This simple pre-marriage attitudinal test devised by the Catholic Church is apparently so powerful and predictive other non-Catholic denominations are using it. Will you take it before you get married?
From Slate
Can the Catholic Church help you find a suitable mate?
By Claudia Kolker
The tests are available directly from the Test Company “Foccus” for only $ 3.50 each
The lovely and talented Mrs. Shodan and I took this test, or something similar, before our wedding. (Twenty-two years ago. Yes, we are still married.)
My memory of the test is that most of the questions were about issues that were fairly obvious. We had already discussed them, even before we got engaged, and it had not really occurred to us that people would contemplate marriage without finding out what each other thought about such things.
My (Lutheran) pastor uses the same inventory in his pre-marital counseling. Seems like an excellent idea to me - if for no other reason than to prompt discussions that need to happen before marriage rather than before divorce.
Regards,
Shodan
I took it as part of pre-Cana - my husband was Catholic when we married, I wasn’t. (We’re still married 6 years later.) It was very straightforward, and if you read the article it was devised by psychologists (one of whom is a nun). I went to grad school for a couple years for social psychology (specializing in interpersonal relationships), and though I’m not schooled enough to have a professional opinion, in my judgement this is a decent instrument to foster communication on important topics for couples.
The way we took it was to meet with a married Catholic couple from the church, and take the test. The next session, they compared answers on our two tests, and we had to discuss the issue when important differences came up.
We took it 19 years ago with much the same result as the Shodan’s. We had already talked about much of it. There still remained somethings that we hadn’t thought to discuss. I was pretty young. I was surprised at some of his answers with regards to managing finances and thought we sorted them out. However those atttitudes are something that we struggle with from time to time.
Funny story about this …
Wife was lapsed Catholic before we got hitched. I’m a lifelong athiest. She wanted the Catholic wedding. Fine with me. We’re both about 30 then, first time marriage for both. Go to see the preacher. He says policy requires we take the test and also attend a weekend retreat. “That’s stupid, but if that’s what your backwards bureacracy wants, well OK” is our response.
We take the stupid test in separate rooms. (Really! All I could think of was Maxwell Smart demanding the “Cone Of Silence”). 100 questions or so, use a #2 pencil to fill out a scantron form. Then we’re supposed to both meet the preacher to review the results.
Preacher finally returns. Computer has printed our answers side by side down a page, highlighting the differences, and also drawn some sort of plot showing our revealed values by topic. Peeking around his attempts to hide the paper I see the lines don’t coincide at all. Two jagged curves waaay out of phase.
He begins uncertainly: “Well, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like this …”
The very first question was, and I quote: “How long have you been courting?” This is in the southwestern USA in 1988. The last time the term “courting” was used in conversation was 100 years ago shortly after the wagon trains first arrived from the East. Get real.
There’re 5 multiple choice answers ranging from “less than 3 months” to “more than 4 years”.
She checked “less than 3 months” since that’s how long we had been engaged. I checked “more than 4 years” since that’s how long we’ve been going together (off and on).
And so it went for the whole 100 questions. He almost refused to marry us. He even accused us of deliberately trashing the test to mess with him.
It’s been 15 years since the wedding and we’ve never yelled at each other yet, nor really even had contention about anything. Very happy, we both can’t imagine being married to anyone else.
I suspect their test needs some improvement, not to mention some modernization. “Courting.” Sheesh!
Having poked fun at it, I have to agree with the other posters about it having some value for some people.
For a couple of love-struck 19 year-olds with no clue about real life or really living together, the test would expose a lot of their untalked- about assumptions. Ditto the retreat.
Interesting-sounding acronym:FOCCUS. Trippingly off the tongue. Were the proofreaders, or anyone with a smattering of English slang, on vacation?
Our results matched up pretty closely (we were old when we got married (and that was 20 years ago), and had talked through just about all the stuff), but we did have one glaring discrepancy. One question asked about infidelity. It was a very neutral phrasing, with nothing about "If your spouse was unfaithful. . . ", just “Would infidelity end the marriage?”.
I answered “No.” Deb answered “Yes.”
You could just about see the wheels turning in the priest’s head regarding the gallivanting bachelor agreeing to settle down with no intention of giving up his carefree lifestyle while the devoted wife was committing her life to the marriage.
However, it was not quite like that. I did not know of any man in my extended family who had ever cheated on his wife and could not imagine my ever cheating, so I figured if she cheated (since I was not going to), I ought to give the relationship a chance to heal.
On the other hand, Deb had already caught two separate boyfriends in flagrante delicto and she had no intention of reliving that situation.
We both figured that if neither of us cheated, it would be a non-issue, so we got married anyway. (And the priest even said it was OK–not that we would have stopped on his say-so.)
My fiancee and I took this a few months ago. We were specifically warned not to give much stock if our percentages weren’t all 90% or better–inevitably, you clash on some things.
Also, the questions were worded REALLY funny. “Do you agree that your spouse does not dislike the same things that you enjoy?” Seriously, we found ourselves going “HUH?!?” a lot.
I’ve seen those.
That’s the kind of stuff I discuss with someone before I’m willing to date them!
A lot of my family still use this word. It has resulted in several similar conversations -
Family Member - “Are you still courting?”
Me - Laughing “Er… yeah. But I don’t call it that.”
Family member - “What do you call it?”
Me - “Dateing.”
Our premarital counseling (Methodist) used the Myers-Briggs. So if you’re looking for a potential alternative, that’s an option.
