Things You Should Know Before You Get Married in the Catholic Church

Brief Overview

• Getting married in the Catholic Church is not simply choosing a beautiful venue with religious ambiance; it is entering a sacrament that the Church understands as a permanent, exclusive, and life-giving covenant that you cannot dissolve by personal decision or civil divorce.
• The Church requires free, informed, and unconditional consent from both parties, and any significant defect in that consent, whether from ignorance, coercion, mental incapacity, or deliberate exclusion of the marriage’s essential properties, can render the marriage invalid from the start.
• Catholic marriage preparation, called Pre-Cana in most American dioceses, varies enormously in quality from parish to parish, and many couples complete it without fully understanding what the Church actually teaches about what they are committing to.
• If you are a Catholic marrying a non-Catholic, whether Christian or non-Christian, specific permissions and promises are required, and the religious differences you minimize before the wedding have a documented tendency to become significant fault lines when children arrive and major life decisions must be made.
• The Church’s teaching on openness to children and Natural Family Planning is not an optional add-on to Catholic marriage; it is a theological core of what the sacrament means, and couples who have not genuinely engaged with it before the wedding often find themselves in serious conflict about it afterward.
• An annulment is not a Catholic divorce; it is a declaration by the Church’s tribunal that a valid sacramental marriage never existed, and understanding that distinction clearly before you marry is one of the most important pieces of information the Church can give you.

What Catholic Marriage Actually Is, Before You Say the Words

The Catholic Church’s teaching on marriage begins with a definition that most couples hear at some point in their preparation but rarely absorb in its full implications. The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes the matrimonial covenant as a partnership of the whole of life between a man and a woman that is by its nature ordered toward the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring, and it states that this covenant between baptized persons has been raised by Christ to the dignity of a sacrament (CCC 1601). Every word of that definition carries weight. A partnership of the whole of life means not a partnership for as long as you both feel fulfilled or romantically connected, but a permanent, total union of persons that encompasses every dimension of your existence. Ordered toward the good of the spouses means that the marriage itself is a vehicle of sanctification, a way of growing in holiness through the specific demands of loving one particular person faithfully over an entire lifetime. Ordered toward the procreation and education of offspring means that openness to children is not a lifestyle preference you negotiate individually but a constitutive element of what marriage is. Raised by Christ to the dignity of a sacrament means that when two baptized Catholics marry validly, God himself is the author of the bond that is formed, not a third party blessing a contract that the spouses themselves create and could theoretically uncreate (CCC 1639). The Church teaches that a marriage concluded and consummated between baptized persons can never be dissolved, not by the civil state, not by a court, not by the Church’s own authority, except by the death of one of the spouses (CCC 1640). Understanding this before you walk down the aisle is not a technicality; it is the foundation on which every other aspect of what follows rests. If you are entering Catholic marriage without genuinely understanding and accepting this definition, you are not consenting to what the Church means by the sacrament, and that defect of consent is a real problem with real canonical consequences.

The Canonical Requirements Are More Specific Than Most Couples Know

Couples who begin the marriage preparation process at their parish are often surprised to learn how specific the Church’s canonical requirements for a valid marriage actually are, and how many of those requirements touch directly on the interior disposition of the parties rather than merely the external form of the ceremony. A valid Catholic marriage requires that both parties are free to marry, meaning no existing valid marriage bond, no prior religious vows of a permanent nature, and no canonical impediment stands in the way (CCC 1625). It requires that consent is given freely, without coercion or grave external fear that forced the decision (CCC 1628). It requires that each party has the psychological capacity to understand and assume the essential obligations of marriage, which include the commitment to permanence, fidelity, and openness to children (CCC 1625). It requires that neither party withholds consent to any of those essential properties by a positive act of the will, even if they express the correct words externally. For example, a person who plans to divorce if the marriage becomes difficult, or who has secretly decided never to have children, or who intends to have ongoing relationships outside the marriage, is not giving the consent that Catholic marriage requires even if they pronounce every word of the vows correctly. The Church also requires that the marriage be celebrated in canonical form, meaning in the presence of a qualified priest or deacon and at least two witnesses, unless a dispensation from canonical form has been granted by the bishop. Most couples are aware of the ceremony requirements but much less aware of the interior consent requirements, and the distinction matters enormously because defects in interior consent are the primary grounds on which marriages are later found to have been invalid by the Church’s tribunal.

