Jon Leung – Kudus

Family Corner: Weekend Marriage Encounter

An enrichment retreat experience for married couples

Last weekend, me and my wife went to a long weekend together without our kids.
We attended to Weekend Marriage Encounter, located in Bandungan.

Actually, our friend asked us for many times to attended this Weekend ME before.
We usually denied this, with so many reason. I think that our marriage is find, so what for we have to attend this kind of retreat for married people. Then finally we made a decision to attend this ME, to try what kind of weekend here.

For those who have not been “encountered”, the idea of participating in the ME Weekend may appear to be a bit threatening. Why? Some people think that if you attend the Weekend, you’re automatically admitting that something is wrong with your marriage and that can be either shameful or embarrassing.

Family and friends who haven’t attended may tease you about it. Others may think that because their marriage is fine, there’s no need to attend a “marriage seminar”. And still others believe that at the “Weekend”, you will have to expose your private lives to strangers. These are the most common excuses for not wanting to attend including us.

Unfortunately, all of these excuses are just that…excuses and not based on reality or fact.

Marriage Encounter is a warm, family-oriented organization that not only promotes strong marriages, it also enhances love and communication among couples.
For another reason, I think that we could have time together with my wife without any disturbance from our kids, just like honey moon for us. But I was totally wrong.

During this weekend, we’ve met many couples that may have different reason to attending this ME. All of groups was 12 couples from different Paroki/district. After we introduced ourselves, here it comes.

We were all made to sit into a circle, and then we were given some question. We were filling this question without understand what for we have to do this. After that, we were told to swap the answer to our partner and read the answer of our partner. Into this step, I still did not understand the purpose of this kind of technique.

Second day, we began to learn about feeling and we have to describe about feeling with write it into a paper. We listened a sharing from the couples team that lead us, about their marriage.

They explained about marriage stage, from Dating, marriage, a romance stage, and a stage called “married single stage”. In this stage, we usually realize that what we expected from someone we married is not the same with the dream what we expected and starting a “fight “ each other. And finally we made a gap, confrontation about something, and the we came into a time that we still lived in the house, in the same bed, but we feel like a single person again.

We felt unhappiness with our marriage and this is the critical moment in our marriage. And the worst this thing affected to our children

During this day, we have spent our time, with filling so many question, and then write it, and It is call “ Love letter “ to our spouse, then swap the love letter to each other.

We given a lot of time to make a dialogue with our spouse about the question and about the answer we already write.

I remembered that I was given a question, I wrote it, and then swap the papers to my wife, and then we have to made a dialogue in our room. After we read the answer from each other, we burst into a tears. We finally realize that although we love each other, but because there is a different expectation from each other and there is a miscommunication between us, without we realized, we came into a marriage single stage.

And thanks God, before we came into deep trouble, we came into this Weekend ME and we have solution from here.

This solution involved :
• talking about how you feel without attributing the reasons to your partner
• describing the type and intensity of those feelings using terms that your partner can understand
• telling your partner what you would like them to do – how you’d like them to respond.
• talking about times when your partner did respond well and how/why you liked it.
• accepting new ideas about things you’d and your partner would like to do.

At the end of the Weekend ME, all of us have reawakening of Sacrament of Matrimony.

What we’ve learned about this weekend are:
• enable deeper communication between the couple and teaches a way of enriching their couple life.
• is a time to share feelings, joys, hopes, disillusionment to rediscover romance and enthusiasm for being married.
• provides a time to reflect and discuss privately
• Is not a retreat, therapy or counseling
• Is a unique way to revitalize our marriage away from the distractions everyday life

Our marriages were saved due to the communication techniques they learned in ME. In our 12 years marriage, we never felt happy like this before. We’ve also heard from other couples who are back in that “romance” stage of their relationship with their spouse since they can openly share their feelings with each other.

Marriage Encounter is for EVERYONE ! It doesn’t matter if your marriage is good or great, the Weekend will help you reconnect with your best friend and partner for life.
Marriage Encounter help GOOD MARRIAGE into GREAT MARRIAGE.

The key is not to try to change our partner but is learn to accept our partner as it is.

We hope that we can share this amazing grace from Lord to all Baltyra readers.

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Posted by JL Thursday, 26 November 2009 on 00:23.

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