Marriage Inventory

So as part of our getting married at my church, we have to do some premarital meeting with the Pastor. We were both a little worried about how it would go - we've been living together now for 3+ years, we don't regularly attend church, and the Pastor presiding over our wedding barely knows me, and doesn't know Matt at all. But we went to our first meeting with her a couple of weeks ago and it went really well. We want to keep the ceremony as short as possible, and try to keep it from being overly religious. As I've mentioned before, Matt hasn't been to church in years (except for weddings and the last 2 Easters with my family). And I basically only go on holidays. Neither one of us felt like having a lot of religious readings and components to our ceremony would be right (hypocritical, maybe?). So we said as much to Pastor Cindy (not about the non-religious thing, in so many words, but definitely about keeping it short), and she was on board with that. There are certain things that, because we're getting married in the church, have to be a part of the ceremony, but there are other things that can be omitted. One thing I really wanted to make sure of was that we could use a secular reading. I had come across a reading that I really wanted to use, and when I showed it to Pastor Cindy, she thought it was great. So that made us really happy. Anyway, we felt very comfortable with her after our first meeting, and it seems like things are going to work out really well.

Part of the premarital counseling is completing the Marriage Inventory. We just got it in the mail last week, and set aside Wednesday night to complete them, and then Thursday night to discuss them (so we didn't have any big surprises when discussing them with Pastor Cindy!). We both struggled with some of the questions - how to interpret them, how to answer them...that sort of thing. For example, one of the questions was, "My future spouse does not know what I'm like when I am: a) sick, b) angry, c) with children, d) with coworkers..." something along those lines. Well, like I said, Matt and I have been living together for 3+ years. He knows EVERYTHING about me. He's seen me at my best and at my absolute worst (ER-level migraine). So I ended up leaving that one blank. There were other questions like that that just didn't really fit where we are as a couple.

So then Thursday night we sat down and discussed our answers to the questions. For most of them, we were pretty much dead-on. And then ones that we differed on, we mostly agreed about the other person's answer. There were some that will definitely need to be addressed, and I look forward to doing that both between me and Matt, and also with Pastor Cindy. It was nice to see that Matt and I are on the same page with so much of the stuff that the inventory covers. This inventory helped to create an opening for us to talk about everything, including things we hadn't even thought of. As much as we were both kind of dreading it, I think it turned out to be a really helpful tool.