About the weekend....the religious part. First of all, I am Jewish, so I don't really fit at a Catholic event. It didn't bother me. The way the presentations go, first the husband and wife speak, they take about 3/4 of the presentation time. Then the priest speaks. He doesn't preach or sermonize. He speaks to the topic at hand. So usually the priest spoke about families that he knew, or his family, and how the topic at hand affected him. I think he read some scripture once during the weekend. He made the point that he was there for confession from any of the Catholics who wanted to say confession to him. I thought of him as a resource there for the Catholics. And since they support the group economically, I felt he had a right to be there.
There was a mass on Saturday morning before breakfast, and it was optional. There was a closing mass, and my husband and I whispered goodbye to a few people and sneaked out before it started. We saw a couple of other couples in the parking lot too.
All in all, the religious part is in the background. For some people the idea of a spiritual connection between their marriage and God is important. It was mentionned. For myself and my husband, who is more anti-organized religion than anything else, that was not the valuable part of the weekend. But we got so much out of the weekend that we just let that discussion go by.
As for having an OM. She will be told that she must cease contact with the other man. And if your dialogues go well, she won't want to contact him anymore anyway.
For sparking the relationship...the weekend does it. There was a lot of sex going on during the weekend. We always had a lot of time alone together in the rooms. The retreat we were at had 2 single beds in each room. At breakfast everyone was saying, "Why are there single beds? We pushed ours together." The topics of the dialogues are so carefully chosen. They know how things are developing without having to know what anyone wrote. They move it along with increasingly important questions so that by the end of the weekend you have really opened your heart to your spouse. And they insist that you look into each others' eyes when you dialogue, so you see just what you saw 10 or 20 years ago. The young person who you loved.
The weekend pretty much focuses on learning to dialogue and practicing the technique. In the post sessions there is a section on building intimacy and sex.
I cannot recommend Retrouvaille enough. Now that things are going well for us I keep thinking that it doesn't cost any more to be happy and get along. I wonder why we fought. And yet we did. Retrouvaille should be required of all newlyweds. Any married couple whether happy or unhappy would benefit by attending the weekend.
