The Quest for Free Everything

Jen Fulweiler has a pretty good response to the NYT‘s Contraception v. NFP article; Marissa Nichols adds more here, and of course Simcha points out that it’s all eerily similar to playground equipment. [Not like that, get your mind out of the gutter.]

My nine-year-old doesn’t know it, but it also has to do with cleaning the house.

She proposes a remote control with different settings, from “dirty” on through “super clean”.  Pushing the desired button automatically transforms the house into the level of cleanliness you have selected.  I observed that we didn’t really need the slovenly buttons, we’re very reliable about that part.

Because what we want is to just play and relax all the time.  We want all the fun of owning lots of cool stuff, building things, sewing, painting, reading 1,001 books — all of it genuinely good and good-for-you.  But we don’t really feel like doing the housework that goes with.

And mind you, there is nothing dangerous or laborious about the work we’re talking about here.  It’s just not as fun as the funnest parts.  It’s sort of dull.  So we imagine we’d be so much happier if only we had the magic remote to take care of the not-so-great parts.  Then we could do only the homemaking we wanted, and not have to think that every time we wanted to do an activity, we’d be expected to clean up afterwards.

It’s contraception for hobbies.

***

The reason people hate NFP so much is that they keep comparing it to contraception.  No no no.  NFP is not contraception.  It is not like contraception, it does not do what contraception does, it has nothing to do with contraception.   Ask a happy contraceptor to use NFP, he’ll quickly confirm this for you.

NFP is a form of abstinence.  It’s a method for not having sex. 

[Okay, it also doubles as a method for increasing your odds of having a baby when you want one, and we have had great success with using it that way.  In that sense, NFP is a fertility treatment, and compares very favorably to the other fertility treatments out there.  But no one’s complaining about that kind of NFP.  Wish the NYT would run the article.  Please.]

So any way, back to not having sex.  Which you would think was pretty simple (I’m doing it right now), but actually doing it all the time is not so easy.   People who are determined not to have sex often find they have to take elaborate measures to pull it off, such as not spending large amounts of time alone with likely partners.  And those measures are tricky to execute when you, hmmn, say, live with the guy.  As often happens when you’ve gone and married him.

Which is why NFP is great: Instead of having to not have sex all the time, which is daunting, you can figure out ways to not have sex just some of the time.  Which is easier if your spouse has some time-consuming hobby like golf or hunting or smashing concrete blocks to smithereens, that can be employed as a distraction during those “few brief days” (bwahahaha) of periodic abstinence.

–> I have my luddite moments, but there is no convincing me that everything was better back before digital thermometers, when couples who needed to postpone a pregnancy enjoyed the simplicity and peace of just not having sex at all.  Complicate my life with technology, please.

(I feel the same way about my washing machine.)

Is NFP good for you? Well, I don’t know.

I know some people who keep a really clean house, and they do it by rarely being home and rarely pursuing any hobbies when they are home, and not really cooking much.  That life seems sort of harried and empty to me, because I like all the messy home-livin’ we do.  They’re practicing the NFP of hobbies and homemaking, avoiding making the mess so that they don’t have to keep up after it.

I know other people who keep a really clean house, despite having bunches of kids, homeschooling, and eating all their meals homemade.  They do it by discipline and hard work.  They are the full-quiver, providentialist types of the hobby-and-homemaking world.  And they seem pretty happy.

I’m not sure what I’d do if you offered me the magic house-cleaning remote.  But I suspect it wouldn’t be good for me.  It would make my life simpler and easier and more fun-filled at first, but I bet over time my life would just get crowded by all the non-stop pleasure seeking. And then empty.

I know that contraception is dangerous and empty in this way.  (Though, like the magic remote, very tempting.)  I know that the people who are able to just conceive conceive conceive, and it is coupled with true generosity and discipline and love, these people are living a life filled with tremendous joy.

But what about us NFP-types?  Would we be happier if we just abstained 100%?

Would I be happier if my decision to have sex was not, “Are my reasons to avoid a pregnancy serious enough to wait until the end of the month?”, but instead, “Are my reasons serious enough to not have sex again, at all, until some unknown date when my life might be different?”  Would the higher stakes make me value my sexuality and my children that much more?

I do know that couples who have a large family not out of generosity to life but out of uncontrolled passion, sooner or later have to deal with the reality of their motivations.   And I know that NFP practiced with an overdeveloped sense of fear can mean missing out on the immense and uncountable blessings that another child would have brought.

It’s powerful knowledge, being able to know when you are fertile.

And I’m just simple and dumb.  I like being able to have sex with my husband some of the time.  I like that a lot better than having sex with him none of the time.  The Church says this is a morally acceptable way to use our sexuality.  And I suppose, what with most of our theologians and all of our Popes being “none of the time” people, they probably have an inkling.