Does NFP work? Do you see my 11 kids?

Someone on Facebook posed the question: "Why do all NFP teachers seem to have 5 kids?" It's a good question: if NFP works, why are these people always pregnant? One answer is that they want to have lots of children, which is a good thing but does raise the question of whether they practice the system they preach. But probably a more accurate answer is: do you know how many more kids we'd have without NFP?

So I did a little math on the subject I know best: myself. I have been married for 14 years minus 5 months, so 163 months. I had my first baby 15 months after I was married. My fertility returns, on average, 6 months postpartum (second child, 15 months younger than the first; and careful observation after the other four births bears that out). So, a fifteen month cycle between possible pregnancies. Had I not used NFP and gotten pregnant on a fifteen-month schedule, well, 15x11= 165. After being married for 162 months, I could be six months pregnant with my 11th child.

Let me restate that. I could have 11 children by my 14th anniversary without NFP. I will have six, almost half that number.

Now this isn't carved in stone. One won't necessarily get pregnant in a given cycle; I myself have gone several cycles without conceiving even when I was trying to. (Observation says that results in boys, BTW.) But you can't know that except in hindsight, and I do know that I can get pregnant even when I'm trying not to conceive; it's happened three times. (Observation: A girl, a miscarriage, and a girl.)

After the surprise of my second pregnancy, all my children have been spaced with NFP. The second closest spacing is 22 months -- still closer than I'd intended, but far saner and healthier than a 15-month spacing. As I get older and my pregnancies get tricksier, that spacing -- and the physical condition it allows me to recover -- become more vital. I was only 23 once.

So, I'm not an NFP instructor, but people may see my six kids and wonder, "Does NFP work?" And the answer is, "Do you see my 11 kids? No? Then I can assure you that it does."

The Fruitfulness of Truth

This is not the NFP post I was going to write for Natural Family Planning Awareness Week.

I had an insight yesterday, something that I thought expressed something true about NFP and its application, especially in the postpartum period. (Bear in mind, when I write, that baby is seven months old this week and that signs have been ambiguous since before he was four months old -- the sort of pattern that is infertile in retrospect, but makes every day a decision point for a couple not willing to risk conception right now, as we are most unitedly not.) I thought I might write about it, but I wanted to talk it over with Darwin first, because it is a good policy to talk over one's planned public discussion of sex with one's spouse. The resulting conversation (and non-conversation) showed me that the point was hurtful to him, though that wasn't my intention, and I wished I'd bitten my tongue and kept the reflection in my heart (as I'd halfway intended to do anyway) rather than bringing up something that could have been construed as a criticism.

I hurt Darwin not because I'm malicious or bitter or abnormal, but because my insight tangentially touched on the fact that no human couple can possibly fill all of another person's needs. That's true of the most virtuous, most balanced, best-suited marriage (the Darwins, in short). I hurt Darwin because what I said underscored my own humanity, that I am broken not even by sin (though by that too) but by the limitations of my body in this world. But it wasn't unreasonable or wrong of him to feel that pain. In marriage, when the two become as one and your flesh becomes my flesh, there can't really be any, "It's not you, it's me." Everything is a reflection on the other, which is why small comments become big fights and one's person's small actions can have such an outsized effect, positive or negative, on the other. But if we're both doing our best, and we both fall short, and our problem is not sin that can rejected, then how can this be reconciled? When even our best, most virtuous human efforts fall short, what recourse is there other than isolation and civil silence?

The only solution is to confide ourselves and our marriages deep in the heart of Jesus, who is the only person who can ever fulfill all needs. Every earthly marriage, friendship, parenthood, childhood, will fail, because no mother can be everything, no father can be everything, no wife or husband or friend can meet every physical, mental, and spiritual need. The only way to grow into a deeper relationship with someone is to trust in God to repair and better our deficiencies, and then to constantly be willing to lay down our lives so that He may take them up again. Not closing ourselves off, but constantly opening and stretching ourselves in him.

