As a few of you know, I got married in late December- through no fault of my church.
I’d been attending my last church ever since I was born. My Mom started going there about two years before she married my Dad, so it’s been our family church for over twenty-five years, and it’s been pretty good to me and my family. At least, until I tried to get married.
About a year ago, sometime in March or April, my now-husband, then-fiancé and I began to plan our wedding. We’d been engaged for two years, had been dating for three and a half, and were both church members, over twenty, and employed. We reserved the church for our wedding date, asked our respective bridesmaids and groomsmen, and I started to work on my wedding dress pattern. Some time at the end of May I flew to Iowa to visit my Maid of Honour, and we picked out wedding music and got a pattern and fabric for her dress, and also laughed at a lot of wedding magazines. It was fun.
When I got back, Mr. Lissar and I checked with the church to see when we should start do premarital counseling (required by our diocese), and found out that the church wasn’t booked. Okay, we renewed the booking, and made sure it was on the calendar. Fine. We also decided to start counseling at the end of August, because we were pretty busy until then. Also fine.
We didn’t click with our counselor at all. She gave both of us the creepy, “stupid-kids-want-to-be-married” feeling, but she was the only minister with the time, as well as assigned to do the pastoral ministry at our church. So we went, and told her a lot of personal things that we really didn’t feel comfortable telling her, because it was just a hurdle that would be quickly over (4 sessions or so).
Then, during the second session (sometime in mid-September) she told us that she “thought we should wait”. Why? Because we hadn’t done a budget, which was admittedly something we needed to do. She also tried to bully both of us into going back to school in January- something neither of us wanted to do, and something we couldn’t afford.
So we did the budget and talked to a number of people about general financial advice, and also (finally) phoned the head minister to book a meeting with him, as our counselor was making us uncomfortable, and being a jerk. We couldn’t get through, and didn’t hear from him in weeks, during which we met with our counselor again.
Fine, she said, you did the budget, but now I’m concerned that if you get married, Mr. Lissar may possibly decide on a career change at some point in your future, and that may cause you, Lissla Lissar, some pain. “What the hell do you mean?” we politely enquired. “We both know that we’re going to be changing jobs, and that the average person makes several career changes in his or her lifetime. We know this. Are you going to fucking marry us? It’s fucking October!“ Well, we said it without the swearing, but that was the gist.
“I think you should wait for a few years. We want marriages our church performs to survive.”
Wait? We’d already waited for two years, we knew we wanted to get married, I was still living with my parents because I didn’t want to waste money moving out into my own place, we’re conservative Christians so we were not going to move in together before marriage, and we have the full support of family, friends, and each other. Why the hell would we wait? And what the fucking hell does your desire for perfect marriage stats have to do with anything?
So we finally managed to get through to the head minister, and made an appointment to see him. We also explored other places where we could get married, and contacted two other ministers, one of whom said he’d do it without any reservations or any more counseling. Good, because it was mid-October.
We went in to see the head minister, and he said that given our counselor’s concerns, maybe we should spend the week imagining what it would be like to not be married in December. What the bloody, stupid, squid-brained fuck? We were both on edge from work and also from the stress of needing a place to be married, and especially because of their obtuse, fandangling idiocy. We left, resolving that we’d be married elsewhere unless they gave us the go-ahead in next week’s meeting. At that point we should have just pulled out completely. Actually, we should have pulled out as soon as they said, “We want to keep our records clean.” but we’d so much wanted to get married at our church…
The next week, we went in and said, “Look, you’ve jerked us around enough. We’re sure we want to marry. We’re sure that God wants us to marry. Are you going to do it or not?. And they (minister and counselor) said, “Okay, we’ll do it, but we have reservations.”
So we were married there on December 28th, surrounded by friends and family, and went on a glorious group honeymoon to Ottawa with all the friends who’d flown up to be with us, and the Maid of Honour and Best Man got engaged on January 7th, and are getting married in August, hopefully minus church stupidity.
I’m putting this in the Pit because this is the first time I’ve ever sworn here, and also because I am still so fucking angry, both at myself for not pulling out of the situation sooner: before my mother almost had a nervous breakdown, and before we’d gone through all that pain. We haven’t gone back to that church since we were married, and I doubt we will.
Oh, yeah, and we pulled out the wedding record thing for the first time since the wedding, and found out that my maiden name is not only spelled wrong, but bears no relation to my last name in the least. And that’s what reminded me of all the histrionics involved in our wedding.
Dammit. I still have no idea why they thought career change was a good enough reason to delay marriage. Until when? Until suddenly, in our late thirties, we change careers? The whole thing was stupid. Thanks for listening.
I wish you a long and happy marriage.