I guess I don’t have to say that Rosemarie and I were utterly unprepared for marriage.
We were not even smart enough to know that we were unprepared. Thus, when Father John Raven suggested we make one of the new pre-Cana conferences, we agreed, more to humor John than because we thought we needed to plan our married life together.
Pre-Cana was a cautious Catholic attempt at marriage education, progressive by the standards of the Church then, simple-minded and chauvinist by the standards of today, and inadequate in terms of the problems our generation of husband and wives was going to face.
The Church once again was doing too little, too late, for its laity.
Our pre-Cana was scheduled for the week before Halloween, the first anniversary of my first tennis triumph over Rosemarie at Skelton Park. We still played at least once a week, despite the activity of trying to finish school and prepare for the wedding, mostly at Rosemarie’s insistence.
“I’m not letting my husband get out of shape,” she asserted.
I won an occasional set, but not on the anniversary Saturday. The angel Gabriel could not have beaten Rosemarie that day.
The next day, after I turned off the broadcast of the Chicago Cardinals game, Rosemarie and I walked over to St. Ursula’s for the first part of the three-day conference.
When the priest began his talk at the Sunday afternoon session, he said, “The mark of success of a good pre-Cana is the number of men and women who cancel their marriage after the conference.” The participants laughed, some nervously. Rosemarie and I joined in the laughter.
My laugh might have been a little nervous because I knew it was too late to cancel anything.
We were both too young to marry. If any of my children had told me that they planned marriage at our ages, I would have been profoundly offended. Fortunately none of them did. We understood nothing about the strains of the common life. We never discussed money, though it was obvious that we had very different attitudes toward it and would bitterly disagree about whether any of Rosemarie’s money could be used for our family needs.
We had been raised together. We had spent many hours together in the year since I had been expelled from Notre Dame. We had argued about Plato and Goethe, Augustine and Freud, William James and Thomas Aquinas. Rosemarie had won most of the arguments, I had won a few. But neither of us understood much about the meaning of life. Or about one another. Despite our long acquaintance and our intimate friendship we hardly knew each other at all.
Nor had we discussed sex. We knew we wanted it. We knew we would like it. We were convinced that we would never tire of it. Unlike most devout Catholic young women of her age, Rosemarie did not seem to be afraid of sex or inhibited in her sexual feelings. What else did we need?
She wanted five children, which seemed to me a nice number.
And we certainly did not and would not and probably could not discuss her drinking problem—if that’s what it was.
That Sunday afternoon, in the stuffy, tile-lined parish hall in the basement of St. Ursula’s school, the handsome young priest explained to us that the man was the head of the family and the wife the heart of it.
“Many Catholic couples feel,” he said, “that the wife should quit working at the time of the marriage. It is not good for the head of the house to have to depend even for a few months on his wife’s income to support the family, especially if, God forbid, she should make more money than he does. That would be a disastrous beginning for a marriage. You’re going to quit as soon as you’re pregnant anyway, and that’ll be only a few months after your marriage, maybe even when you come home from your honeymoon. So why not quit before you’re married and avoid the conflicts of two-income families, of families where the wife thinks that because she has some money, she is also head of the family.
“That would be a terrible embarrassment to the husband and, worse still, would make it hard for the wife to play her God-given role as the warm, tender, affectionate member of the partnership.
“Some women think that they are doomed to second-class citizenship because they are the heart of the family and not the head. But doesn’t everyone know that the heart is more important than the head? Most men will admit that it is the love of their wives that keeps them going. If anyone is second-class in a family, it is the head, not the heart.”
The last is true enough, God knows, if your wife is Irish.
I didn’t and couldn’t, given my own background, accept the passive description of women implicit in the theory; it offended me.
Rosemarie merely giggled, hand over her mouth so as not to offend the others, especially the young women, who were feverishly writing in their notebooks, just as they had in their high school and college classrooms.
The “head and heart” theory was carried throughout his whole presentation and used to account for the “differences” between men and women.
Men were more rational, women more emotional.
An affronted snort from my future bride.
Women forgave more easily than men and were less likely to hold grudges.
Vigorous nod and a poke in my ribs.
Men tended to be insensitive, women oversensitive.
A derisive grunt.
