I’d suggest Abbie Carmichael’s position is a bit strong, UNLESS the OPs prospective wife is real hard core about this stuff.
I’m rock-solid atheist, although not strident about it, while my wife was a lifetime Catholic, even active in the Diocese’ operations before we got married. She’s since given up on the Pope & switched to the Episcopals because she sees that the Vatican cannot (or more accurately will not) distinguish doctrine from theology.
We’ve been married 16 years and it works fine, subject to a few caveats I’ll outline below.
As to The OP’s specific questions: She does her thing every Sunday for 3-ish hours & I enjoy my time alone. We don’t (& won’t) have kids. We got married in a Catholic church. You didn’t ask, but we did the Catholic “engaged encounter” weekend retreat thing, a requirement in those days.
We do a typical commercial US Christmas, plus she goes to a service on (I think) Xmas eve. I ignore Easter & she goes to service. Big Deal. We don’t have much interaction with our extended families, but mine is pure athiest like me and her Mom is Soft-core Catholic & her sister defected to the Lutherans years ago.
Caveats:
We can talk about religion as a social phenomenon, not as a belief system. I’m perfectly comfortable discussing it like an anthropologist, and we often talk about the content of the Bible readings of the week, but we both think we’d both be real unhappy in any discussion of why she believes or why I don’t. So we generally don’t go there. It’s more a matter of mutual respect, not so much avoiding a touchy subject. We both think the other person is smart enough to know what’s right for them, and we’re both big enough to know the world contains more than one opinion on these matters.
I’ve made it clear she can have as much time & space as she wants to pursue her belief, and she’ll get no guilt trip from me, zero.
But, if she starts to build her life around the church & her friends and aquantances there, that’ll be a part of her life that, perforce, excludes me. I simply don’t play that game. Sorta like if I took up hunting; she’d gladly grant me the time, but she’d never get into it, not even a smidgen.
That means she spends most of Sunday AM & an extra hour in the evening once every couple of weeks with the music committee or extra Bible discussion or whatever. That’s fine with me. If she invited a bunch of them over to pray or have Bible discussion, well that’d be getting ready to become problematical. Not much danger with Episcopals, but if she went hard-over Baptist then we’d be in another situation.
Kids: When we got married we assumed we’d have them and we’d cross the religion bridge when we came to it. Circumstances intervened and now we’re childless for life. Stuff happens. But if we had kids, I would fully expect that she’d take them to church & teach them her way and I’d be patiently teaching them my way. Would they be confused? Maybe. Little kids can grasp “Mom likes Chocolate & Dad likes Strawberry”. A 6-year old has no more comprehension of religion than that.
A 12-year old can begin to decide for themsleves, but only if they’ve ben exposed to both positions. I find a world of difference between people like me who do not believe and see no purpose for believing versus the many people who were raised as Christians but are now non-participating & who don’t buy any one denomination’s version, but still have some belief (or need to beleive) somewhere, and a nagging guilt that they’re missing something.
I’d want my children to be able to be free of religion, or be involved in it as a matter of informed choice. Filling young minds with that stuff while admitting that yes, once they’re older they can lapse if they choose is just not the same. In fact, I’d argue that’s more detrimental than truly giving them both ways.
My bottom line: If you’re both mature and neither of you makes religion (or lack of it) the center of your life, there’s plenty of room for you to be a very happy & successful couple.
OTOH, the family right across the street from us are Capital C Evangelical Catholic, where the word “God” appears in every sentence and Jesus appears in every paragraph. All the 7 kids are named for saints & there’s literally nowhere in their house where Jesus isn’t watching you from a cross or a painting. I can’t even stand to dine with them, much less be married to someone like that.
As a practical matter, I’d expect you’ll have more trouble with her family than you will with her. So an important point for you to understand for yourself is how does your wife-to-be work with her family? Do they control her? Does she need to please her Mom or can she tell Mom to butt out & make it stick?
Between yourself and your wife you can work as partners to achieve a very smooth cooperation on this or any other topic. But if every time she talks to Mom or Sis or …, she’s getting an earful of how she ought to be doing it, well then it becomes all of them against you and your wife is forced to choose sides.
That scenario’s Hell on a marriage when the issue is something minor. But if you get in that situation over religion, well the marriage is probably hosed and so are you.
Ideally your wife-to-be won’t be the first of her siblings to marry or have kids. GrandMoms-to-be can get fiercely protective of their grandkids, to the point that they think their interests override those of the father (ie you). The more traditionally rasied Mom is, the more this tendency is out there. If your contribution to her grandbrood is #s 4 & 5, shes likely to be more relaxed than if yours are her first or likely only grandkids.
Points to ponder.
All in all I’m very glad I chose the person I did for my wife. I’d have missed out on a lot had I (or she) taken Abbie C’s doctrinaire approach. But we have had to be consciously mature about how we handled this, at least at first, to keep it a smooth part of our relationship, rather than a sore spot. Good Luck.
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) Not eating meat on Fridays during Lent – who does the shopping and cooking? I am the primary cook in our house (in our case it is because I dislike cooking slightly less than he does, so we’re not real gourmets over here), so I cook meatless, and if he wants something else, he can make it or order it in.