Also, psychiatrists only talk to the critical cases - it costs money to see a shrink, but the priest is always there for everybody, the untroubled, the mildly troubled, and the very troubled.
The idea that you can only learn about marriage by being married is the same thinking that promotes the idea that only black people can understand "black issues", only women can understand how women think, etc. and nobody else is qualified to have an opinion or voice one. It flies in the face of the universality of the human condition.
And I wonder how many married couples have actually thought in depth about the transcendental meaning of marriage, as the late Pope John Paul the Great did in his masterful study of the theology of the body . . .
No it doesn't; not at all. Unless you've walked the proverbial mile in the proverbial shoes yourself, you can presume to know the experience, but that's all it is---a presumption. You don't know it truly. You simply cannot get the full nature of the experience of something merely by reading about it in a book, or hearing others talk about it. You may think you can, but you're fooling yourself, and deep in your heart you know it to be true.
My father and brother have been to war; I haven't, though I've probably read more books about war than either my brother or father, and I know a hell of a lot of veterans. Should I presume I know more about war than my brother or my father does? Of course not. The same is true vis-a-vis priests and marriage.