***

Truth is, I think, the key application of NFP. Naturally, the observation of cycles and the day-to-day decisions about sex, the health of the body, the respect for the body's natural capabilities, and a lack of delusion about our capacity to control all aspects of reproduction: all these are important aspects of Natural Family Planning, by whatever system one practices it. NFP is not perfect, not because of the "failure rate" or because someone's cycle is just too crazy to chart or because abstaining from sex can be really really hard or because of some inherent flaw in the concept. It's imperfect because everything this side of heaven is imperfect. It's imperfect because spouses are imperfect. Look around and you'll find that the relationships in which each person believes the other can totally fulfill all needs are the newest ones, the least mature ones, the ones untried by shared suffering, shared joys, shared daily life, without true judgment about real life and real people.

The reason to practice NFP, or to live a Christian life, despite the difficulties and the inevitable hardships, is that truth and openness and virtue will always bear fruit in a way that lies, misdirection, or taking the easy way cannot. The fruit may seem stunted or worthless or bitter at first. Or it may ripen immediately and be appealing to the senses and the will. But either way, it is divine, and participating in the will of God is never an empty exercise. We sow where we will not reap. We harvest what we did not sow. Between the sowing and the harvesting, which can be human activities, is the hand of God, mending our imperfect efforts. We transform our works and joys and sufferings in Him, and He transcends our flaws and our seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

***

Here's what happened. We were able to talk about last night's discussion a bit more freely over email today, once the immediate rawness had worn off. The pain I caused wasn't the destructive damage of a malicious, sinful action, but the constructive damage of a muscle being exercised. That muscle will repair itself if it is given rest and nourishment. The rest, I think, is key -- we didn't have to hash out every detail of this idea at that very moment, something that could have really strained our relationship as we both tried to justify our points of view. The work of being married doesn't have to be achieved in a moment of catharsis. It takes a lifetime of listening and adjusting, revisiting and rebuilding, and in making the good, hard decisions every day, and every night.

NFP: Not Just Natural Birth Control

If you think you've found the key to a better life, the most natural thing in the world is to want to rush out and convince everyone else to do likewise. We want to shout from the rooftops, "Hey! Better life to be found here! You can too!" As someone who finds significant meaning and happiness in the Catholic understanding of sexuality and prohibition of contraception, this view (and the approach to natural family planning that springs from it) is indeed something that I think other need to hear -- but as a result it's doubly frustrating when it seems like it's being "sold" wrong.

This is why my teeth went a little on edge when I ran into what ought to have been a very encouraging article to see in the Washington Post detailing the efforts of young and faithful Catholic women to re-explain the Church's teachings on contraception to the modern world. Here's the section that threw me off:

Yet the images the church uses to promote its own method of birth control freaked her out. Pamphlets for what the church calls natural family planning feature photos of babies galore. A church-sponsored class on the method uses a book with a woman on the cover, smiling as she balances a grocery bag on one hip, a baby on the other.

“My guess is 99 out of 100 21st-century women trying to navigate the decision about contraception would see that cover and run for the hills,” McGuire wrote in a post on her blog, Altcatholicah, which is aimed at Catholic women.

McGuire, 26, of Alexandria is part of a movement of younger, religiously conservative Catholic women who are trying to rebrand an often-ignored church teaching: its ban on birth control methods such as the Pill. Arguing that church theology has been poorly explained and encouraged, they want to shift the image of a traditional Catholic woman from one at home with children to one with a great, communicative sex life, a chemical-free body and babies only when the parents think the time is right.

Now, before I go any further, let me say that my limited experience of dealing with interviews is that what you say and the way you come off in the article are often very, very different. So I don't want to suggest that McGuire was misrepresenting NFP. It may well be that the WaPo writer talked to her for a long time, wrote up the article in good faith, yet ended up infusing it with an attitude that's just -- off.  (And indeed, I see that Jennifer Fulwiler of Conversion Diary (quoted elsewhere in the article) feels like what came across in the article is not exactly what she was trying to convey.)

