There I was, sitting in a meeting room at St. Francis. Marriage prep class. Looking forward to the future.
My bride-to-be sat next to me, a giddy smile on her face anticipating the next speaker.
Who, you ask? The next speaker was the Natural Family Planning practitioner.
The one who would tell us how to turn our marriages into a love fest with generous boundaries.
Who would give us the tools to know when we could make babies and when we were just having fun growing together.
Who would tell us how much better we could know ourselves.
But there was something missing from the room. Why were we the only ones excited?
Status Quo
The rest of the room’s eyes glazed and shoulders slumped. Everyone else had already made up their minds.
They were going for the pill. That bolt on promise from big pharma of all access all the time.
Sure, it’s against Church teaching.
Sure, it makes a woman’s body think she’s pregnant all the time, which buries her libido.
Sure, these therapies have fertility impairing, or even deadly side effects. And they mask other symptoms of reproductive dysfunction until the damage is irreversible.
Or that once you decide to finally have kids, a woman’s body could take years to recover her natural cycle and lead to heartbreak and confusion over how to hit that goal.
For a solution marketed to reduce uncertainty, that’s an awful lot to have floating over a couple’s heads. Even if it doesn’t seem like that to a young couple. But the campaign was effective. They saw no alternatives.
Those other couples were just going to get through the class, get through their wedding, and get on with life.
Our own path
But the apathy stopped with us.
What that practitioner shared with us that day reaffirmed how much my wife and I wanted to pour into our marriage.
Better conversations
In order for natural family planning to work, two things have to happen. The woman has to track her cycle and she has to communicate this to her husband.
Part one was easy to fit within my wife’s normal routine.
And the communication in part two set healthy expectations between us.
We had predictable insight into the mystery of her cycle. That would temper my initial frustration of “not tonight” with “I just started ovulating. I’ll let you know when it’s time.”
Freedom over when to have kids
As we went through our marriage, lots of things changed. We had to work through Moves for a new career, loss of care, and inflation destroying our paycheck.
But we still wanted lots of kids.
Natural family planning gave us the space to live within our means when our means weren’t great. That let us tend to the kids we already had while finding the best times to have more.
Keep mom sane
And when those additional babies came, they brought their own set of needs. When lots come at the same time, not meeting those needs can overwhelm mom.
So we spaced our kids enough to not have to wean them too early or tandem nurse. We got so good at this that we’ve had 5 kids each spaced an average of 30 months apart (plus or minus 2).
Does that mean we have teenagers and toddlers at the same time? Yes. But they’re spaced close enough to build solid relationships with each other and still learn from watching their older siblings.
15 years later
So our marriage has grown strong because of Natural Family Planning. My wife and I have deep conversations about our intimate life. And our kids are spaced far enough apart that we can meet their needs.
That leaves us enough space to build relationships with our community. And we’re doing it out of a spirit of growth instead of restraint, so it’s a lot more fun.
Why anyone else in that room would settle for a bolt-on solution to their marriage, I’ll never know. But building this practice into our marriage improved our communication and drew us closer together.
There’s more coming on Natural Family Planning. Leave a comment below on what you want to learn and subscribe today so you don’t miss the answer.
Check out these related posts before you go:
Liberty Begins At Home 
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