Convalidation Archives - The Marriage Group

Read Time: 5 minutes

What if I’m having doubts about getting married?

The engagement period is marked by several emotional highs: the thrill of announcements, anxiety about mounting costs, and the mad dash to get everything done. Couples will ride the roller coaster of those highs and lows all the way to the altar and even through the honeymoon.

During this time, it’s totally normal to experience conflict with your partner and even have some doubts about marriage. But how do you know whether your doubts are a normal part of making one of the biggest decisions of your life or a sign that you may be making a huge mistake?

Doubts are part of good decision-making.

Every thoughtful decision should come with an honest evaluation of the choice. You may have said yes to a proposal based on emotions that felt like 100% certainty, but that feeling can’t last. Once you start doing the work of being engaged (yes, it’s actually a lot of work), part of that work is moving closer to certainty based on facts rather than just emotion.

While you’re planning your wedding and going through the marriage preparation process at your parish, you’ll face many choices and tough questions. You may find yourselves squabbling over who to invite to the wedding, and you may be asked to talk about aspects of your past, family life, and personality that hadn’t yet surfaced in your dating relationship.

All of these situations should be opportunities for you to “try on” what married life will be like and discover how you’ll handle these things as a couple. In fact, conflict should be welcomed during engagement so you can learn how your partner responds to you when things aren’t going well and whether or not you can resolve things in a healthy way.

Conflict is an opportunity to test the relationship

The idea that healthy couples don’t fight is a myth. The opposite is actually true; couples who repress disappointment, disapproval, and disagreement to avoid conflict inhibit their ability to move into a deeper, healthier relationship.

While constant arguing certainly isn’t the goal, both partners should feel free to express their opinions and should be growing in their ability to work through disagreements in ways that make each of them feel heard, valued, and considered. Couples experiencing conflict during engagement shouldn’t be concerned that they are facing struggles. They should be concerned when those struggles reveal unhealthy patterns. Learning how to work through disagreements is a valuable skill healthy couples will use over and over again during their marriage.

How do you know you’re not ready?

When conflict arises during engagement, it can be a sign that you simply need to work through some issues, learn better methods of communication, or get to know each other better. Stress has a way of bringing things to the surface that don’t come up when everything is going well. Certain character traits and coping mechanisms are difficult to hide when we’re stressed out.

When engaged couples begin to see and experience these new sides of their partners, it presents new challenges to navigate in the relationship. How you handle those challenges can help you determine how compatible you actually are, and even if you’re really ready for marriage.

Here are a few red flags to pay attention to:

Inability to resolve conflict: When disagreements arise, you feel ignored, humiliated, or insulted for your desire to work things out.
Unhealthy coping mechanisms: You or your partner resort to substances, pornography, gambling, or work to avoid dealing with conflict or actively taking part in wedding planning and preparation.
Overwhelming pressure: You feel crushed by the pressure to please your partner, family, and/or spiritual leaders. You feel you have to have the perfect relationship and the perfect wedding, and you base your decisions on what others want rather than considering your own emotional, spiritual, and physical needs.
Secrets: You or your partner are hiding a significant incident or piece of information from one another, for fear that it would destroy the relationship. This could be anything that makes you feel shame, such as a past relationship, financial debt, or a medical issue.
Resistance to spiritual preparation: When you’re seeking marriage in the Catholic Church, you’re preparing to receive a sacrament. This is a deeply meaningful act that requires certain steps to fulfill. If either partner is resistant or apathetic about these responsibilities, it needs to be addressed.

How to get help with pre-wedding doubts?

If you’re dealing with any of the above red flags, or anything else that’s causing you to question whether marriage is still the right decision, the best thing to do is ask for help. As uncomfortable as it may feel, you’ll need an outside perspective.

Help can range from clergy and professional counselors to a long-time married couple in your parish, family, or friend circle. Connecting with clergy and/or a mentor couple is part of the marriage preparation process at many parishes, but it can be valuable to go to a variety of sources for a broader source of wisdom and support. In Church environments, this is called ‘discernment’, the art of separating, analyzing, and deciding the best course of action. All this is done in a prayerful state of mind with the help of a Spiritual Director or mentor.

If your marriage prep doesn’t include connecting one-on-one with clergy or a mentor couple, or you feel like you need a broader perspective, you’ll have to be proactive about seeking help.

Here are some online resources that can help you find a qualified Catholic counselor:

You can also search your local diocese website for information about counseling services from regional Catholic Charities or Catholic Human Services organizations.

Here are a few things to consider when choosing a mentor couple to connect with:

Have you experienced the couple in a variety of settings, and do they have a marriage you’d like to emulate?
Do they seem to have healthy relationships with their parish community, family, and friends?
Are they open and non-judgemental? Do they operate as people of grace and mercy?
Are you comfortable opening up to them? Do you trust they will be confidants?
Do they share your faith and values about marriage as a Sacrament and lifelong commitment?
Are they recognized as leaders in your parish or recommended as mentors by clergy? If you are unsure, ask your priest or deacon.

Friends and family are also a valuable part of your support system, but it’s okay to look beyond that circle for a bigger perspective. Dealing with serious doubts about your upcoming marriage should require as much help as you need from whatever sources you’re comfortable with.

What if you have to call off the wedding?

If you’re trying to make things work, you’ve reached out to others, and you’re still having significant doubts, it may be time to postpone or call off the wedding. This decision will never be easy, but it could be the best one to make.

If your relationship is worth working on, taking the pressure of the impending wedding date off the calendar can free you up to grow individually and as a couple. While canceling your wedding can usher in feelings of grief, failure, and embarrassment, it may also open the door for relief, focus, and healing. Those feelings should worked through if you truly want to strengthen a relationship worth saving and let go of a relationship that needed to end.

