That Happy Day: Pre-Cana Seminar at UST

The Pre-Cana Seminar is basically a crash course on how to be married. Who knew that you can have lessons on being a responsible, married adult? Haha. It's actually a church requirement for marriage. You can't get married without going through marriage preparation classes. The government also requires couples to have a family planning seminar for the marriage license, but lucky for us, we applied for a license at the Pasig City Hall, which accepts the church's seminar in lieu of the government's family planning seminar. [Tip: Make sure you check with your local city government if they accept the church seminar. If they don't, you have to take the government's family planning seminar as well. Not all municipalities allow it.] The UST seminar is free, but I'm not sure if it's free for those who are not getting married there.

So we hied off to UST super early in the morning last March 3 to undergo marriage training. The seminar started at 8am and ended at 6pm! We felt like we were back in college, there in the mezzanine of the Ecclesiastical Faculties building. There were five classes that ranged from responsible parenthood to couple finances. (I'll post the names of the other classes when I remember them, hah!) We had recesses and a lunch break, and we were provided food and drinks the entire day, which we didn't expect. We had different "professors". There was a Catholic OB-GYNE, a stockbroker who has a successful marriage, a catechist from the Archbishop's Palace, and a couple of church lay ministers who also have successful marriages. We had classmates too - we went through the seminar with four other couples with very diverse backgrounds. There were three couples who have been together for 2-6 years, and a couple who has been together for 8 months but are already living together. Aleq and I were the only ones who have been together for more than 10 years, heh.

Anyway, it was good in the sense that it got us thinking about the realities of marriage. The wedding is only the first day after all - we have to prepare even more for what comes after. It also gave us the opportunity to discover things that we never knew about each other - like what we wanted out of married life, what aspects of our relationship were really important to us, etc.

UST was beautiful that cloudy, rainy day.

I haven't had chicken ala king like this in years! This was our morning snack. It was just like how we used to do it in high school cooking class in St. Scho. It was so good. I wish I knew who their food supplier is.

Lunch was asado. This was pretty good too. Shame I forgot to take a pic of our afternoon snack - a clubhouse sandwich - and our drinks.

The class about responsible parenthood was pretty much the family planning class. We were taught about natural birth control methods, among other *ehem* things, which would really be useful down the line. We thought the financial class was incredibly useful as well - we learned stuff about managing finances as one unit, which Aleq and I haven't even started thinking about before the seminar. The rest of the classes were about having a good husband-wife relationship, which were par for the course.

There was this funny thing that happened in the Catechism class. The lady catechist passed paper and pencils around and told us to draw our dream house. We had to collaborate as a couple and see what we come up with. Aleq and I really enjoyed it because we never really thought about the specifics of our dream house before. We had to learn to give and take then and there too, deciding on the details as one. I think the other couples enjoyed it just as much as well. Everyone was talking animatedly and arguing in a good-natured manner with their significant others. So then the lady came back and gathered up all the dream houses. We expected to see the other couples' drawings, but we were all shocked when she ripped them all up, crumpled the pieces, threw them on the floor and stomped on the paper! [I know I'm probably spoiling this for the couples who plan on having their pre-cana seminars in UST, but sorry, I need to write about this!] We were all pretty much bummed out afterwards. The lady then said if we were already this bummed out seeing our dream houses ripped into shreds, how much worse would we feel if someone did the same thing to our marriage? I know it was a good analogy, but man, she could have just made us imagine! It would've made a great keepsake. Aleq and I were the only happy ones in the bunch after that because being the camwhore that I am, I managed to take a pic of our drawing.