Oh, sweetheart, 18 years? My heart aches for you and for your wife. Listen, I'm not going to give you advice about how better to work NFP as I'm sure plenty of others with more experience will offer you that. I came to NFP not because my husband or I are Catholic, but as a holistic alternative to artificial contraception, with which I had had enough.

I feel the need to write you because I fear that the problem in your marriage is not in fact caused by NFP, but that NFP in the form it has taken. I presume to make this guess because many of the things you said hit very close to home for me — my husband and I had the exact same problem and got there by very different means. Let me explain.

We weren't virgins when we met and lived together for several years before we married. Our sex life waned before we married, the result of a distance that grew between us. It wasn't a big problem then — we loved each other, and when our timing was together, making love was fantastic. Then after our first child was born, my husband's libido shot through the roof while mine hit the floor. That's where the real damage occurred. He was so hurt by my rejection; he couldn't help feeling that it reflected upon him, that he wasn't desirable, that I didn't feel the same way about him that he did about me or that I used to. And I couldn't make him believe that it was something external to our relationship — my exhaustion, too many demands on my body by a breastfeeding infant to then have him bring more needs to me, and under it all, a physical change (chemical, it turns out, but I'll get to that later) in me. As awful as he felt, I, too felt like something was terribly wrong with me, in the most humiliating and shameful way imaginable. Meanwhile, he couldn't stop himself from pressuring me, and I felt the weight of his need and his resentment every second of every day.

I can't tell you how completely that strangled any surviving desire I might have nurtured. Try as I might to give of myself to him out of love, sex became all about him and what he needed, and I felt it no longer had anything to do with me. That's where your comment about her need for romance, the constantly shifting rules and especially romance turning into nothing more than a dressed up demand for sex hit home for me. We were totally in that place. However much he tried to give me room, even his giving me room turned into pressure. It wasn't that I was playing games with him; I simply didn't know what I needed or how to fix the problem, so I'd make suggestions, they wouldn't work, and we'd both feel frustrated.

After years (five for us) of working so hard with so little success, I realized that what romance meant to me was the need for true emotional intimacy — the feeling that we were in this together, us against the world, rather than you meet my needs before you expect me to meet yours (when you're both thinking that, clearly neither ever gets anything). For us, drinking had become a coping mechanism to deal with an injured marriage, but it was in fact one of the major causes of our marriage's injuries. We had to confront this problem together. We're still working through it, but facing the underlying causes of why we were pushing one another away was what it finally took to move the boulder that had come to stand between us and physical intimacy. We had to find a way to make lovemaking about giving of ourselves to the other instead of this holy grail that is being withheld from him or this terrible pressure to feel what I didn't feel.

I don't know what your issues might be, but I suspect there is something other than NFP that is standing between the two of you. I don't say this to blame either of you, but in the hopes that if you look away from the instrument, you might find the cause and come to rediscover the love and partnership you once felt for one another, with or without NFP. I fear that if you stopped NFP, you'd find very little changed.

There are two other important things that have helped us on our way out of this hole. One is counseling. I know it sounds trite, but at some point you've suffered enough alone that how much worse could it be to bare your soul to a complete stranger, someone trained to help you see your situation clearly, someone who's seen it all before, and most importantly, someone who can, without judging either of you or taking sides (and keep looking until you find someone who does exactly that), help you to find a solution to both your problems. Our counselor is our lifeline.

Finally, I owe NFP for giving me back my desire. Not (for us, anyway) the periodic abstinence part, but in reading through my home study book, I came across a supplement called Optivite. It's been tested to help with PMS, but anecdotal evidence has suggested that it helps with low libido in women, There's so little help out there in the medical community, that although I'd sought help from my doctor, there was nothing for me. This supplement, plus flaxseed oil gave me back my desire the very day I started it. I can't say that it will help your wife, but it worked for me.

I hope and pray that you and your wife find relief from an anguish I know only too well.