Marriage Preparation Varies Wildly, and You Deserve Better Than a Weekend Retreat

Here is something most couples only figure out after they have completed their marriage preparation: the quality of Catholic marriage prep in the United States varies enormously from parish to parish, and a significant number of couples come away from the process feeling that it was either perfunctory, generic, or so focused on wedding logistics that it failed to address what Catholic marriage actually demands of them as people. Published assessments of Catholic marriage preparation programs consistently note that many programs tend to be out of touch with the realities couples are actually facing, including cohabitation, financial stress, different levels of faith commitment, and the specific challenges of marrying in a culture that treats marriage as a personal fulfillment project rather than a permanent covenant. The standard diocesan requirement is that couples begin preparation at least six months before the wedding, and most dioceses require a Pre-Cana program, an Engaged Encounter weekend, or some equivalent structured preparation experience. These programs range from genuinely excellent, psychologically informed, theologically rich experiences to assembly-line weekend programs that feel like administrative obligations rather than genuine formation. If the preparation your parish offers feels inadequate, you have both the right and the responsibility to supplement it, and good options exist in the form of programs like Worldwide Marriage Encounter, the FOCCUS assessment tool, the Theology of the Body Institute’s programs for engaged couples, and solid reading in Catholic marriage theology. The preparation period is also when the pastor or deacon conducting the required interviews will ask you direct questions about your intentions regarding the essential properties of the marriage, and those conversations are meant to be substantive rather than procedural. If the person conducting your preparation is treating those conversations as a box-checking exercise rather than a genuine pastoral engagement, that is worth raising honestly rather than simply going along with.

Consent Is What Makes the Marriage, and It Has to Be the Real Thing

Of all the things that Catholic marriage preparation should communicate clearly and that it often communicates inadequately, the centrality of free, informed, and unconditional consent to the validity of the marriage is the most important. The Church teaches that consent cannot be supplied by any human power; not by a parent’s expectation, not by social pressure, not by the fact that invitations have been sent and a venue has been booked (CCC 1626). Consent must be free from coercion, including the kind of soft coercion that comes from feeling that you have no real alternative because you have already been living together, because children are expected, or because family members have invested significantly in the event. Consent must be informed, meaning both parties genuinely understand what Catholic marriage is and what they are committing to. Consent must be unconditional, meaning you are not agreeing to the marriage on the condition that it works out, that your partner changes, or that circumstances remain favorable. The Church also requires that consent include an intention regarding all three essential properties of marriage: unity, which means exclusive fidelity to one partner; indissolubility, which means permanence until death; and openness to children. If you internally exclude any of those properties at the time of the wedding, even without saying anything, you have not given valid consent. This is why the Church asks couples in their preparation about their intentions regarding these properties directly, and it is why the tribunal later examines these same intentions when a couple seeks a declaration of nullity. Going to the altar with unresolved reservations about permanence, significant doubts about whether this is actually the right person, or private plans that contradict what you will publicly promise is not a minor emotional uncertainty; it is a problem with the sacramental validity of what you are about to do.

