I’m a relatively new husband, and my wife and I are practicing NFP. To be perfectly honest, it has been rather difficult for us, as we want to wait to have children for another year and a half. We have travel arrangements that have to be respected before we will feel comfortable bringing a child into our family (we live in Canada, and her family is having a reunion in India, and we’re trying very hard to be frugal in order to pay for the trip, so having a child now would very much complicate matters).
I work in shifts, and I’m out of town a week at a time every other week. Essentially, based on the timing, I’m generally home during her unavailable days, and as she works full-time as well, in a fairly stressful environment, on the rare available days that we have, she’s too tired to want to engage in intercourse.
So it has been difficult. However, for neither of us is contraception an option. We both faithfully adhere to the authority of the Magesterium, knowing it to be correct. But it
has been difficult, and I fully expect it to continue to be so. We’ve had fights that I can say certainly derived from this. Not that we fought about it specifically, but that the frustrations that we’ve been feeling were the source of the fights.
So, in this sense you could say that NFP has been damaging to our marriage. However, I would feel a strong urge to disagree.
What is good and right and just does not damage. It edifies, because God Himself is the source of what is good and right and just. The Church teaches that NFP is morally acceptible. Therefore, I must look to something else to determine what is causing damage in our relationship.
I have to be honest with myself and say that I am. Please understand that I do not intend to imply or insinuate that the following is true of anyone besides myself. I am simply sharing my story and my thoughts about myself and my relationship.
For many years, starting in my early youth, I have struggled with impurity. By many years I don’t mean any small token. I mean a good twenty years. When you’ve struggled with a problem like this for so long, you come to recognize things that perhaps you may not otherwise.
Firstly, my view of women was disordered. Throughout my teen years and into my early twenties, I was always shy around women whom I found attractive. This effect lingeres to this day, but not so much as it was. You might think this is normal, and perhaps it is in the sense that it’s common, but it is not in the sense of it being natural. I understand this to be a direct result of my struggle with purity. I didn’t think about it in these terms then, but I understand it now. My timidity was derived in a feeling of inadequacy relating to sex, which acted as a lens in my interactions with attractive women. A healthy vision would have had me treat attractive women like anyone else, like any brother or sister in Christ. But my vision was tainted by impurity.
In my marriage, I see that the effects are still active, but in relation specifically to sexuality. In our normal, day to day interactions, I treat her as well as I can, as a loving husband, not always successful, but trying. Yet, early on, when it came to sex, I was often forceful or manipulative. Not that I forced myself onto her. I didn’t. Rather, I was insistent.
I no longer am, and I attribute this in large part to NFP, as well as to serious examinations of myself and my marriage and what a loving husband ought to look like. Having been forced to respect her boundaries, to respect our own wishes for our family, and practice abstinence when we need to, I have grown very much as a person, as a man, and as a husband.
Part of this growth, though, has involved recognizing external triggers that increase our sexual desires. By this, I mean sexually suggestive ads at malls, on tv, in magazines, or unexpected love scenes in shows or movies, or even books. Our environment is very highly sexualized, and that makes practicing NFP much more difficult than it should. Yes, there is a natural desire between a husband and a wife, but I think perhaps in the past it may have been easier to practice abstinence than it is today.
The ideal that I’m striving for is to be able to see my wife firstly as a sister in Christ, a daughter of God, and secondly as my wife. In the end, Christ tells us there is no marriage in heaven, so with an eschatological vision, my wife is firstly and foremostly my sister in Christ, and that should be my first treatment of her. She is my wife also, but secondarily, and I hope to come to the point when our sexual choices are made as responsible mutual decisions, and not from irrational passions. That doesn’t mean there can’t be room for spontaneity, just that the source of that spontaneity isn’t the fact that I’m all hot and bothered and can’t help myself.
Believe me when I say that I understand the desire to use ABC. For me, it would be a freedom to indulge. But having come as far as I have, I couldn’t countenance that anymore. I couldn’t treat my wife that way anymore. I accept the fact that I have to abstain. I’ve come to realize that just as a celibate priest is an image of the eschatological man, so too is a celibate husband an image of the eschatological man. But only insofar as my disposition about it is proper. I must be willing and accepting, placing God and my wife ahead of my own desires, for this is the proper order of things. Mayhap, one day, I might be counted among the blessed married saints who practiced perpetual celibacy. But only if it be God’s will, and my wife’s.
God bless.