That said, I think the message that the article conveys is problematic in that it simply doesn't reflect all that accurately what it's like using NFP, and when your advertising message doesn't fit the reality of your "product", user dissatisfaction is sure to follow. Emily Stimpson covers this well in a post titled Truth in Adverstising:

Let me be clear: I think it’s all sorts of great when young, attractive, faithful women talk to The Washington Post about contraception and NFP. And I totally get the importance of marketing and branding in this media age. We want people to know that NFP is not your grandmother’s rhythm method: It actually works. Nor is it your mother’s birth control pill: It doesn’t give you cancer or diminish your sex drive.

So what unsettles me?

Me, I guess. Me and my 11:45 a.m. battle with the brownie.

Like passing up turtle brownies, NFP requires self-control, temperance, and prudence. Only, it requires a heck of a lot more of each—more self-control, more temperance, more prudence, plus a ready knowledge of how to make chastity within marriage work. (I may be single, but it doesn’t take a genius to know that. Besides, I live in Steubenville, and my girlfriends talk about NFP as much as my sister’s friends talk about “Jersey Shore.” So…a lot.)

Regardless, temperance, prudence, and chastity aren’t virtues most people possess in spades anymore. Our culture, where instant gratification and over-indulgence are the norm, has seen to that.

At the same time, rejecting contraception in general requires trust—trust in God’s will and God’s provision. It requires generosity—a willingness to put others needs before our own. It requires a spirit of poverty—detachment from the extras our culture says are essentials. And it requires a heart that delights in pictures of fat smiling babies, that believes babies are precious gifts from God, not a reason to run for the hills.

Basically, it requires that we be everything our culture has programmed us not to be. That’s why NFP is a challenge for the most faithful couples I know, let alone those decidedly less faithful. Few are able to use it to space births with the same precision the manuals promise. Not because the methods don’t work. But rather because wills are weak and temptation is tempting. If a tiny tasty brownie can almost fell us, what can love and desire do?

Does that make NFP impossible or unrealistic? Of course not. Nevertheless, we should remain realistic about the fruit better branding can yield. We also should be realistic as we go about that branding.

No matter how savvy our marketing may be, NFP will remain a radical, counter-cultural choice, at least for the foreseeable future, because it asks…no, it demands that we reject our cultural programming and embrace a different way of thinking. Not simply about sex, but about everything: children, family, marriage, finances, work, God, desire, love, life’s purpose, life’s meaning, human freedom, the Divine Will, suffering, sacrifice. Again, everything.

NFP is not Catholic birth control. It’s the Catholic world view…lived out in the bedroom. [emphasis added]

The corrective is not some sort of bitter, "Oh I hate NFP. We can never have sex when we want to, half our kids were 'unplanned' and I never even feel like it during the infertile times, but it builds character, dammit, and it's about time people learned that marriage isn't all about self indulgence." That's not going to win any converts, and unless you allow yourself to be completely taken over by resentment (at which point people are able to make even unloading the dishwasher into some sort of Bataan death march of marital suffering) it's not even true. But living the NFP lifestyle -- which can be most briefly summed up as understanding that if one doesn't want to get pregnant at the moment, one is going to have to not have sex on some occasions when one would really like to -- takes effort and commitment. If you go into it with the idea, "all I want is to not have a baby right now" or even "all I want to do is control my fertility without using chemicals" it's going to seem pretty onerous.

With a difficult and commitment heavy process, success and satisfaction depend on actually learning to embrace the process itself, not just the goals. The people I know who look seriously fit are not the ones who hate exercising and eating well, but like to look good and so struggle through. Almost no one is able to put that much consistent effort into something he doesn't actually want to do. Success in that area comes from finding an athletic activity one can like and working up to the point where one actually wants to engage in it. That doesn't mean it isn't hard. But it's something hard that you want to do.

Using NFP is rewarding. It trains spouses into greater consideration for each other, a more communicative and other-focused sexuality, and a greater appreciation of the way that their love for each other ties intimately together with their parenthood. But it's no more a natural form of birth control than picking up a loaf of "organic" bread at Wal-Mart is the same as farming.