Indissolubility Is Not a Slogan, and the Church Means Every Word of It

Catholic marriage is permanent. Not mostly permanent. Not permanent unless things get very bad. Not permanent unless a civil court grants a divorce. Permanently permanent, meaning the bond formed by a valid consummated marriage between two baptized persons cannot be dissolved by any human authority, and it persists until one of the spouses dies. The Church teaches this with complete consistency and without qualification (CCC 1640, CCC 1641). This teaching has been countercultural in virtually every era of Church history, and it is countercultural in a particularly pointed way in contemporary Western society where divorce is legally straightforward, socially normalized, and sometimes treated as the responsible choice when a marriage has become difficult. The Catechism acknowledges directly that binding oneself for life can seem difficult or even impossible, and it responds to that acknowledgment not by softening the teaching but by pointing to the grace of the sacrament as the source of the strength required to live it (CCC 1648). That response is honest and theologically serious, but it also requires couples to genuinely engage with the question of whether they trust God’s grace to sustain them through the specific difficulties that a permanent, exclusive, unconditional commitment to one person over an entire lifetime will produce. The practical implication of this teaching is that Catholics who civilly divorce, while they retain full membership in the Church and access to all its sacraments except in specific circumstances, cannot remarry in the Catholic Church without first obtaining a declaration of nullity from the Church’s tribunal. That process examines whether the original marriage was validly contracted in the first place, not whether the subsequent relationship was difficult or whether both parties would be happier in different marriages. Understanding the indissolubility of Catholic marriage before you commit is not meant to frighten you away from the sacrament; it is meant to ensure that you enter it with the full, serious, and honest awareness of what you are doing.

Living Together Before the Wedding Is Not Just a Pastoral Awkwardness

A significant percentage of Catholics who present themselves for Catholic marriage preparation are already living together, and many parishes have developed a somewhat awkward ambivalence about how to address this reality. The Church’s teaching is not ambivalent. Living together in a sexually intimate relationship outside of marriage is contrary to the moral teaching of the Church, it does not constitute a trial marriage in any sense that the sacrament of matrimony recognizes, and the USCCB has consistently stated that ministers responsible for marriage preparation must address cohabitation honestly rather than treating it as a negligible pastoral detail. This is not primarily a matter of ceremony or canonical technicality; it is a moral teaching rooted in the nature of the sexual relationship and the meaning of the body as understood in Catholic anthropology. The practical dimension is equally important for couples to know honestly: the sociological evidence does not support the popular assumption that cohabitation before marriage serves as useful preparation. Diocesan resources drawing on decades of research consistently report that couples who cohabit before marriage have a fifty percent greater chance of divorce than those who do not, a finding that has been replicated across multiple studies and that directly contradicts the cultural intuition that living together is a responsible way to test compatibility. The mechanism behind this finding is complex, but it includes the effect of what researchers call the inertia of cohabitation, meaning couples who were living together slide into marriage without making a deliberate, clear-eyed choice about whether this specific person is whom they genuinely want to commit to permanently. None of this means that couples who have been cohabiting cannot have a valid Catholic marriage or that the Church refuses to work with them. It means that they are asked to address the situation honestly in their preparation and to make the genuine, free, and deliberate choice that the sacrament requires rather than simply extending an existing arrangement into a ceremony.

Openness to Children Is Not Optional, and You Need to Understand NFP Before the Wedding

One of the areas where Catholic marriage theology most directly conflicts with contemporary cultural assumptions is the Church’s teaching on openness to life within marriage. The Church teaches that the sexual dimension of marriage has two inseparable meanings, one oriented toward the union of the spouses and one oriented toward the possibility of new life, and that artificially separating those two meanings by using contraception violates the integrity of the marital act as God designed it (CCC 2366, CCC 2368). This teaching is contained in Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae and is reaffirmed in the Catechism, and it means that Catholic couples are not morally free to use artificial contraception as a routine method of family planning. Natural Family Planning, commonly referred to as NFP, is the Church’s alternative, and it involves using knowledge of the woman’s natural fertility cycle to achieve or postpone pregnancy through periodic abstinence. NFP is not the rhythm method of the 1950s; modern methods such as the Creighton Model, the Billings Ovulation Method, and the Sympto-Thermal Method are scientifically validated and, when used correctly, have effectiveness rates comparable to hormonal contraception. Marriage preparation programs almost universally include some introduction to NFP, but many couples complete that introduction without genuinely engaging with what it requires: mutual communication about fertility and sexuality, periodic abstinence that requires real self-discipline, and a genuine openness to pregnancy that persists even when timing or circumstances feel less than ideal. Couples who enter marriage treating the Church’s teaching on contraception as something they will figure out later, or who privately plan to use artificial contraception regardless of what they said in preparation, are setting themselves up for serious conflict and for a potential problem with the validity of their consent regarding openness to children.

