I can't even describe to you the waste of time that this Engaged Encounter thing was. The people who ran it were like cultist evangelicals. At one point, it was getting late on Saturday evening / night, like maybe 8 o'clock and we'd been there since 7:30 in the morning, so we were all hoping that we were going to let out of jail soon. Noooooo. The group leaders turned all the lights down and lit about 30 candles and then started randomly reading prayers. Then said they wanted each couple to write a prayer for themselves, and they would come around the room and you would read your prayer to them, and then you would get into a hug huddle so that you could pray together.

The whole room went, "Uh what??" and then a third got up and went to the bar. We were with that third. But then we had to come back at 9 p.m. so that we could sit there for a half hour while they set up for a full on mass with tons and tons of singing -- a full hour mass -- with a priest that would grab your head and pray on it. Wow. It was. An experience.

One of the group leaders, who was adamant that birth control "doesn't work" told us how when she got married, she immediately got preggers repeatedly (not on birth control of course) and had 4 kids year after year, then wound up messed and depressed and on doctor’s orders went on birth control for several years, and then the second she went off it when she was 42, she got pregnant again. But she kept saying over and over again that condoms and the pill don't work.

As for how the rest of the couples in attendance were handling it, I would say there was one couple who was completely insane and right on board. There was one couple to the other extreme who were openly hostile, were in and out of the room, and made it clear they weren't paying attention to this crap.

Roughly a half were like us, who just thought, "Eye on the prize, let's just get the certificate and take a hot shower afterwards to wash off the weirdo germs." We were talking to some of the other couples, and they were saying these people make you feel embarrassed to be Catholic, like they could lump these loons in with the religious snake handlers you'd see on 60 minutes.

I think the other half were either really good actors, or they thought, "Well, this is all very nice, the group-huddle praying is a little bit weird, but it's all okay." So maybe that half was a mix of good actors and people who thought it was okay. But perhaps I'm just projecting that I would hope they were good actors and they are in their right minds, otherwise I feel even more grossed out.

So the vast majority of the weekend, maybe 85% was hocus pocus, and the other 15% was geared toward people who are stunted in the head and it might never have occurred to them that there are these things called "check books" and there are these other things called "dishes that need to be washed." So all in all, this weekend was 100% painful, and if I were to do any praying, it would be to pray that it was over.