Pre-cana

We did! It was a one day thing super easy and in a group setting. I originally just did it to make my parents happy, but ended up really enjoying it because it brought up some great talking points with my fiancé. Don’t stress!

I don’t know if what we did was typical, but... we had 6(I think) with a mentor couple. We discussed how the other sacraments related to marriage and just general marriage “tips” communication, holidays, family, etc.
we also attended a day long “retreat” where we discussed personality types and communicating with other types, natural family planning, finances, acts of service (reaching out to the community), and I think one other topic. In this retreat we had whole group with a presenter, small group discussions with 6 other couples, and then time to discuss with just your future spouse. Honestly we didn’t get a whole lot out of it, we are pretty open with communication and money to begin with and many of the topics had overlap from our mentor meetings.
Itbwasnt a hard process. Honestly coordinating days to meet with our mentor couple was the hardest part.

View Quoted Comment I think my Parish has us go through a weekend retreat and meet with the Priest. My FH isn't Catholic, and I am a convert,so thisshoud be interesting...

View Quoted Comment Thank you! I think it will actually help!

We did a one day all day course with many other couples in like an auditorium setting. In my opinion that was the best fit, it allowed us to just discuss answers to the questions they prompted in the workbook alone and made it personal. I cannot see how a mentor couple and having a one on one would have been better. The couples who lead the precana are just regular couples, they don’t have like church credentials or anything. They also don’t have all the answers just because they have been married for a while. Keep that in mind. We just took the advice we wanted and left what we didn’t.

I think that is how our PreCana will be like. Though I am interested in more of an indepth version, too.

My FH and I did the weekend version.

Full disclosure: I am not Christian, we completed the weekend, but were denied the Church by his priest, and we had a truly awful time.

Caveat: our weekend was also extremely poorly run (no posted schedule, no communication about schedule, run by much older couples who spewed truly outdated information on financial advice, and, of course, birth control, not to mention gender roles).

I found the questions and the discussions to be very basic, essentially Relationship 101. If you've done couple's counseling, this will be so basic as to be frustrating. They also tend not to give you more than 20 minutes to discuss things with your FS, which means you start big discussions and then get absolutely yanked out of them.

There is very little down time. If you are someone (like me), who needs time to process or "unplug" emotionally, this will be overwhelming.

Also, the people who organized our preCana took our names, gave them out to people we didn't know, and also continued to contact us about other couples. I found this VERY invasive.

So, fair warning, the weekend version is intense, and if it's run poorly, it's miserable.