Mixed Marriages and Interfaith Marriages Carry Real and Specific Challenges

The Catholic Church permits Catholics to marry non-Catholics, but it is honest about the fact that these marriages carry specific challenges that same-faith marriages do not, and the requirements it imposes are designed to address those challenges rather than merely satisfy administrative formality. A marriage between a Catholic and a baptized non-Catholic Christian is called a mixed marriage and requires permission from the local bishop. A marriage between a Catholic and an unbaptized person, whether of another religion or of no religion, is called a disparity of cult and requires a dispensation from the bishop. In both cases, the Catholic spouse is required to make a promise, sincerely and freely, to maintain their own Catholic faith and to do all in their power to ensure that children of the marriage are baptized and raised Catholic. That promise is not a formality; it is a genuine commitment with ongoing moral weight, and it sometimes becomes a significant source of conflict when the non-Catholic spouse, who was informed of the promise before the wedding, later resists the Catholic upbringing of children. The religious differences that feel manageable or even interesting in the dating phase tend to become more consequential when children arrive, when one spouse becomes more deeply invested in their faith, or when major family decisions about prayer, Sunday practice, religious education, and faith community involvement must be made. Research consistently shows that interfaith couples experience higher rates of marital stress around religious questions than same-faith couples, and that the children of interfaith marriages are significantly less likely to maintain active religious practice in adulthood. The Church’s permission for mixed marriages and dispensations for disparity of cult is not encouragement; it is accommodation given specific conditions, and couples considering these marriages deserve a completely honest assessment of what the research and the pastoral experience of the Church consistently show about their particular challenges.

The Wedding Ceremony Has Specific Requirements You Cannot Ignore

Catholic couples sometimes assume that because the Church is permitting their marriage, the specific form of the ceremony is largely at their discretion, and they discover too late that this assumption is incorrect. Canon law requires that Catholics marry in the canonical form, meaning the ceremony must be celebrated before a qualified priest or deacon and two witnesses, and it must take place in the church building of the bride’s parish or in a church building designated by the bishop. Outdoor weddings, beach ceremonies, and other non-church celebrations are not automatically permitted; they require explicit permission from the diocesan bishop, which may or may not be granted depending on the bishop’s judgment and diocesan policy. Similarly, Catholic couples cannot simply choose a civil ceremony or a ceremony in a non-Catholic venue without obtaining a dispensation from canonical form from the bishop before the wedding takes place. A Catholic who marries without observing canonical form and without obtaining the required dispensation is not validly married in the eyes of the Church, regardless of what the civil certificate says, and this situation creates serious canonical complications that can affect their ability to receive the sacraments. The readings, prayers, and structure of the wedding Mass or ceremony are also governed by the liturgical norms of the Church, and while there is genuine room for personalization within those norms, the ceremony is a liturgical act of the Church rather than a personal performance, and couples who approach it primarily as an opportunity for self-expression sometimes find that the liturgical requirements are more specific than they expected. Beginning the conversation with your parish priest at least six months before the intended date, understanding what the diocese requires and permits, and not making promises to vendors, venues, or guests before you have confirmed what the Church’s requirements actually allow are all basic practical necessities that couples who skip them consistently regret.