How To Marry a Nice Girl

Manosphere blogger "Dalrock" has linked to me under the apparent misapprehension that because I wrote that it is okay for someone (even, some were shocked to hear, a woman) to intentionally remain single so long as he or she remains celibate, MrsDarwin and I are promoting fornication. This seems to be about on par with Dalrock's previously shown abilities to read and understand the arguments of others, and once again I can't help responding, especially because he attempts to make an argument from data while clearly using an incomplete historical trend and generally not knowing what he's talking about.

[Before I get into this, an editorial note: Last time I unleashed a broadside at the manosphere in general and Dalrock in particular, I was spoiling for a fight after watching Dalrock's readers flood into the comboxes of Patheos in response to a post by Elizabeth Duffy and behave pretty badly while doing so. (This ranged from garden variety rudeness to calling the author a c***.) So when I stepped in with a response post, I was in the mood for a fight. When one of Dalrock's readers started propounding the idea that regardless of repentance any woman who had sex before marriage was "a slut" and could never get married, I grew tired of dealing with the situation, banned him, and closed the thread. Since I'm responding to Dalrock again, I'm permanently lifting the ban on that commenter, and will leave the thread open to any manosphere types interested in engaging in conversation. That said, I want to make it clear that the standards around here are different from those in the manosphere, and so just in case anyone is unclear, being generally derogatory towards women (or men) is unacceptable behavior around here. So, in general, is the use of terms like "slut", "ho", "c***", etc.]

Now, to respond to Dalrock's post, the first very odd thing is a conviction Dalrock seems to have about how what he terms "trad cons" view marriage and sexuality. He's his summary:

Most Traditional Conservatives are obsessed with creating and enforcing rules of the road for fornication. There is an unspoken assumption that young women engaging in uncommitted sex have a right to swing from man to man on an ultimate path to marriage. Once the woman tires of the carousel, Christian and secular Traditional Conservatives ride in on a white horse and start demanding that whichever man the woman is having uncommitted sex with now must do the honorable thing and marry her. However, Trad Cons go a step further and also create elaborate rules of the road for fornication in their desperate attempt to make the carousel as pleasurable and rewarding an experience for women as possible.
...
Yet Trad Con moral angst is directed almost exclusively at the men in the fornication market who they feel aren’t playing by the rules. It isn’t that these men are fornicating, it is that they aren’t doing it the way Trad Cons want them to do it. As I wrote above, this comes from a generally unspoken assumption that fornication is the logical path for women to follow to marriage. Therefore their partners in fornication need to live up to a set of high fornication standards. With seemingly no discussion this idea has somehow become sacred, something which must not be challenged.

Now, I'm pretty used to the fact that the circles I move in are a very tiny portion of the US population. The Catholic sub-culture in which we live is radically different even from the more mainstream Catholic culture that tends to show up in surveys (you know, the one in which only 25% of people go to mass and the majority don't follow the Church's teachings on contraception). However, with that proviso: I certainly have never heard traditionalist conservatives (a group in which I number myself) say that sex outside of marriage is fine so long as you follow certain social norms. The message that we keep putting forward is that sex belongs only in marriage. If you are not married do not have sex. It doesn't matter if you are a man or a woman, if you think of yourself as an "alpha" or a "beta", if you think you are deeply in love and committed or if you are just out for a good time, sex does not belong outside of marriage and violating this moral law is not only a sin but (and for those with an understanding of moral law this is an obvious corollary) it will also end up causing short and long term problems for your current and future (if any) relationships. While I'm stating the unpopular, let trot out the point that really gets scorn heaped upon us traditionalist conservatives: Not only should you not have sex outside of marriage, but sex itself is inextricably linked with procreation. So even after you're married, if you don't want to get pregnant at the moment, there are going to be periods of time when you need to abstain from sex even though you're married. In accordance with the Church's teachings and natural law, we traditionalist conservatives use Natural Family Planning and reject artificial birth control and the contraceptive mentality that goes with it. What's the difference between these two? Put briefly, NFP involves not having sex during the fertile part of the wife's cycle, while artificial birth control involves taking fertility out of the woman's cycle so you can have sex whenever you want.

