Like this:

As I’ve said before, this blog is not about melodrama; yet I haven’t figured out an effective way to post about the less-than-optimistic things in my life because the entire goal of this blog is optimism, and hope, and growth. The last goal I talked about (now eight days ago) was avoiding being too subversive or loud or calling too much attention to myself at my first pre-marriage class.

The first class definitely put me on edge. At one point, the instructor (a married deacon from the area) had a conflict with an attendee about the Roman Catholic Church’s position on divorce and annulment, who brought up the excellent point that the Catholic Church will generally permit an annulment if it’s found that a married couple has different ideas about how many children to have or how to raise them; but will not necessarily grant one if a woman is being abused by her husband. For Catholics, divorce is a civil concept only and they don’t recognize it, because once you’re married (if you’re validly married in the eyes of the Church and theoretically also of God), you’re married for good. The only way you can ever marry someone else after you’ve already been married in the Church is if your spouse dies, or the original marriage is declared never to have been valid in the first place. If one spouse doesn’t want kids, then you can’t have a valid marriage according to the Church because marriage is supposed to be open to the creation of children (they also use this line of reasoning to argue against same-sex marriages using the ole plug and socket routine, but I don’t think it applies in the same sense). The flipside is: when you get married, you’re supposed to sacrifice for each other and take the good times with the bad, and supposedly if your husband is abusing you, as if a spouse were to get hooked on drugs some time into your marriage, that’s just a “bad time.” Now, the Church doesn’t (by doctrine) frown upon separation, but if you got a civil divorce and then wanted to marry someone else, you couldn’t in the Catholic faith because you’d be committing polygamy. I would argue (and so did this person) that an abusive spouse has a fundamental misunderstanding of what marriage is (a sacrament entered into freely by two people who love, honor and respect each other) so the marriage couldn’t be valid, but the deacon decided to be a bit of an old codger about it. So that was a fun little controversial time, though (thankfully) not brought up by me, although I was thinking about it. Our most controversial moment came when Ian countered all the statements about the bad state of marriage today by saying that wives aren’t generally expected to be house servants (which may or may not be completely true, but more women will at least say they don’t want to be maids even if they end up doing most of the picking up after their husbands).

This week’s was better. Ian and I agreed we would keep our mouths shut, something both of us have horrible trouble with, but broke that rule about five minutes in. Yesterday’s session was all about communication, and thankfully I think Ian and I are pretty much on the same page with the Church about this (next week’s session is about sex – that should be a fun one), namely, you should communicate and be on the same page about things; or at least know what the disagreement is about. So even though we couldn’t keep our mouths shut, we managed okay. We were also the first couple there again, so that was fun and awkward.

As far as tomorrow, I am planning to post again, as I always do, and I am going to try and make it happen. My job situation has deteriorated…I’m pretty sure I no longer have one, even though no one’s told me so yet. My goal for tomorrow is to update my Monster account and check out some other entry-level opportunities (yes, including outside teaching) in the area. Some of my other upcoming daily goals will be job related, too, but I need to take this one step at a time.

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