A wedding is a day, a marriage is a lifetime...

Following our engagement, we spent a lot of time preparing for the wedding day and little time on preparing for the marriage. I was concerned that we should re-prioritise, as we both see marriage as a responsibility to each other and those around us.

I asked the rector of the church how we could prepare, and he gave us nothing! No words of wisdom, no suggestions, no duty of care for the sacrament he was about to enter us both into. I suspected that the reason for this was that so many of his weddings are for out-of-towners who he will neither see after the ceremony nor counsel when they are having martial issues. These people are those who visit Ickworth Hotel and fall in love with the space as a wedding venue, see the beautiful church outside it's gates and request to be married there. To be fair to these strangers, our rector did say that people commute every weekend for six months from London before the wedding, just so that they can qualify to marry at St Leonard's!

So I started to look for others suggestions, and ended up looking at the Family section of St Edmundsbury Cathedral website. There are many organisations and books suggested, and we decided to participate in a residential weekend with Engaged Encounter. It was very fulfilling to take the time to just focus on our relationship, it helped us understand marriage in a more spiritual sense and we now have more clarity on our responsibilities as a married couple.

I don't want to write about exactly what we experienced on our weekend, so that others who experience the weekend can enjoy it in the same way that we did. When we arrived we did not know what to expect from it, and were pleasantly surprised.

So when I read this post on pre-marital counselling, I thought it would be useful to share. To me, it succinctly highlights the benefits of marriage preparation to the extent I feel we could do even more. For example, we have never considered that divorce could be a 'Mitzvah'. It made e consider the benefits of having an impartial individual who provokes our thoughts and ideas about marriage, like Meg's rabbi and her wise words. I miss Judaism and it's culture, and I mourn it's loss as I feel like I will never be involved in the way I had wanted. I think that when we find the right place of worship, I will recover from any sense of loss - it's a case of right time, right place for both of us.