What an Annulment Is and What It Is Not Matters Before You Marry

Every Catholic who is planning to marry should understand what an annulment is, because misunderstanding it distorts both the meaning of the marriage being entered and the realistic picture of what happens if the marriage subsequently fails. An annulment, properly called a declaration of nullity, is a formal judgment by the Church’s diocesan tribunal that a marriage which appeared valid was in fact never a valid sacramental marriage because some essential element required for validity was missing at the time of the wedding. It is not a Catholic divorce. It does not dissolve a marriage that existed; it declares that a valid marriage never came into existence because of a defect present at its inception. The grounds for nullity, as established by canon law, include lack of due discretion, meaning one or both parties lacked the maturity and judgment to understand and commit to the essential obligations of marriage at the time of the vows; psychological incapacity to assume those obligations; exclusion of an essential property such as permanence, fidelity, or openness to children; consent obtained through fraud or grave fear; and prior impediments such as an existing valid marriage bond. The process involves a formal petition to the diocesan tribunal, written testimony from both parties and witnesses, and a formal judicial review. In the United States, the process typically takes between twelve and eighteen months, though this varies significantly by diocese and case complexity. Understanding this before you marry is important for two reasons. First, it clarifies that a declaration of nullity is a finding about what happened at the wedding, not a retrospective endorsement of the marriage’s failure. Second, it reinforces what is at stake in the consent you give: if that consent is genuinely free, informed, and unconditional regarding all of the marriage’s essential properties, then no grounds for nullity exist regardless of how difficult the marriage subsequently becomes.

Your Finances, Your Family, and Your Faith All Need Honest Conversation Before You Marry

Catholic marriage preparation programs tend to address the theological dimensions of the sacrament more consistently than they address the practical, human dimensions of building a shared life, and many couples discover after the wedding that they made significant assumptions about their partner’s values, expectations, and habits in areas that turn out to be major sources of conflict. Money is the most commonly cited source of serious marital conflict in almost every study of marriage stability, and couples who have not had specific, honest, detailed conversations about debt, spending habits, financial goals, and the management of shared resources before the wedding are carrying a significant unexamined risk into the marriage. Family of origin dynamics are the second most commonly cited source: how much time you spend with each family, how decisions are made when families of origin conflict with the new household’s needs, and how each partner’s family patterns of communication and conflict resolution shape their own behavior in marriage. Faith practice is a third area that many couples assume they agree on when they actually have significantly different expectations: how frequently you attend Mass, whether you pray together, how you raise children in the faith, and how the demands of parish life fit into your weekly schedule are all questions that produce real conflict when they have not been addressed honestly before the wedding. The Sacrament of Matrimony is not a magical resolution to the differences, conflicts, and unexamined assumptions that couples bring into it; it is a grace that strengthens and sustains the work of genuine love between two specific, flawed human beings who have chosen each other permanently. That grace does not eliminate the need for honest, specific, sometimes uncomfortable pre-wedding conversations; it is what makes persevering through those conversations, and through the much harder conversations that marriage itself will require, genuinely possible.

The Sacramental Grace Is Real, but It Requires Your Active Cooperation

The Church teaches that the sacrament of Matrimony confers a specific grace on the spouses that is intended to perfect their love and strengthen their indissoluble unity (CCC 1641). This grace is real, and the Church means what it says about it. But sacramental grace is not automatic in the sense of bypassing human freedom and cooperation; it is always given within the context of the spouses’ own active participation in the life it makes possible. A Catholic couple who approaches the Eucharist regularly, who prays together with consistency, who brings the honest difficulties of their marriage to Reconciliation and to spiritual direction, and who understands their marriage itself as a form of daily cooperation with grace are accessing the full reality of what the sacrament promises. A couple who receives the sacrament with valid consent and then treats their faith life as an occasional background presence in their marriage is receiving the same sacrament but cooperating with its grace at a much shallower level. The saints of married life, including Louis and Zelie Martin, the parents of Saint Therese of Lisieux, Thomas More and his family, and the many married couples whom the Church has beatified or canonized, were people who understood their marriage as an active spiritual partnership oriented toward heaven rather than simply a domestic arrangement with a religious backdrop. The Catechism’s description of marriage as a school of deeper humanity, a place where love becomes more firm, generous, and self-giving through the trials of daily life together (CCC 1642), is an honest picture of what the sacrament actually demands and what it genuinely produces when the spouses give it the active cooperation it requires. Planning to access that grace through the sacraments, through regular prayer, through the honest formation that ongoing faith life provides, is not supplementary to getting married in the Catholic Church; it is the interior life on which the whole commitment rests.

