What a cri de coeur from a man who no longer feels loved and appreciated! Feeling so unhappy, who wouldn't cast about for someone or something to blame? And while the most obvious culprit seems to him to be NFP, I would insist that the real villain is the pornography-driven images that lash at our marriages, threatening peace. It would be too long to reply to his many charges, but the sum is clear: this man — and his unhappy wife — are in the midst of marital disillusionment. What to do about marital disillusionment? "Stay married!" encouraged CCL founder John Kippley in a talk many years ago on Casti Connubii.
Stay married despite all temptations to abandon vows. We live in a financially fantastic and pornography-driven world that taunts and threatens us, even while we are trying to live faithful lives. In these unavoidable images — ads, billboards, TV, magazines, internet — the glamorous lie of big money and great sex without consequences or responsibility seduces our minds and weakens our wills. Then we see in our spouse someone who is in our way, who has not given us the appreciation we deserve. It’s easy to slip further into self-pity, fantasy, and resentment. Life seems caught in a vicious circle of nightmare. But it isn't NFP that is the nightmare … it is the glamorous "alternative lifestyles" that smirk from every side and whisper empty promises.
We can choose not to visit pornographic sites, not to succumb to the advertising world around us, not to blame our "fate" for our dissatisfaction. We can be true friends and we can resist fantasies of the world, the flesh, and the devil. We can choose to be conscious of their deadly effects on us: the loss of gratitude, loss of respect for others, emotional abandonment of family, self-pity for our "loneliness," and resentment of tension in our lives.
When love becomes merely the release of tension, we have invited dissatisfaction. Love is not the release of tension; it is a willed fidelity, a willed friendship which we do not betray: for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death us do part. I would urge this dear man, who should be commended for having stayed married for 18 years, to have hope that his marriage can be renewed. He can step out of his dissatisfaction and make friends again with his wife, who sounds as alone and unhappy as he does. She needs to be reminded to affirm her husband, so that he feels loved and appreciated, too — and not just take him for a galley-slave, rowing to support the family's finances.
My husband and I have now been married for 38 years and we’re beginning to know something about marriage as a vocation. What gratitude for a life-long friend, my beloved husband! The married way — the whole life of the married way — is a privilege.