I strongly recommend some kind of formal counseling before marriage. I know my husband is the only guy I could have made it through that torture session with…
There was some funny stuff, though. Like the couple that led the session had all our chairs in a circle at the beginning of the day. And there was an odd number of chairs. They’d been doing this for years, you’d think they’d see a pattern.
At some point they asked everyone to raise their hands if they planned to have children together. Can you imagine how awkward, only one person in a couple raising their hand? We didn’t have any discordant pairs on that one, but I had to wonder why they asked that question so publicly.
To give the test some credit, I think you’re all approaching this from the perspective of being bright people who talk about these major issues before you got married.
You have to understand that a truly astounding number of couples get married and never discuss this stuff. Really. It comes as a total surprise to them after the wedding when the husband objects to the wife working, or when they find one person wants kids and the other does not, or one spends 40% more than they earn and the other wants to save. You can all laugh at how dumb this test seems, but trust me, it catches a LOT of people who are running into something they just do not have a damned clue about.
With due respect, Harriet, I’ve had the opportunity to use Myers-Briggs on many occasions and I don’t think it has nearly the usefulness of FOCCUS for this purpose. Myers-Briggs is of highly questionably validity, and in any case you’d be hard pressed to prove to me that an “ISTJ” personality can’t have a happy marriage with an “ENXC” or whatever. FOCCUS actually asks specific questions relevant to marriage. I can tell you with near-psychic accuracy that a couple who don’t agree on gender roles, money, sex or children are going to run into problems.
Mrs. RickJay and I took the FOCCUS test in a Catholic marriage course, as I used to be Catholic (as it turns out we eloped to Las Vegas, and were married in a strip mall chapel by a Baptist minister, so it was a hundred bucks and eight evenings wasted, save for the hilarious tales we can tell about the family planning hour.) We agreed on most issues and a lot of the ones we didn’t agree on were cases of interpreting the question differently. I have to admit I thought the test was generally quite well constructed; in my line of work I have worked with many tests, and it was one of the better ones. But… well, there were 20-25 couples in the class, and some of them had very different opinions indeed about critical marriage issues. Seemed to come as quite a revelation to them.
Been there done that.
In defense of the clueless ones (such as myself), some things seem so bleeding obvious that you can’t IMAGINE anyone feeling any differently about them than you do, so it does not OCCUR to you to ever ask. Or you DO ask, and (much) later find out you were using different definitions of terms.
For instance, bill paying. We both could agree that we preferred to pay the bills generally on time, but the occasional late payment, while a bit bothersome, was ok. Imagine the hilarity that ensued when I discovered that, while I define “on time” as “by the due date shown on the statement” and “late” as “after the due date but before the next billing cycle”, she defined “on time” as “before service was cut off” and “late” as “after service is cut off.”
Another personal example. I came from a family that made a big deal out of Thanksgiving and Christmas. These were large-scale, full-family production numbers. My friends and roomies in high school and college had similar family things. My first wife’s family made an even BIGGER deal of it than my family had. I now realize it was a bit short-sighted of me, but I considered this “normal” and it never occurred to me to ask Wife2 about it. Unfortunately, in HER family, Holidays were awkward and acknowledged as little as possible. Oh the joy for both of us as this played out over the years!
I’ll leave out the more interesting examples involving more personal and emotional subjects.
So, yeah, there are dummies like me out there that could be helped by something like this.
My wife and I took a long test like that when we had our counseling with the pastor. When the results came back, he looked at us, and said, “well, I’m not going to lie…you guys came back with the highest compatibility rating I’ve seen in any marriage I’ve performed…and that’s over 200.” True, my wife and I had been friends for 12 years before we started dating, so there was very little we didn’t know, and therefore learn to live with a long time ago.
Jman
My husband and I took that test too. Husband had a big problem with it and griped about it afterwards, because he felt it was gender-slanted. I remember him going off about how there was a question along the lines of “it’s OK for a husband to go out with the boys from time to time” but not a parallel one for the wife! (I’ve generally been a loner anyway, so the absence of that question didn’t even register with me.)
What I think would be interesting to do would be to re-take the test now, almost 7 years since we first took it, and compare the results to our original results.
RickJay,
I will meet you half way on that. We took the Myers-Briggs as part of an overall counseling session that covered more marriage-specific topics, so I agree with you in part that Myers-Briggs on its own wouldn’t replace FOCCUS.
For basic info on validation that has been done on Myers-Briggs, here’s a link
http://www.capt.org/The_MBTI_Instrument/Reliability_and_Validity.cfm
Personality tests aren’t going to have the accuracy of digital thermometers, but I feel “highly questionably” was overstating it.
Palmistry, numerology, tarot cards - those are highly questionable. The M-B folks are at least willing to explore the issue analytically.
We did the verbal grilling version - way less scientific, but similar approach. (Quaker, “clearness” - they get you in a room with a few experienced couples, and ask you prying questions over tea…)
It was useful for us in that it proved to THEM that we actually talked about all the critical issues. Heck, we had already discussed how to approach sex-ed with our (presumptive) teenaged kids before we even decided to get married (way before we even tried for kids, that is). The clearness committee ask questions to determine if you have discussed things like career conflicts, number of children, financial management, etc. (Their job is to determine if you are ‘clear’ of issues that would prevent marriage, including oh, being married to someone else already…) Nowhere near as in-depth as this test, which would cover a lot of the general stuff more explicitly. But the in-person approach catches the stuff that is very person-dependant, like: “Given the fact that your mother has divorced four times, how do you feel about the permanence of marriage?” :eek: or (one I asked another couple in the same capacity): “If you plan to have children, in which country will they be raised, and will they have dual citizenship?” Some things are just not gonna be in the typical test form. But it does sound like a pretty good tool.