So the "weekend from hell" I referenced in my last post was actually a Catholic retreat (ironic, non?), called "Engaged Encounter", that Lui and I were being forced to attend as part of the marriage prep program that lets us get married in the Church. The premise, as we understood it, was that we would be spoken to, or have a group discussion, on a topic relevant to our future (sex, babies, finances, etc), then be separated and sent off to write about our feelings on the topic, and then discuss what we'd each written. This turned out to be true. The result of this, as we understood it, was to be a full 44 hours of arguing. This turned out not to be true.
We did argue a little, the first night, after he'd put that some good qualities he gets from his family were how close and affectionate they are and how they talk on the phone every day (a definite sore spot in our relationship, as I don't really see this excessive familial communication or lap-sitting as a good quality at all). But it was more about his method of arguing - the way he tends to get defensive and doesn't even realize that I'm making an effort to see his side of things, because he's too busy actively not seeing mine - than it was about the over-hashed subject at hand. After that, we spent the time actually discussing, or just getting a chance to read each other's feelings and then sit quietly together taking it all in. There were no big surprises (we'd heard stories about people going on this thing and then calling off the wedding, because they find out that one of them wants kids and the other doesn't - how can that subject just not come up if you're planning on getting married???), mostly little reminders about what we like/don't like about ourselves and our relationship, what we want, and what we value.
When I'd been researching the Engaged Encounter program online, trying to find all the horror stories to psych myself up for a weekend of misery, most of the feedback I was able to find was from the program's website, and therefore, it was all positive. There was a lot of, "I didn't think it was possible, but we're more in love after the weekend than we were when we got here on Friday." I wouldn't go so far as to say that Lui and I are more in love with each other now, but we did come out of it with a sense of... validity? We realized we need to give ourselves more credit: rather than shrugging and saying, "We do okay," we need to reaffirm ourselves. Because in the face of all this adversity - different countries, families, upbringings; inabilities to work leading to inabilities to support ourselves; our romantic pasts both being kinda shite; etc... We've done incredibly well for ourselves, staying together all this time without resorting to sex or violence to solve our problems.
Oh, and I went to Confession for the first time since high school, and erased all my sins for the past seven years or so. Which I figure makes me a virgin again.
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2 comments:
Reminds me of when I worked at the zoo and they set up a Gibbon Encounter for us.
It doesn't sound pleasant, does it?
And after, we spent the afternoon saying, "I had a bit of a gibbon... encounter. I don't really wanna talk about it."
For the first few months I knew about this thing, I'd heard it spoken out loud and thought it was actually called, "Engaged - and Counter!" Which really didn't help with the worry that it was going to be a two-and-a-half-day-long argument...
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