If all this sounds a bit dour, it's worth pointing out that married couples using NFP report higher sexual satisfaction, better communication, and a 5% divorce rate -- staggeringly better than the population in general. As the Skeptics point out, some of these studies on the benefits of NFP are not as rigorous as one might like. This is one of problems when you have small and poorly funded groups. On the other hand, the studies line up pretty well with my personal experiences. Of all the couples our age (mid 30s) we've known living our kind of life in the Catholic sub culture, only one that I knew personally has gotten divorced. That would be highly unusual in most other parts of society.

Having made the claim that we traditional conservatives are all for fornication so long as it's on terms that the manosphere doesn't like, Dalrock then tries to diagnose the real problem:

Why do the Darwin Catholics and Pastor Driscolls of the world look at women engaging in the hookup culture and see marriage material? At the same time, why do men like FFY see these same women as good for a good time and nothing more? I think the answer to both questions can be found in the shift from a dating/courtship/marriage Sexual Marketplace (SMP) to our current hookup/serial monogamy SMP, and this is closely related to the changing age of marriage...

He then does a little bit of pop sociology in which he points do the increasing age of average marriage over the decades from 1950 to the present and engages in some imaginative reconstructions of how these average marriage ages indicates changing attitudes in women towards men and the "sexual market place". Here's a sample:

Fast forward a decade to the 1960s. As you can see, the trend has continued but the fundamental SMP hasn’t changed; the median age of marriage has increased by only a few months. If you are an 18 year old young woman, you still find that your peers just a few years older than you are very likely to already be married. The pressure is on to find a husband. Screwing cads for sport might be enticing, but there is no time to waste, and developing a reputation would harm your near term goal of finding the best husband you can attract.

Since the women are still looking for dads and not cads, as a young man the signal is still strong; work hard and prepare to act as a provider. Young women will spot the young men with the best potential and want to be with them.

Dalrock keeps this up until he reaches the present, with an average age at first marriage of 26.5 for women, and from this concludes:

Skip ahead to the generation that survived Y2k. Women are marrying roughly an additional year later than they did a decade ago, and 7.5 years later than they did in the 1950s. An 18 year old woman’s peers aren’t looking for a husband, and neither are the women 2 and 4 years older than her. The women who are looking for husbands are in a very different life stage than she is, so this removes her sense of urgency. The only thing holding her back from fully embracing the now raging hookup culture would be a strong moral belief that sex shouldn’t occur before marriage. For the rest, why not go after the hottest men they can find? There will be time to paper it over with stories about college boyfriends later. Besides, everyone is doing it.
...
As you can see, the trend of women having “relationships” with men for an extended period of time has continued in the most recent years data is available for. Unfortunately, Trad Cons are so obsessed with the rules for the road of fornication they can’t focus on bringing us back to a truly moral situation.

So, the clear conclusion is that telling people not to have sex until they're married doesn't work (and according to Dalrock, we Trad Cons aren't doing this anyway) and the solution to this is to get back to where the average marriage age for women is 20 so that women will want "dads not cads".

There are a couple basic problems with this analysis which Dalrock may or may not be aware of. One obvious weak point is that there's a limit to how low the average age of marriage can practically go. (Well, unless you wear white robes and carry an AK-47.) 20 is pretty low, especially for those of us who expect to go to college. There are those who advocate getting married in college, but since a man isn't able to support a family while in college, and a woman finds it difficult to finish a degree while having children, I advise against it. MrsDarwin and I chose to date chastely for nearly four years after meeting a couple weeks into our Freshman year and got married seven weeks after getting our degrees. I continue to think that was the right choice even for people who met at 18. It's also why I personally have a low level of sympathy for the argument that it's impossible to remain a virgin a long time for marriage. I personally waited four years, despite knowing very quickly that MrsDarwin was the person I was going to marry. And I know good Catholic guys (and also good Catholic women) who are in their late 20s or early 30s, still looking hard for the right spouse, and still saving themselves for marriage. We are not ruled by averages -- we rule ourselves through moral choices. Moreover, a big part of the problem is that in the sexually permissive society that has sprung up in the wake of the "sexual revolution" the average age of first pre-marital sex has steadily gone down. In the 50s it was 20.4 but now it's 17.6. We can hardly tell people that they should all be married by 17. Rather, the correct message is that they shouldn't be having sex before marriage at all, whenever that age is.

