Out of FOCCUS

Editor's note: Finding kitschy Christmas crap is way more fun than writing a blog. Or at least, that was the case today. So for your reading enjoyment, I present a little piece I wrote for our (now defunct) wedding website just under a year ago today.

Between the two of us, Mr. Man & I have scored in the upper percentages of over 15 standardized tests. This is not necessarily an indicator of intelligence, but at the very least one would think that it indicates an aptitude for taking standardized tests.

But apparently not.

Recently Mr. Man and I took the FOCCUS- a test some church people give to their engaged couples to give them a sense of how ready the couple is for marriage. Of course, they don’t tell you that. The name of the test is “Facilitating Open Couple Communication, Understanding & Study,” so you think the church people are nice and they just want to help you “talk about things” and “get know yourself better.” You know, all the usual touchy-feely hippie crap. They even go on and on in the instructions about how “there are no wrong answers.” Have I ever mentioned how church people are a bunch of liars?

Anyhoo…emboldened by the dizzying freedom of no wrong answers, Mr. Man & I took the test and…totally failed. Or, to quote our marriage prep counselor, we “Received the worst scores I have ever seen.” Excellent! Apparently there are wrong answers. For every question there are three choices: “Yes,” “No,” and “I don’t know.” Guess what? Every time you answer, “I don’t know,” it’s the WRONG ANSWER.

I’m not sure if accusing your partner of "making us fail” is the kind of open couples communication that the test is trying to engender, but that’s certainly what it has done for us.  I think we both have pretty good cases. Observe:

One of us- the litigious one- liked to answer, “I don’t know” whenever s/he didn’t exactly agree with the wording of the question. For example, if the question said “I am comfortable with my partner’s hair color.” The litigious one would think, "Well, I’m mostly comfortable with my partner’s hair color…but I wonder what my partner would look like with red hair…so am I really comfortable?” And then s/he’d mark “I don’t know.”

The other- who we’ll refer to as the eschatological one- had trouble with definitive futuristic statements like: “We’ve agreed to the number of children we will have.” The eschatological one would look at the question and think “Well, we’ve mentioned it, but how can we every really know if that will happen, even if we said so?” and then s/he’d mark “I don’t know.”

Actually, the litigious one did this too, but did it help if we both agreed that we didn’t know? Of course not! It only counted if we both answered the same answer that the test said was the “desired answer.” (PS- “desired answer” is hippy-speak for “right answer.”)

You will all be glad to know, however, that despite scoring around 30% percent in most areas (and yes, that is lower than F-) we scored almost 98% (a solid A!) in one area: Marriage Readiness. Apparently we are both very ready to commit ourselves to spending the rest of our lives telling each other “I don’t know!”

(Another) Editor's Note: Due to our dismal failure on the FOCCUS, we shelled out the big bucks for the king of all wedding preparation: marriage counseling. To Mr. Man’s people we said we were going to “communications workshops” to which they replied, “Well at least you don’t have to go to therapy!”  Of course, if we said the same thing to my people, they would have said, “Don’t waste your time with that workshop crap! Go to therapy!” Since we were so very well prepared for our marriage, we now take the liberty to give unsolicited relationship advice to all our friends.

Comments

[acinoM]

Ok so I have no comment on *this* post, but I wanted to say I like the new purple, AND you made me spit water on my keyboard when I had just taken a drink and read the tagline.
Oh and I think you should add Nunzilla to your toys on the side (I have one!)
http://www.officeplayground.com/nunzilla.html

[skyking]

You two sound way too complicated.