There was a little old Italian lady in one church I attended who came over from Italy where she was married.
She met her husband on their wedding day.
It wasn't that strict. But when I lived among working-class Italian Catholics in this country a few years ago, I was struck by how diligently they still prepared their grown children for successful and presumably permanent marriages. Being working class, they could not count on having piles of money to bail out boomerang kids or grandchildren in a hell of divorce and custody suits. Nor did they typically put their aging parents in nursing homes, but expected to take care of them at home when they were old. Some of the families were preparing for a widowed grandparent, for instance, to give their house as a wedding gift and go live with their own child, the parent(s) of the engaged grandchild. They had to feel certain that there would not be a divorce coming along in a couple of years and the house be sold off or given to the in-law and their subsequent live-in (which would violate their Catholic conscience about marriage).