Secondly, by starting in the 50s, Dalrock misses a fact I imagine he's not aware of: the 50s marked a low point in the average marriage age in the US. This table shows median age at first marriage (rather than average), so the numbers are very slightly different from what Dalrock's quoting, but the trend is very clear: the median age at first marriage fell steadily from 22 for women in 1890 to 20.3 for women in 1950. It didn't rise to the 1890 rate again until 1980. Was 1890 a racy period of constant pre-marital sex in which alphas ruled and betas suffered? No. Indeed, from what data we have pre-marital sex was significantly less common in the 1890s than the 1950s (in part, no doubt, because contraception was less available and abortion more dangerous, not to mention that morals had not degraded as far in this area as they had by the '50s) and divorce was far less common then than in the 1950s. Nor was 1890 a fluke.

Here are three papers that deal with the "European Marriage Model", the way in which Western Europeans tended to regulate fertility by marrying later, and by more people never marrying at all.

This one gives average age at first marriage in 1600-1649, 1650-1699, 1700-1749, 1750-1799, and 1800-1849, the results for women are: 26, 26.5, 26.2, 24.9, and 23.4 respectively.

Here's one that gives the average age of first marriage for women in 1790 for several Western European countries (see Table 2 on page 9):

Belgium 24.9
France 25.3
Germany 26.6
England 25.2
Netherlands 26.5
Scandinavia 26.1

And finally, check out Table 5 here and the percentage of women aged 25-29 who had never married in these countries in 1890-1900:

Great Britain: 42%
Switzerland: 45%
Sweden: 52%
Portugal: 41%
Germany: 34%

Again, these were not, in 1900, hotbeds of sexual immorality. People could not afford to get married, or they couldn't find someone to marry, and so they just didn't marry and (in the main) did not have sex.

The US in the 1950s was not some sort of world norm for what age people marry at when they're not being sexually promiscuous prior to marriage, it was the product of a particular time in which affluence was reaching unheard-of heights, birth control was becoming available, and sex before marriage (while increasingly common over the last 50 years) was still socially disapproved of. However, once again, we don't marry averages, we marry people. There is not a perfect age to marry that will guarantee you a faithful spouse. Rather, there is a right person to marry, who shares your beliefs about marriage, who is willing to join you in a happy marriage.

Third and lastly, Dalrock's amateur sociology by decade leaves out an obvious problem: People who divorce in one decade probably got married anywhere from 5-20 years before. Take a look at this chart of US divorce rates since 1860 (with some historically significant events marked as well) and note that far from guaranteeing marital stability divorce rates were already relatively high in the 50s compared to the past (in which people married older) and when they shot up in the 60's and '70s, it was often as not people who had married 10+ years before who were getting divorced.

[source]

In other words, marrying a 20-year-old woman is no guarantee you won't get divorced. Lots of those women who married young in the 50s and 60s proceeded to get divorced in the 70s and 80s.

Does this mean you shouldn't marry young? Obviously, we don't think so, since we married at 22 (well under the average marriage age in 2001.) But it is true that all data these days suggest that those who marry young are more likely to divorce than those who married older. That didn't worry me, because I wasn't marrying "woman aged 22" and I wasn't marrying 100 women and hoping to get the maximum percentages of those marriages to last; I was marrying one woman who shared my beliefs about the nature of marriage (as taught by the Catholic Church) and who had been in a faithful and chaste relationship with me for the last three and a half years.

Alright, so I've spent a lot of time shooting down Dalrock's explanations. Clearly the open question is: If you're a guy who wants to have a happy and lasting marriage in this day and age (when that's certainly not the norm), what should you do?

