Revitalizing Marriage Prep

Let’s go back in time a few years ago to 21-year-old me. I had gotten engaged a few months before and my now fiancé and I were headed to our engaged encounter retreat almost exactly a year before our wedding day. That type A personality in me wanted to get things done ahead of time. Looking back, I think of what a gift it would have been if we had embraced the teaching of NFP during that retreat. I would have had an entire year to learn and practice the rules before the question of sex ever came on the table.

Sadly, that’s not how it played out. The “NFP Talk” was relegated to about 15 minutes on Sunday morning right before lunch. First off, we’d all just had an emotional weekend full of deep conversation and planning for our lives together as married couples, and second, this talk was between us and lunch, and food at this retreat center was delicious!

Over the course of the weekend, each talk had the same format: One presenting couple would share their experience (usually some way that they failed and then grew to love each other more and grew from the situation) and then we would have some journal time and then we would talk with our future spouse about what we journaled about. It was pretty simple, but honestly it worked, we had great conversations all weekend. Had the “NFP talk” been anything like that format, I don’t think I’d be here writing this because we probably wouldn’t have as much of an issue with NFP in our church communities.

Ok I’ll stop beating around the bush now, here’s the talk we got: The two presenting couples stood over to the side and made themselves look busy, the priest who had been there on and off throughout the weekend got up on stage and started talking. “Well, the church has this thing called NFP and it’s what the church teaches. And this all doesn’t really matter to any of you because you are all already having sex. But I guess if you’re interested there’s some links in your packet. Oh and also, you should stop having sex before you get married, you all are probably only a few weeks away at this point so, yeah just do that it’ll be good for you.”

I’m paraphrasing, but I think you get the idea. Oh and those links he talked about? These links were printed out on a document – I’m not going to retype that! They also sent us to dead end links (they didn’t work).

You can imagine how NFP completely fell off our plate. I mean, we had to get our save the dates out, and that’s clearly more important!

Because the “NFP talk” was short, didn’t have the same journaling/discussion format, and the presenting couples refused to even talk about it, it was clear to my fiancé and I that it wasn’t important.

Let me pause for a moment and state the fact that I think NFP is possibly the second most important part of Marriage prep. Right behind prayer. If a marriage prep weekend only consisted of teaching couples how to pray together and then taught them how to engage in the deep conversation required for practicing NFP and discerning marriage and family size, our newly married folks would be set!

Now let’s fast forward to a few months later. I’m a good Catholic, right? I’ve been Catholic my whole life, so I need to go do the Catholic thing. So, I painstakingly typed in those links! I was likely the ONLY person from that whole retreat that did this. What did I find? Flowery brochures toting the benefits of NFP with smiling families and couples. What did I find next? Here’s the cost. And it was completely out of budget.

Let me pause again. I am now an instructor in the Symptopro method, and I fully understand the costs of a class. It took a lot of time and money for me to get trained and each client takes time to teach the method and follow up. When you think about it, the $125-175 price tag is pretty low for what you are getting.

But at the time, it was completely out of budget. The main reason for that, is I had no idea I NEEDED a budget for this. Less than $200 is chump change compared to the few thousand dollar wedding I was planning, but I was told it was virtually free! So, seeing a price tag of any amount would have sent me running.

That was the end of my searching. Racked with guilt, I made an appointment with my GP to get on birth control. I was so nervous to ask for a prescription that I didn’t in that whole appointment. I ended up messaging my doctor afterwards asking for it and had to go in for ANOTHER appointment to get the prescription. Looking back, it was actually pretty surprising that she never mentioned birth control in the first appointment.

I was on birth control for about 2 months. 1 month before we got married and then most of the following month. For 51 days, I guiltily popped the pill out of the packet, swallowed it, and put the packet back on the shelf. I read every inch of the warnings page. And if you’ve never seen or read one, it’s downright scary. As I was reading it, I was thinking “I WISH I didn’t have to do this. I just wish there was another way.” My libido plummeted to zero, and this newly married woman who was supposed to be excited for sex because she waited, dreaded it. It was obligatory at best, and it wasn’t even sex. The years of ignoring sex and being told to wait until marriage, the guilt I had from taking the pill, and the confusion of the idea that now I’m supposed to be a sex machine led to a minor case of vaginismus. But all that is part of another story. We’re talking about marriage prep here.

That wish I had while I read through the warnings page (which is a thin HUGE piece of paper folded up really small so when you see it at first, it doesn’t look like too many warnings. The marketing that these Pharmaceutical companies have is nothing short of genius, and that’s part of the problem) was a deep desire to have the free, total, faithful, and fruitful love that God wants for all of us. God kept pressing that desire on my heart and lead me to stop taking the pill and toss it all in the trash.

The story doesn’t end there with a happily ever after. What followed was about 6 months of a long journey toward learning NFP. For a while after I got off the Pill we just abstained. Yes, married for less than 6 weeks and we were basically living as brother and sister. I still held the belief that if NFP is what the church teaches it needs to be accessible and affordable. There needs to be programs for people who can’t afford it. Or a trial session to learn about it before coughing up the money. (Yes, I know many instructors who do this, myself included, but at the time I couldn’t find any).

We found a PDF online and tried to learn from that. Which I DO NOT suggest under any circumstances. We had no scientific base for these rules I was learning, no outlet to ask questions, and almost no confidence in the method. Somehow, I didn’t get pregnant until we actually intended it. In some ways, I think God made that happen because had I unintentionally gotten pregnant at that time, I likely would have returned to hormonal birth control of some form because I really didn’t understand the teachings or the method I had learned.

My marriage prep story is a little different than the normal “Marriage prep NFP talk” story. It seems that most marriage prep programs talk about NFP as this magical thing that will make your marriage and sex life perfect. It’s toted as free and easy, and you’ll only abstain for like a week, right?

Both this kind of experience and my experience are detrimental to the cause of promoting Natural Family Planning. Natural Family Planning is a beautiful teaching that empowers women (and their spouses) to get to know her body, to intentionally communicate and pray with each other, and to realize that God really is the center of our lives and marriages and His plan is the best plan for us. Hands down.

It would take another couple thousand words to share with you my ideal marriage prep NFP talk and I don’t have space for that, but I’d like you to take away a few key points. If you’re in the space of promoting NFP in any way (to friends, in marriage prep, to your family), share the truth. We don’t need to sell NFP like a used car salesman would and we don’t need to brush over it and assume that no one will use it. Share YOUR story. Share YOUR struggles and wins. Really just SHARE. Let’s get this conversation going.

We need more people to be talking about NFP in just normal circumstances like sharing how hard abstaining has been postpartum with a mom friend at coffee. Or sharing with your workout buddy why you’re killing it this week and last week during your luteal phase the workout was a little tougher. Or asking your parish pastor if you can start an NFP small group to share difficulties, wins, and ask questions. Or if you want to go there, reach out to whoever is in charge of marriage prep at your parish or diocese. Offer to take a look at their NFP resources and edit them or share other resources like Managing Your Fertility or my podcast Charting Toward Intimacy with the newly engaged couples in your parish.

We have a long way to go and a lot of work to do to get there. This isn’t something we can wait for someone else to do; this is something we need to do, starting now.