Men like to argue about differences. Women like to seek compromises.
A rare poke from my elbow.
Women are more affectionate, men more guarded emotionally.
A triumphant poke in return.
Time was allotted for questions after the priest’s talk—written questions.
Rosemarie scratched on the sheet that had been provided, “What if you’re smarter than your husband and he won’t admit it?”
I wrote, “What if your wife is oversexed?”
Neither question was read aloud by the priest.
He did, however, answer a lot of questions about birth control.
Sample: “Is oral intercourse permitted after marriage?”
We both gasped at that suggestion.
“Anything is permitted so long as the marriage act is completed in the proper fashion. But no man would want to impose on his wife something she finds repulsive. Often, of course, that kind of intercourse is simply another form of mutual masturbation—birth control, in other words.”
“What if,” Rosemarie whispered in my ear, “the wife wants it?”
“Then the husband is lucky,” I replied uneasily.
Birth control was the big issue. The priest’s answers were blunt: it perverted the purpose of marriage. The Church would never change on the issue. “Rhythm” was always a possibility for Catholics, though it was usually a sign of a lack of self-control, especially on the part of the husband. If married couples did not want to have as many children as God would give them, then they ought to sleep in different bedrooms.
The group stirred uneasily. They didn’t buy it.
“I should think five is enough, don’t you?” Rosie asked me as we were walking by the new church, now almost finished. “Do you think God really expects more?”
I hadn’t thought about it.
“It’s a full house.”
“And I bet He doesn’t like it when husband and wife sleep in separate bedrooms. He made them to sleep together, didn’t He?”
I could only agree.
“I don’t think the priests or the nuns know what they’re talking about. Sex is for holding husband and wife together as well as having kids, isn’t it?”
“Seems reasonable to me.”
Which is as far as we went on that one.
Indeed it was the only discussion we had the first day of our pre-Cana conference.
Monday night we were back in the parish hall to hear the talk by the married couple, a sleek-looking lawyer and his worn-out wife. Small wonder that she was worn out: she had born thirteen children, all of them alive and well.
Much of their presentation was devoted to jokes about having that many kids around the house. They were good speakers and the jokes were funny and it was patent that they loved each other very much. It was also patent, however, that most of the group could not identify with them.
One question: “It’s all right for you to have thirteen children because you’re a professional man and make a lot of money. But what about those who don’t?”
Answer: No one has that much money, but God will provide for those who trust him.
Another question (from Rosemarie): “Suppose that the wife has inherited some money. Would it be wrong for the family to use it?”
Answer: It would threaten the husband’s position as head of the home. Much better that the money be saved for the college education of the children.
An angry snort from Rosemarie and a “See!” from me.
“Do you want to live in an apartment instead of my house?”
“You win.”
That was our only discussion about the second part of the pre-Cana. To be fair, the speakers were wise and witty and had many sensible things to say about dealing with each other’s moods, about sex as a renewal of love, and about financial problems.
Neither of us listened.
And we were, I think, the green wood. Most of what was said went in one ear and out the other. I think now that such wisdom would have been much better received in the second year of marriage. The problem, however, then as now, would be to get husband and wife to come.
Wednesday night was devoted to talks on SEX! by two M.D.s, one for the men and one for the women. I mean, you can’t have a man and his future wife hear about sex and even discuss it in the same room, can you?
My doctor knew all the technical terms for the relevant organs. But he didn’t seem to know anything about women. Nor, to judge by the questions, did most of the other grooms-to-be know anything about them. The session scared the hell out of me.
I was grateful to Trudi for what I had learned from her. Again I wondered what had happened to her. It was an academic question by then, almost as if Trudi had been a person I met in a storybook and not in real life.
“Learn anything?” I asked Rosemarie as we walked through the dark streets of Austin back to Oak Park and our house (she was living at our place almost all the time now).
“Men are horny beasts.”
“You knew that.”
“And women’s job is to keep them in line.”
“Manipulating them. Give them something but not everything. They’re insatiable.”
“Do you believe that?”
“Not about my future husband.” She put her arm around me.
“I’m probably insatiable.”
“The way you’re insatiable I won’t mind.”
Thus for our marriage preparation.
Like everyone else, we stumbled toward consummation with our eyes closed.