Have a Reason
I recall a while back listening to one of the EconTalk podcasts where host Russ Roberts (who is a practicing Jew) was observing that while many people talk about how they want to forgo aspects of modern technology and follow a simpler life, one of the few groups of people that do this with any regularity is the Amish, who do it for religious reasons.  He speculated (analogizing Jewish religious practices, particularly Orthodox ones) that when you have a lifestyle which has some attractions but is very, very hard to stick to, in general it's only going to be people who have a religious-strength reason for following that lifestyle who are going to follow through.

In this day and age, not having sex till marriage (which these manosphere types seem expect of women, though I'm less clear whether they expect if of themselves) and remaining married until death after marrying is very, very countercultural.  Why would you go through the work?  For us, it's because we believe that acting otherwise would be a mortal sin -- a sin for which, unless truly repented of, one goes to hell.

If you believe that too, you're a good part of the way there.  Now just find a woman who shares that belief just as deeply as you do.  It is, to my mind, far more important that a potential wife truly shares your deepest beliefs about what marriage is than how old she is or what her sexual history is prior to reaching those beliefs -- if you are dealing with a woman who routinely violates her own stated beliefs, as opposed to having had a history prior to reaching those beliefs, you may well have a problem on your hands and should do some very, very serious thinking.

If, on the other hand, you don't hold these kind of beliefs, if you just think it would be more pleasant not to get divorced and to have a wife without prior history, but you don't think it is wrong for you yourself to have sex before marriage, don't think it's wrong for you to divorce, etc:  In that case, you need to start looking at your expectations and ask yourself why you expect something out of your potential wife that you don't adhere to yourself.

Move Among People Who Share The Beliefs You Want To Live By
You would think this would be a no-brainer, but people violate this principle with surprising frequency and don't understand why it causes them problems. I recall one of my parent's single friends complaining to my mom (many years ago) that the girls he went out with never seemed to want to get married. "You only go to meet women in bars," Mom pointed out. "How about you start going to church again and meet a girl there?"

Now, I know some very nice girls who go to bars at times -- and not just for Theology On Tap, but also just to have a drink once and a while -- but it's true that if you move primarily among people who aren't interested in marriage, or who have a view of marriage as something you might do after cohabiting for a number of years, unless you too want to follow that path, you need to find a new social set. If you never spend time with people who share your beliefs about marriage, no amount of ranting on the internet about your lack of prospects is going to hook you up with someone who does.

Be The Sort of Man That The Sort Of Woman You Want Would Want To Marry
(And that her father, brothers and brothers-in-law won't veto either.)

This is not just a matter of: "I have a good job, male genitals and am not bad looking." If you want to marry a woman who has saved herself for marriage, and you've spent some time realizing that these sorts of women are not exactly thick on the ground in the United States in 2012, it's worth asking yourself: Are you the sort of man that woman is going to want to marry? You've essentially admitted that such women are rare, and rare commodities are precious. Are you worth it to her?

Have you yourself remained a virgin? Have you avoided porn and masturbation? If you haven't done these, or worse yet have no intention of refraining from fornication, porn, masturbation, etc. from here on out, it's time for a reality check. You may not want to compete with theoretical future wife's past lovers, but why should she want to have to compete with your past lovers, your online porn habit or your wanking?

Have you shown that you're a steady guy who's ready to provide for a wife and family?  Are you able to be someone that a woman actually wants to be around?  (Hint for manosphere types, from a guy who's been happily married for a good while and has a lot of close female friends: Most women do not find locker room behavior attractive, nor do they find guys who go around saying things like "The smartest woman is dumber than the dumbest man," a turn on. Don't delude yourself that because you don't say it to her face, she won't pick up on your attitude.)

Do you share the religious convictions that your future wife has? And, see above, are there many women with your religious convictions, or lack thereof, who are wanting to live as you want her to have lived and have a marriage such as you want to have?

If you're coming down on the wrong side of a lot of these questions, it's time for you to do some serious thinking about your desires versus your actions.

