Dan & Pat

Dan: Our involvement with NFP goes back to shortly before our marriage back in 1985. So yes, we’ve been practicing NFP for over 20 years. Although we dated in high school, it wasn’t until a couple of years after college that we got married. Like many other couples, we first heard about NFP from friends. When I first heard the phrase “Natural Family Planning,” I thought, “Interesting concept...I guess when I get married I should check into that,” and promptly forgot about it until Pat mentioned it.

Pat had been diagnosed with a thyroid condition that required she take medication daily. She did not want to also take hormonal birth control, for a part of her that was not even “broken.” And we did want to have children eventually but not right away, so learning NFP was an appealing way for us to postpone having children.

Pat: I really appreciated having Dan on board with this “NFP stuff” as we were first learning. In retrospect, Dan really relates to a lot of young men who are uncomfortable taking an NFP class. He grew up with four brothers and no sisters, and even growing up on a farm did not prepare him enough for all this “cycles, temperature taking, and mucus stuff.” But it really was not as much work as he thought it might be. His daily habit is to give me the thermometer, and then later mark down the reading, plus provide an occasional reminder to me to observe the mucus sign.

Dan: When we did decide to have children, it was not as easy as one is led to believe, at least for us. It was during this time (months) of trying, but not getting pregnant that we attended a seminar on Catholic views on artificial reproductive technologies. This seminar helped us understand how these various technologies worked and that for the most part they really took all the love out of getting pregnant and replaced it with an all-business attitude. It all seemed so cold and indifferent…treating the body like a machine. Thank goodness we were both in agreement that we would not use any artificial means to achieve a pregnancy. This seminar was our first experience of the “why” of sexuality — the beauty of how God made us.

Pat: So, believe it or not, we got excited about the rules that we had learned for achieving or delaying a pregnancy, excited enough to decide to start the training process to become teachers of NFP. We now have five living children, so things did work, and quite well. Now before you think, “Five kids...how can they legitimately teach NFP with five kids?!”, let us explain what happened.

Dan: What happened was that our hearts were changed. As we practiced fertility awareness we matured and we gradually stretched beyond our thinking that there was an ideal number of children for our family. Instead we were asking “What does God have planned for our family?” We became aware that our children were a reflection of our love and that our children were (and are) teaching us to be better people. For example, they have taught us to be more kind, patient and understanding. They have also have brought much laughter and joy into our lives. We are truly blessed to have them. So we have used NFP to postpone, achieve, and through breastfeeding, space our children.

While practicing NFP, we have learned much more than just “fertility awareness.” We have learned better communication. By that I mean we have found that if we can talk about sex and intimacy and such very personal things, we can really talk about pretty much anything. I think we have also learned that sex and intimacy are not the same things. We can engage in sexual intercourse, but that does not mean we are “intimate” in the fullest and best sense of the word. We’re almost embarrassed to think about what we once thought was “making love” and what we now know and experience with each other.

Pat: Are there challenges to learning and using NFP? Pretty much anything worthwhile that we have done has required an effort, and has even been difficult at times. NFP is no less so. Learning to deal with abstinence can be a challenge. But Dan has grown and has become a better husband and father as a result. Would we choose NFP for our marriage again if we could do it, with the good times and bad times, all over again? Absolutely! It is one of the best decisions we have ever made together as a couple.