Three Things NFP Has Done for Our Marriage

Last month we celebrated our three-year wedding anniversary! And just this week we celebrated seven years since we first started dating.

Seven years ago during our first summer of dating <3

Seven years is a long time, and I think I love our relationship more today than at any other point in that time. I think I'm pretty blessed to be able to say that, too. There are days or moments where I have to sit down and wonder, "Why do I deserve this?" I haven't figured it out yet, but whatever it is, I know my husband was created for me and vice versa.

One of the best things we ever did for our relationship was switch from contraception to NFP. I think that switch has created permanent guardrails for our marriage so we can avoid many of the ravines other couples fall into. It certainly wasn't something we ever planned for and it meant a lifestyle change for us both, but it was worth it if it meant making our marriage more like what God wants it to be. And as a way to keep my thoughts going in a coherent direction, I've decided to list three things that NFP has done for our marriage, one for each year.

It's Created A New Level of Respect
If NFP does one thing, if applied properly in a marriage, I think it is creating a level of respect that wasn't there before or at least supporting that level of respect on a day-to-day basis. I've heard a lot of women say they don't want their husbands to help them chart because they don't want their husbands to know about their cycles. Yes, pretend they don't exist. I'm sure he'll never notice .... All joking aside, I can't tell you how appreciative I am that Ben knows how my body works as well as I do. A woman's ability to grow a life inside her is incredible and all the functions that support that are equally so. My fertility is not something to be ignored, rejected, or suppressed, but celebrated and worked with.

You also can't help but feel a sense of wonder over the body when you understand how perfectly it was designed and how perfectly they were designed for each other. It helps you look beyond the outer shell and not want any kind of substitute, and goodness knows the world has created a lot of substitutes that have readily been accepted into marriage.

It's Called Us to Be Sacrificial
Though having used both NFP and the pill and not seen a huge increase in difficulty in application (I think the copious amount of benefits far outweighs the few extra steps of NFP), it is a sacrifice-based system since you need to abstain during the fertile periods (about 7-10 days on average) if you want to avoid pregnancy. I'm not sure when marriage became more about what you can get from of another person and less about what you can give another person, but it definitely has in our society. Practicing NFP is a daily reminder that we must make sacrifices for our marriage if we want them to flourish and that translates into more than pregnancy or not. It reminds a spouse that the other person in the marriage is there for more reasons than to satisfy their needs. And it has reminded me to sacrifice in other ways like doing the laundry when he's having a busy/crummy week. Sacrifice is necessary if you want to make a marriage work. Too often people give their worst to their spouse and expect the best in return. No relationship can survive that.

It's Made Our Relationship Less Self-Focused
For us, NFP goes hand in hand with our faith and responsible parenthood, where we are asked to be open to life and pray about God's plan for our family constantly and not just when the prescription for birth control runs out. I've never been the best at prayer. I'm more of a doer, and silence often causes my mind to wander. However, with the daily reminder of the gift of my fertility, I suddenly found I was talking to God more about what His plans were for me. And it wasn't just in relation to children. I was suddenly talking to him about work, family relationships, future goals,  and on and on. Ben and I were also discussing faith more frequently together and getting the opportunity to share with others. It's just made us aware that there's a bigger picture than our individual selves and sometimes that bigger picture is our marriage. I think one of the best examples happened when I found out I was pregnant. I was in a flurry. I couldn't even sit down. And Ben came over to me, grabbed my hand, and pulled me down to sit with him on the couch. He closed his hands around mine and started praying out loud. For him it had become habit to talk to God about new life. It might be one of my most favorite moments ever.

Thank you Benjamin for being the husband God has asked you to be and being willing and open to grow as a couple.

Wedding day :) Photo by Deidre Lynn Photography

Redefining Life

Once upon a time I was a birth control user and called myself pro-life. Little did I know that made me a hypocrite.

How so you ask? Don’t women by taking birth control prevent unwanted babies and thus possibly abortion? Nope. But don’t ask your doctor that because you’ll get a different answer. I know. I asked.

Prior to 1965 conception was considered to occur at fertilization or when the egg is fertilized by a sperm thus creating an embryo, which has all the necessary DNA of a human being.

In 1965 the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (per Planned Parenthood’s suggestion) redefined conception as the implantation of an ovum, or when the embryo attaches itself to the uterine lining.

