The Catholic church has this mandatory thing they do for couples who want to get married in their church where they sit the kids down with upstanding members of the congregation for ‘counseling sessions’. On the surface, it’s actually a good idea, because, as a friend of ours said, it’s a lot easier to get married than to stay married. However, as with any activity or social group consisting of more than three people, I looked at the idea with more than a healthy dose of skepticism. What are they going to ask us? Are they going to split us up into separate rooms and come at us like the Scientologists? Are they going to grill us on our beliefs or quote scripture at us until we beg for mercy?

We talked to a good friend about it the night before, and she assured us it was not as bad as our (OK, my) imagination. Essentially, the Church is trying to weed out the folks who aren’t really prepared for marriage—the kids who saw Nick and Jessica get married on MTV and thought it would be bitchin’. So after about a half hour through the first meeting with our sponsor couple last night, I felt a lot more at ease. (There was a point, when she read a prayer for marriage early on in the meeting, when I got a little worried, though.)

One of the things they do is sit you down with a booklet, a pencil, and a Scan-Tron sheet like the ones we got in 9th grade for spelling tests, and have you each answer the same set of 150 questions. The test is designed to highlight the stuff in your relationship you haven’t really thought of or covered yet, like money, sexual, or family issues, and see if you have the manual dexterity to fill in a page full of teeny circles. The questions range from the mundane—Would it create a problem for you if your future spouse earned more money than you did? to the funny—I have a gambling problem which will cause future problems in our relationship—to the expected—We have decided to raise our children as members of the Catholic Church. You fill in an answer for ‘Agree’, ‘Disagree’, or ‘Uncertain’. They take these answers, collate them, and then work on the areas where you’re out of sync.

Really, we weren’t supposed to be comparing our answers, but some of the questions were vague or worded poorly, and it took some figuring to understand what the question was really asking. (e.g.: My future spouse and I seldom disagree about how we spend money.) We did find, however, that our money situation is the place where we need to pow-wow before we sit down with the counselors again, because we still approach it as two separate individuals instead of one single unit. I do have to say, though, that based on a lot of those questions, I think we’re about forty light-years ahead of other folks. Still, I’m nervous about getting our church SAT’s back, because I’m pretty bad with math, and if I fail us, we won’t get into heaven.

Under the Radar. Because he is a on the down-low, ‘I’m not into making a big deal about my birthday’ kind of guy, Todd has not mentioned his birthday today. I had to read about it on his log. (frowning.) So stop over the the Land Of Pleasant Living and say “Happy Third Birthday” to XLT.

Random Fun Links. ooooooooooooooooooooooohhhhhh. Nice. Totally gotta get us one of these little babies. You Are Watching Big Brother. Swipe, from the good folks at Turbulence.org, helps you read your driver’s license barcode, provides links to data warehouses, and calculates how much money you should charge for your personal data.