Perspective from a Charlotte counselor
Retired lawyer Cindy Capwell, 57, of Charlotte, and her husband Jeff, attend St. Gabriel Catholic Church, where they help couples prepare for marriage by discussing with them everything from religious to financial to family issues. She provided her perspective to the New York Times.
I’ve always had a strong interest in family.
My husband and I have been married for 23 years, and we are counselors for the marriage preparation classes given by the Catholic Church. These classes are supposed to help bring engaged couples away from the romance of the ceremony and into the mechanics of married life. Our own preparation – facilitated by a longtime married couple, a newlywed couple, a divorced person and a priest – was very helpful. My husband said that walking into that room with six or eight other engaged couples really put his feet on the ground: If you weren’t ready to get married, it would hit you right now.
Our counseling of others began right after we married. We don’t talk directly about divorce at all in our classes. It’s more about married home life, like division of household labor and when to have children. We ask them, “What starts your fights? And how do you resolve them?” There are no correct answers. There’s also a survey designed to bring to light possible substance or alcohol abuse, infidelity or issues of physical safety.
These days, I see a wide variety of readiness. People are waiting longer to marry. They’re more mindful of the rate at which marriages fail. I see a lot of anxiety, and they don’t know if they are on a path to succeed. With people who have been married before, we talk about the facts of the prior marriage and the emotional issues that led to the divorce.
The central idea is that the security of the marriage is the bindingness of it. I want to start classes for people at different stages of marriage – maybe at five, 10, 20 years on – because that’s when you really need support.
I think there’s a disconnect between where we are in terms of living daily life and the doctrines of the church. We need to focus on people who are in need of spiritual or other kinds of support, and not get into whether or not they are following church doctrine to the letter.
This story was originally published February 6, 2015 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Perspective from a Charlotte counselor."