Why’d they do that? Because this newfangled pill was coming out, but people weren’t jumping on the bandwagon because it ended pregnancies. How many times are we going to be fooled by semantics?! The pill works like this:

First it releases a synthetic version of progesterone. Progesterone naturally occurs in a woman’s cycle only after ovulation (when the egg is released to be fertilized) to prepare the body for a potential pregnancy. By releasing this hormone earlier it tricks the body into thinking it’s pregnant and therefore does not ovulate. No ovulation means no chance to make a baby.

Thanks 1flesh.org for the graphics!

However, because the pill originally had extremely high dosages of progesterone that were causing serious issues in women (like cancer and death) developers of the pill have cut back on the amount of progesterone thus allowing ovulation to occur (though we still get many of those nasty side effects). If ovulation happens, the egg can become fertilized. Ovulation occurs 28 percent of the time with regular hormonal contraceptives (that means the pill, the patch, IUDs, and other contraceptives that use synthetic hormones to trick the body). Ovulation occurs 33-65 percent of the time in progestin-only mini-pill cycles. *

So backup function of the pill is to thicken cervical mucus and slow tubal motility so the two halves of a whole person can’t meet. But still, that might not be enough to prevent new life from forming.

The pill has a third function and it’s abortificant in nature. It thins a woman’s uterine lining, aka the “embryo food”. So, if an egg and sperm were to meet and create a baby, the pill makes a woman’s body inhospitable to that life continuing, thus causing an early term chemical abortion. That means hundreds, thousands, millions of babies have been aborted due to hormonal contraceptives according to the definition of life that starts at fertilization.

Don’t believe me; ask your doctor. Ask, that if your definition of life begins at fertilization (and science has proven that it does), if the pill (the patch, IUDs, etc.) causes the embryo to be unable to implant (aka die). Their answer should be yes and that means that hormonal contraceptives can have an abortificant effect.

I asked my doctor at the age of 18 if the pill caused abortions, and I got ‘no’ for an answer. I didn’t know that her definition of when life started was later than mine. And it was because of that answer, and my own unwillingness to investigate into the issue, that I went a year and a half on birth control while married. That devastates me looking back and wondering about the possible lives I might have ended because the pill seemed somehow easier and more effective than the other options out there. I thought I wasn’t hurting anyone, but I had no idea I was potentially ending life … life that my husband and I created … my own children. I don’t know if that happened and I might not ever know until I leave this world, but that’s my burden to bear. I just hope I can help others realize this truth so they can embrace life when they are ready and exercise responsible parenthood and make adult decisions before they are.

If you are pro-life, you don’t use hormonal contraceptives. That’s that.

Want to learn more about this from an NFP doctor or teacher, visit www.onemoresoul.com to find one in your area.

* Larimaore W Standford J. Postfertilization Effects of Oral Contraceptives and Their Relationsihp to Informed Consent, Arch Fam Med 2000; 9:126-133

NFP Believes in Soulmates

Sometimes I forget to lead with my heart instead of my mind when it comes to telling people about NFP. I want to preach that it’s 99.5 percent effective at preventing pregnancy and that it tells you all sorts of things about your body beyond you fertility and … look I’m doing it again!

But honestly avoiding the baby bump is not the ultimate reason behind my love for NFP. I love NFP because I now see humanity in a totally different light.

If you couldn’t guess, I’m a Christian (NO WAY, right?), and I’m a pretty ginormous fan of Jesus and His Church. They have both taught me how to respect my body as well as the bodies of others, but never more clearly than when I was learning NFP and researching the reason the Church denounces contraceptives (because, hey, I was on that bandwagon for a while). What I learned literally took my breath away and blew my mind so completely that I’m surprised I still lead with it.

The body is essential to the truths of the Christian faith, but most of the time it gets a bad rap for being “weak flesh”. But it wouldn’t be weak if we knew how amazing it was. Want to know why? Keep reading.

First is that God created us in His image and likeness. For a long time I just thought that meant our souls were like His and not necessarily our bodies. I just didn’t see the body as being as important as the soul. But if bodies aren’t important to God’s overall design, then why did He give them to us? I think it would be pretty cool if we just flew around as spirits without the limitations of bodies. But since we have bodies, there must be a reason.

