"The health of marriage is heavily affected by the quality of the engagement": this is confirmed by the bishop of Palencia (Spain), mgr. José Ignacio Munilla Aguirre, in a release published yesterday. Marriage courses, according to the bishop, are inadequate, so "pastoral guidance is needed during the engagement", partly because "many marital crises derive from disappointment, in seeing that the reality is very different from that first dream". At the same time, highlights mgr. Munilla Aguirre, "pre-marriage relations are increasing this ‘blindness’, which is typical of falling in love". Actually, "an untimely sexual relationship hides problems instead of bringing them to the fore". After all, statistics show that those who live together before marriage "have much higher rates of broken marriages than those who didn’t". "If we do not want to have any unpleasant surprise in married life added the bishop , an education to love is essential, to teach the engaged couples not to ‘shoot ahead’ and skip the steps in between, otherwise breaking an engagement will become a trauma, as if it were a sort of "mini-divorce".