If you find yourself in a situation where the red flags were warning signs of an unhealthy marriage, you may want to consider individual counseling to help identify areas in your own life where growth would be beneficial. This work on your personal development will make you more likely to pass over future partners who have the same issues and move toward healthier companions both platonic and romantic.

Your wedding day should be the day you commit yourself to a partner you trust, someone you can rely on, and the person you can grow closer to every day – even after conflict. If you can’t enter into that commitment freely and wholeheartedly, it’s okay to push the pause button until you know for sure.

Read Time: 4 minutes

“Of course we will do a Catholic marriage service. Do you want to do a Latin Mass?”

This was the first sentence from my Protestant fiancé as we sat down to figure out what our marriage ceremony would look like.

Branden and I had spent the last two days of our fresh engagement basking in the joy of this new chapter and calling our dear ones to share the good news. When we came down from the high of being newly engaged, we sat down to make a game plan for the actual wedding day.

Making Plans for the Wedding

We had secured the date December 5th (but not the 4th because that was already Jay-Z’s birthday), and we knew who we wanted to stand up with us. When I asked Branden what type of ceremony he would want, he surprised me by stating we would have our ceremony within the Catholic Church and even asked about a Latin Mass.

I felt so honored and supported, and it was really a significant moment for me in our relationship.

Branden was (and is) a Lutheran pastor. He not only serves a local church, but he is also incredibly involved in many parts of his synod (the Lutheran version of our Catholic diocese).

For him to be fully on board with a Catholic service was a big deal!

While I desired to be married in the Catholic Church, I could see the sacrifices he would be making as an ordained member of his church. Also, nearly all of my dear Catholic friends, colleagues, and connections were over 700 miles away in Minnesota.

Making Choices for Now and Later

After considering both of our strong ties to our churches and that our family and friends were miles apart, we came up with three options:

We could fly to Minnesota and have our ceremony there and do marriage prep online, but then our elderly relatives from Michigan could not attend.
We could have a Lutheran ceremony now to honor the connections to his church and be married in a more intimate Catholic ceremony later, but who would be invited to both?
We could throw our plans to the wind and elope, but we were both pretty sure none of our relatives would support this choice, and we didn’t want to face their wrath after our big day.

We ultimately decided on option #2, and on a beautiful December day, we packed a local Lutheran church with our friends and family while we said our handwritten vows to one another. It was a joyful and prayerful time.

The day was incredibly lovely, and we were so thrilled to be surrounded by this melting pot of people who showered us in love and support.

While that ceremony was a treasured time in our relationship, I was eager to move forward with our marriage in the Catholic Church.

However, we had spent all our planning energy making sure everything was in order for our Lutheran ceremony, and we had no capacity to plan anything else because wedding planning is just A LOT! Time slipped away from us as we transitioned from engaged to married (which is also A LOT), and planning our Catholic ceremony was placed on the back burner for the next 9 months.

Preparing for Convalidation

In August of that year, I began working as a youth minister at a local Catholic parish. Through various conversations, it came up organically that I wasn’t married in the Catholic Church, and a co-worker lovingly approached me and asked, “Would you prayerfully consider having your marriage convalidated?”

Having an external force bring up my (now buried) desire was exactly what I needed to start planning again.

I brought it up to Branden (who still hadn’t fully recovered from wedding planning), and the idea of planning a second wedding seemed insurmountable to him. I reassured him that this would be a more intimate affair and that the real significance was having our marriage valid in the eyes of my church, the universal Church.

Convalidation is when a civil marriage becomes licit under the Code of Canon law of the Catholic Church.

It’s what brings the sacramental graces into the marriage and fully brings it under the authority of Jesus Christ. These were all factors I knew I wanted and needed for our marriage.

Branden and I both agreed that a healthy marriage needed to be under God’s grace to thrive. However, this was challenging for my Protestant husband.

Why was his church not “valid enough”? I explained it wasn’t a matter of “good enough”, but that these were the instructions of the Catholic Church, a church to which I belonged, and wanted to honor as the church instituted by Christ (this led to a fascinating debate about Luther, Constantine, St. Peter, and various translations of the word “rock”).

Ultimately, we decided to move forward, and we picked a date in May for our marriage to be convalidated.

Experiencing Convalidation

To prepare fully for convalidation, we met several times with our deacon and went through some questions together. We also took the online course Living Our Faith in Love through The Marriage Group. Although we had gone through something similar with the Lutheran church, we felt ourselves encountering new material and addressing some topics with greater depth.

Once the education portion was complete, we had to track down the certificates we received after baptism and confirmation, along with our civil marriage certificate, verifying that neither of us had been previously married. These certificates were inspected by our deacon and then sent to the canon lawyer for our diocese. It took about 4 weeks to have our paperwork processed and approved. Once we got that approval, we were good to go!

On May 27th, we had 8 people gather around us as we met in an Eucharistic chapel with stunning stained glass. Our daughters got to be flower girls again which was the absolute highlight of their day. We read through scripture, our deacon gave a moving homily, and we said our traditional vows as the deacon directed us. Our rings were blessed, and we sealed our marriage with a kiss!

When compared to our Lutheran ceremony, the Catholic wedding was peacefully reverent. While it happened with much less fanfare, I felt the same amount of joy. Being connected and celebrated in the Church brought a fullness to our marriage. Both of our faith traditions were honored, and I got to wear TWO wedding dresses. All in all, we agree that it was a very good decision to have our marriage convalidated.