I also know that the body is essential to understanding Christianity because Christ became man; He took on human flesh. God wouldn’t have done that if the body were somehow lesser than the soul. He could have easily appeared on Earth as a ghost/spirit type of entity, but instead He was incarnate of the Virgin Mary and became man. He became flesh because it would be the destruction of that flesh on the cross that would make His sacrifice so great and absolutely perfect.

Finally I had to come to the realization that the body and the spirit are not two separate things competing in a contest for who is greater. They are indivisible. Christ wasn’t half human and half God when He was walking around Earth. He was fully both because He was God made flesh just like we are souls made flesh. As such respect of the body is paramount. When you can look at another human being or look in the mirror and see a soul made in the image and likeness of God how can you hate that person? How could you not love that person if you love God?

NFP has made me see this as I learn how perfectly my body was made. NFP has more fully cemented my view that my body should be respected by me as well as by my spouse. My husband and I don’t work against it, but with it. I’ve also become more aware of dangers I see so many of my friends putting themselves directly in front of. They don’t view their body as something sacred and beautiful and made by God. Instead they look for ways to feel those things in ways that are disrespectful to their body such as sex for fun instead of sex for true, covenant love. They don’t wait for to have sex with their “soulmate” (means more now that you know that the body and the soul are indivisible, right?) because this world likes to preach that the body is a toy to do with what we please even if that means hurting it. NFP teaches quite the opposite: that we belong to God and we were created to be loved.

Turning Skepticism Into Openness

“The body, and only the body, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine.” – Pope John Paul II, TOB 46:6

We used Up as an example in our talk because they are the cutest Disney couple ever!

A few weeks back the wonderful couple that taught us NFP asked us if we could step in to give the pre-cana talk on marriage and sexuality. They are part of the Air Force and were moving to a base in California. We of course jumped at the chance to help spread the word about NFP.

Pre-cana is the Catholic Church’s version of marriage prep. The marriage at Cana was where Christ performed his first public miracle when He turned water to wine at the urging of His mother. A fitting name for marriage prep, don’t you think? Today I felt like I was turning skepticism into openness, or at least attempting to.

After we agreed to give the talk, we went and sat in on one. It’s hard coming from an environment that is so pro-NFP to one that is literally hostile to the idea. Our teaching couple got up there and shared their hearts out, but mostly what they got in return were closed minds and skeptic hearts. I was a little terrified at what we were going to face when it came our turn.

I’m an editor by trade, but I don’t always take criticism well. I can dish it out, but I can’t take it. I know, total hypocrisy, but that’s the honest truth, and I’m working on it (just don’t go editing this now). At the end of the pre-cana session the couples listening get to give us feedback. I think some of the people need a new definition of feedback. Feedback should be constructive, not destructive.  But, there were a few shining, hopeful statements in the bunch, which is ultimately what we are after. Maybe this is God’s way of making me better at taking criticism?

Anyway today we gave our first pre-cana talk! I literally worked on it every evening for the past week because I wanted to appeal to both those couples open to NFP and those using contraceptives. To do that, we used the quote at the top as the basis for our talk. We talked about how ultimately this talk wasn’t about sex; it was about respect of your body, your spouse’s body, and the body of your marriage when you become one flesh in the sacrament (Ephesians 5:28-31). I hope to have a blog post about more on that later.

Anyway, there were only five couples this time. A really small class, but we were thankful for that since this was our first go at it. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you look at it, our notes weren’t visible on the screen that showed our PPT slides. So we had to wing it a little bit. I think it helped, but it did run us over our time about 15 minutes. Oops. The couple that hosts the pre-cana came up to us afterward though and said they would increase our time allotted in the future because they loved the points we were making. Yeah!! Sorry future pre-cana people!

The highlight of all of this is that out of the five couples, two couples said they were really interested in taking the class and would be looking us or another local teacher up in the near future! Another couple said they would be looking into adoption since we spoke about infertility issues and the amazing options out there for couples that are loving and morally sound. Not sure what the thoughts of the other two couples were, but we should get our evaluations soon … finger-crossed!

This will probably be a never-ending process of modifying our talk for pre-cana, so if you have any thoughts or suggestions for us about what would appeal to you if you were in the seats, leave me a comment. Ben and I would greatly appreciate it!