We met at work. Different departments, desks a few meters apart, months of polite hellos and passing each other in the corridor: the slowest possible beginning to anything. Eventually I did the only brave thing in this whole story and asked if she’d like to get a coffee. Or a wine (I hedged, it worked). A year and a half later I proposed, and in October 2026, we’re getting married, in a Catholic church, in a European country, in a ceremony I’m still learning to picture.
That last part is why this website exists.
Who we are
She’s Catholic: the quiet, lived-in kind. Not every Sunday, no grace before meals at our table (at her parents’ table, yes; I sit it out and nobody minds). Her faith doesn’t perform; it just sits underneath things, the way a foundation does. And a church wedding matters deeply to her, not as decoration, but as the real thing, done the real way.
I’m a deist, which is the honest word for where I’ve landed: I think there’s something rather than nothing. Nobody has a good answer for what came before the Big Bang, and the deeper physics digs, the stranger the universe gets, so I lean toward “there’s more here” without claiming to know what. I can’t recite what I believe. I can tell you precisely what I don’t know, which I’ve come to think is its own kind of position.
The moment it became a topic
Religion entered our relationship the way it enters most mixed relationships: through wedding planning. And here’s the part that might surprise you, given the website you’re standing on. I felt nothing negative when I understood the wedding would be Catholic. No dread, no resentment. What I felt was a knowledge gap the size of a cathedral. I didn’t know what a Catholic wedding actually involved. I’m not sure I can fully picture it even now, months out.
So I did what I do with everything: I started finding out. Not just what is required, but why: where each requirement comes from, what history sits behind it. And I began sorting everything into three piles: what’s completely fine for me, what needs real thought, and what is simply hers to keep, like raising our future children in the faith, which I can accept wholeheartedly on one condition we both hold: that when they’re old enough, the children get the freedom to look at all of it and decide for themselves.
The meeting I got wrong in advance
We’ve sat with the priest. I’d half-expected an examination of my worldview; what I got was an examination of my honesty. Was I certain I wanted to marry? Did I have financial obligations my fiancée didn’t know about? Any hereditary health issues in the family, the serious kind, that the other side should know of? Was anyone pressuring me into this marriage? Did I accept that the children would be raised Catholic?
Read that list again. One question in five touched religion. The rest were about whether the two of us were being honest with each other, which is, I realized on the way home, a rather good use of a priest’s time, and not at all the interrogation the internet had promised me.
“I came prepared to defend what I believe. Nobody asked. They asked whether I was being honest with the woman I love, which turned out to be the only examination that mattered.”
Where we are now
Honestly? So far, so gentle. Her family has been completely welcoming; mine is open-minded about the church wedding and always has been. We haven’t yet hit a conversation that felt like a wall, though I suspect the children conversations, when they get concrete, will be the real test, and I’d rather walk into them prepared than surprised. That’s half the reason I keep researching.
Why this site exists
Because when I went looking for answers, I kept finding fog. Everything I learned arrived in the same shape: there will be some preparation, there will be some promise, there will be a form, never the details, never the why, and almost never from the chair I’m sitting in: the partner who isn’t Catholic and doesn’t know what’s coming or what’s expected of him. The good information exists, but it’s scattered across diocesan PDFs, forum threads from 2011, and pages written for Catholics by Catholics.
So I’m writing the site I couldn’t find, as I walk the road myself. Everything here is either researched to the source or lived firsthand, and I mark which is which. I’m maybe three steps ahead of you: the priest meetings are happening, the preparation is coming, the wedding is in October 2026, and the first year of marriage will get documented when I’ve actually lived it, not before. If I’ve gotten something wrong, tell me. Corrections make this place better for the next person in our chair.
If you’re at the beginning, start where I did: Do I have to convert to marry a Catholic? (spoiler: no), then the complete process, and, sooner than feels comfortable, the ten conversations. And if you want to walk the rest of the road with us, the newsletter below is where I report from it, one honest email a month.