30,000 Years of Marriage

300 couples celebrated their Golden Wedding Anniversary this past Sunday at St. John Brebuff parish in Niles, Illinois. If you think about it, each couple represents 100 years of experience, 50 for the wife and 50 for the husband. That means there was 30,000 years of marriage experience gathered together. Talk about a "wisdom community!"

I wish we could bottle all that experience and then share it with our engaged and newly married couples as needed. Sure would save them from a lot of mistakes we all seem to make along the way. Oh well.

Blessings to all our jubilarians. Thank you for modeling lifelong, sacramental marriage for the rest of us.

A Better Title?

I just finished reading I Promise To Hate, Despise, and Abuse You Until Death Do Us Part, Marriage in a Narcissistic Age. Quite a title for a book, wouldn't you say?

The authors premise is that there are more narcissists, the vast majority of them men, than ever before and many of them are married. While these men may be charming during courtship and engagement, their true colors show once they are married.

Narcissists are manipulative, controlling, self centered and are incapable of having a relationship that requires mutuality. Typically, the wife, who thought she was marrying a charming, wonderful man, quickly finds out that her husband and their marriage are not at all what she thought they would be.

I am reminded that Dr. John Van Epp and others strongly encourage individuals to take their time, which to Van Epp is a minimum of two years, when considering to marry someone. Hopefully, within two years each person could see what the other is really like and possibly avoid the pitfall of marrying a narcissist.

Then, couples can truly live out their Catholic wedding vows: I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. I will love you and honor you all the days of my life.

That sounds better doesn’t it?

JP2 and our engaged couples

On this past weekend when Pope John Paul 2 was beatified  the Family Ministries Office held four marriage preparation programs that assisted over 100 engaged couples to prepare for marriage. Much of what is done in marriage preparation here in the Archdiocese of Chicago and around the rest of the world has been shaped by the teachings and writings of JP2. His Apostolic Exhortation, Familiaris Consortio, is really the foundational work that speaks to the need to properly prepare engaged couples for marriage. 

Of our four prep programs, I had the opportunity to work with 24 engaged couples at the Cardinal Meyer Center. I shared with these couples the Catholic vision of marriage, the need for support from family, friends and their faith community and the need to develop the necessary skills for successful, lifelong marriage. And the couples really bought into the day. There were excellent insights and stories shared that made it easy for me to see these couples really want to have healthy, happy, holy marriages for themselves.

As these couples continue to prepare for their weddings that will be ocurring over the next several months, I encourage them and all engaged couples to pray for the success of their marriage through the intercession of Blessed John Paul 2. 

A Royal Masterpiece

Pretty amazing. As someone who believes the wedding is important but the marriage is even more important I didn't think the royal wedding of William and Kate would hold much interest for me. I was wrong. Once Marilyn and I started watching it I was surprised by how interested I was and not just because my wife was interested.

As someone old enough to remember Chuck and Di's wedding, all the rumors and the tragic ending, I pray that this young couple's love, so evident today, continue to grow throughout all their years of marriage.

From Soul Mates to Stale Mates

I work with many engaged couples. It is not unusual for them to think they are marrying their Soul Mate. My experience is that the women buy into this much more than the men do, although there are plenty of men who think the same thing.

Recently a study out of the University of Winnipeg in Canada reported that women are more likely to become bored in their marriage than men.  When asked to choose descriptors for their own marriage the most frequent answer was that the relationship was "dull." Other commonly picked answers included "lack of fun," "lack of conversation," and "lack of romance."

When you combine this with the fact that women initiate over two thirds of divorces in the United States, you can quickly realize that their soul mate has become their stale mate. That is definitely not good if you want to have a lifelong marriage.

 How is it that the person they could not stand to be away from for even a moment, the person who fulfilled their partner's every need has become dull and boring? As important as that question is, the more important question is to ask what can a couple do to make sure they don't become stale mates.

What are your thoughts on this? What can couples do to keep their marriage relationship alive and exciting?

Next post I'll give you some of my ideas.

I'm still amazed

The other night I had the opportunity to work with a group of recently married couples. All the couples were married between four months and two years. I could see and feel their desire to be successful in their marriages. We talked about expectations and adjustments and did several exercises. They shared how being open and honest while talking about their successes and challenges, in their still very short marriages, had served them well.

While we all know some couples who believe the myth that once they get married the marriage will take care of itself, it's still amazing to me that so many young couples will do almost whatever it takes to have a successful, lifelong marriage. All we have to do in our churches and parishes is provide them the opportunity to do so.

Grateful for presenters

This past Saturday I trained seven new couples to be future PreCana presenters. When I got into the office this morning I read through the evaluations from a recent PreCana by a relatively new presenting couple, Jeff and Julie.

What a pleasure to read through their evaluations! In a short amount of time they've become a top-notch presenting couple. The engaged really enjoyed the personal examples that Jeff and Julie shared as well as their presenting style.

Pope Paul VI said this years ago and it's still true today: "Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers. If he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses."