (church provided). It is a good check to see if you and FH are on the same page.

The deacon we're meeting with is not the person that will be officiating at our wedding. That priest is now part of another parish. Unfortunately since we're getting married in this church, we need to go through their process, so having the priest that's going to marry us go through the inventory was not an option.

Having said that, this guy may surprise us and be super fun; so I'm trying to reserve judgement. I think it's going to help that we're a little older than the typical couple getting married. I actually think we're around the same age as the deacon, which I'm hoping will help in this counseling process.