Before you get married, a lot of churches require you to go through some sort of pre-marital counseling program. It depends on what religion you are and where your church is, but I think it is pretty common to meet with your priest or minister for a couple of sessions, ostensibly to prepare you for the difficulties of married life, but in reality probably to secretly observe you and make sure you seem like you A) know what you’re getting into, and B) it seems like the marriage has at least *some* chance of surviving.

So when Sara and I got married, it was pretty normal when the minister indicated she would prefer that we meet with her for a few sessions. However, Sara and I each lived in different states, the minister was in a 3rd state, and the wedding itself was taking place in yet a 4th state (it was very complicated). So getting together for multiple sessions was pretty much a no-go. However, we located a place locally that was offering a one-day-intensive marriage counselling class, and the minister agreed that we could go to that class instead.

Now I’ve never done it, but I assume that there is a different vibe if you’re with your minister, whom you trust and whom actually cares about you or has some stake in your well being, versus going to a random place to meet with people you’ve never met before. Also, I think we were the only couple in the class going through a “pre-wedding” session, everybody else was there for marriage counseling. As in, we-have-big-problems-and-in-some-cases-straight-up-hate-each-other counseling. Everybody sort of hated us because we were young and in love, and sort of represented everything they used to be, and no longer were. So right off the bat, we didn’t fit in, and it wasn’t the super best environment.

Now, for my part, I was just there to mark the checkbox that said “has performed pre-marriage counseling” and that’s about it. I figured we’d have to fill in some busy-work worksheets with some made up “everything is great” nonsense and get out of there. I’ve done a little therapy, so I know the score. Sara, however, is not the grizzled therapy veteran that I am, so the whole scenario just wasn’t the same for her. She couldn’t skip all the first steps.

For example, if you’re going to really feel comfortable opening up to someone, you need to have a certain level of trust with that person. If it’s your regular pastor, or regular therapist, then you’ve probably achieved that level of trust over time. Most people don’t want to just walk in and start yapping to some total stranger. I mean other people besides me, of course, since you can’t shut me up about my personal business (even on the Internet). And there are certain things you have to do, such as role playing, that make you feel silly. So if you aren’t very comfortable, and especially if you’ve never done something like that before, it is going to be very difficult.

So Sara was feeling uncomfortable and awkward to begin with, and then I started to feel awkward and uncomfortable on her behalf. As the day wore on, this feeling sort of grew and grew until the therapist in the one-on-one session started to pick up on the vibe. “Something is wrong here,” he said. “There’s something going on that you’re not telling me.” His attitude was that he thought he was being extremely clever for ferreting out some hidden secret. Best case he was judging us hardcore.

Of course this was about the worst thing in the world to say, because it made the whole situation worse.  Now I’m having anxiety that he thinks there’s some big issue in our relationship (which of course there wasn’t) and he’s going to “fail” us somehow and we’re going to have to cancel our wedding and our whole lives would be ruined. It got to be too much and Sara actually started crying, which 1) was very upsetting to me, and 2) solidified the guy’s idea that we had some horrible relationship problem that we weren’t telling him about, and he was really on to something.

In other words,  he probably wasn’t going to win any prizes for his amazing psychology (or detective) prowess.

Eventually the day came to a close and we managed to escape. He didn’t “fail” us (which, by the way, I think I would have had more respect for him if he would have…if he really believed that we had some colossal relationship issues, he sure didn’t try very hard to stop us from getting married. He didn’t even mention this whole thing again, after the one-on-one session. You would think that he would have at least tried to get us to come back for some additional counseling.) It was a very rough day, one that probably strained our relationship. So maybe in that sense it was a good test after all! One of those, “if you get through this, you’ll get through anything” type deals.

For me, it certainly calls into question the ability of anybody to really understand someone in a therapy session, since they are projecting their own baggage onto a situation and reading things in that aren’t there. Or maybe we just had a particularly bad, clueless therapist, who knows. I guess we can look back and laugh about it now.

I’ll always have the memory of that day, and more specifically the memory of the absolutely fantastic muffuletta I had for lunch.