The Church Cares About What Happens After the Wedding Too

One thing that catches many Catholic couples off guard is the discovery that the Church’s involvement in their marriage does not end when the ceremony concludes and the reception begins. Catholic teaching on marriage extends into every dimension of marital life, including sexuality, family planning, the raising of children, the management of conflict, the obligations of fidelity, and the specific demands of charity and justice within the domestic household. The Church also has a developed body of teaching about divorce and its consequences for the sacramental life, about the situation of separated and divorced Catholics who have not remarried, and about the canonical processes available to those whose marriages subsequently fail. Catholics who divorce civilly but do not remarry remain full members of the Church and may receive all the sacraments; the civil divorce itself, while not the solution the Church endorses, does not separate a person from sacramental life (CCC 2383). Catholics who civilly divorce and remarry without a declaration of nullity from the Church’s tribunal are in an irregular situation that the Church takes seriously and that has specific implications for their sacramental participation, including the reception of Communion. Pope Francis’s 2016 apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia addressed the situation of Catholics in irregular marriages with pastoral seriousness and nuance, directing pastors to accompany such persons with discernment and mercy while maintaining the Church’s teaching on the indissolubility of valid marriage. These post-wedding realities are worth knowing before you marry because they give you an honest picture of what the Church’s commitment to your marriage actually looks like in practice, including in the difficult scenarios that none of us plan for but that real human marriages sometimes produce.

Marrying in the Catholic Church Is a Serious, Specific, and Genuinely Meaningful Act

None of the honest information in this article is meant to discourage you from marrying in the Catholic Church, and it would be a significant disservice to end without saying clearly what the Church genuinely believes about marriage and why it matters. The Catechism teaches that God himself is the author of marriage, that the vocation to marriage is written in the very nature of man and woman as created by God, and that the mutual love of spouses is an image of the absolute and unfailing love with which God himself loves his creation (Genesis 1:27, CCC 1604). The sacrament of Matrimony, the Catechism says, signifies the union of Christ and the Church (Ephesians 5:25-32), meaning that when a man and a woman commit to each other permanently, faithfully, and openly in a valid Catholic marriage, they become a living sign of the most fundamental truth of Christian faith, namely that God’s love for his people is irrevocable, total, and permanent. That is a genuinely significant identity to carry into a marriage, and the couples who understand it clearly, who enter the sacrament with informed, free, and genuine consent, who cooperate actively with the grace it provides through prayer, the sacraments, and honest daily commitment to each other, are not taking on a burden that modern life makes impossible. They are participating in something genuinely ancient, genuinely beautiful, and genuinely sustained by the grace that Christ himself promised to give it. Going in with clear eyes, honest preparation, and a realistic understanding of what the commitment requires is not the opposite of faith; it is the foundation on which a faithful, lasting, and genuinely fruitful Catholic marriage is built.

Honest Discernment Before the Wedding Is the Greatest Gift You Can Give Your Marriage

The final thing you need to know before you get married in the Catholic Church is that the most important work you can do before the ceremony is the honest examination of your own readiness, your own consent, and the genuine compatibility of your life’s orientation with the person you are planning to marry permanently and unconditionally. This examination is not a sign of weak faith or insufficient romanticism; it is the basic human responsibility that the gravity of the sacrament requires. Spend real time asking whether you genuinely believe this person is someone you can grow in holiness with, not just someone you find attractive and enjoyable. Ask whether your faith practice is something you share at a genuine level rather than simply tolerating each other’s religious habits. Ask whether you have had honest, specific conversations about finances, family, children, and faith expectations rather than assuming you agree because you have not disagreed yet. Ask whether your consent is fully free from the kind of soft pressure that comes from invested families, scheduled venues, and the social momentum of an engagement that has been publicly announced. Ask your pastor, your spiritual director, and your closest advisors to speak honestly with you rather than simply affirming your existing plans. The Church’s sacrament of Matrimony is strong enough to carry two imperfect people through an entire lifetime of real, ordinary, sometimes difficult shared life, precisely because it is not built on the fragile foundation of romantic feeling but on the bedrock of genuine consent, sacramental grace, and the active daily choice to love the specific person you have committed to before God and the Church. That foundation is real and solid and worth building on. It just requires that you begin building it honestly.