Realize That Good Things Are Worth Waiting For
Too many people, whether it's apparently secular manosphere types like Dalrock's readers or strongly traditionalist Christians talking about how everyone should be doing "Christian Courtship" rather than dating seem to think that finding a spouse is something that can be done rapidly with sufficient force of will, and that anyone who isn't succeeding quickly must be being too picky or not really trying.  Maybe I'm an odd one to disagree with this, since I met my wife when I was 18, but I've always considered that to be quite the piece of luck.  Among my friends and relatives, I know a number of people who also married right out of college.  But I also know people who, though honestly searching and wanting very much to get married, took a long time to find a spouse, or haven't found one yet.  This summer I'll be crisscrossing the country to attend the weddings of three good friends, all good Catholic guys in their early 30s who've been honestly searching hard for the right woman to marry, but didn't succeed until quite recently.

And obviously, each of those weddings has a similar story behind it for the woman: good Catholic girls who've been wanting to get married for years but didn't come across the right guy until recently.  And there are other nice Catholic girls who are still searching.

If you have a highly counter-cultural idea of what marriage is, your pool of potential mates is far, far smaller than the average.  Especially if you're spending a lot of your time moving around mainstream circles, most of the people you're meeting simply aren't marriage material for you.  But even if, like MrsDarwin and I, you spend most of your social time in a sub-culture of like-minded people, who share your beliefs and desire in regards to marriage, finding someone you want to spend the rest of your life with and raise a family with (and who shares the feeling) is often going to take a lot of searching.

If, on the other hand, you're convinced that there are lots of women you could happily marry, but they keep turning you down, your problem might be that instead of a specific woman you're just seeing "a piece of marriage material".  Time to slow down and actually get to know a girl. They like that. Trust me on this.

What About Those Who Haven't Been Living The Life Up Till Now?
Given what our culture is, there are obviously a lot of people (men and women) who have not always lived chastely who now find themselves wanting to marry happily and permanently. From what I can make out from the remarks made by Dalrock and his commenters, their solution to this problem seems to be, "If you're a man, dump the woman you're currently sleeping with and demand a virgin to marry, then everything will be fine. If you're a woman, forget about it; you're damaged goods and aren't worth marrying." Aside from the apparent misogynist double standard involved in this thinking, there's an obvious numerical problem. The number percentage of men and women engaging in premarital sex is pretty equal, and if all the men think they're somehow God's gift to virgin womanhood, there's going to be some competition going on that's not going to work out numerically to everyone's satisfaction.

Dalrock accuses me of being in the "man up and marry those sluts column". I suppose it's one of the contradictions of true Christianity that it scandalizes both those who hate the fact that we believe that the moral law exists in the first place (this would be the people who are always telling us we need to get out of their bedrooms and stop judging) and also scandalizes those who've endorsed a sort of post-Christian (or for the Christians, perhaps neo-Puritan) shame-society -- these folks are shocked that we actually believe in forgiveness.

However, it's important to be clear that when Catholics talk about forgiveness and conversion, we're not talking about the kind of tearful altar call feelings that many Protestants are thinking of. Remember, we Catholics don't accept Martin Luther's "snow on a dung heap" image of how forgiveness works. If you want to really see what kind of hard-asses we are when it comes to expiation of sins, pick up a copy of Dante's Purgatorio and read it through carefully.

It's not enough to just be sorry for past sins. Virtue is a habit towards the good. If your virtue muscles are underdeveloped because you haven't been living according to the Church's moral principles, the only way to get back into shape morally is through rigorous practice. Like any kind of strenuous training for those who aren't fit, it takes a lot of time, effort and pain. And it's not something you can just quit once you've gotten in shape if you want to stay that way.

If a couple has been sleeping together for a while, and they're now wanting to get married according to the Church's understanding of marriage, what I would advise (and to my knowledge what any priest is supposed to insist on unless there are very unusual circumstances) is that they completely cease having sex immediately, go to confession, and then successfully continue their relationship in complete chastity for a good solid while before scheduling a wedding. (The usual big exception to this advice is if they're pregnant, in which case they may well want to get married much more quickly, but again, any good priest is going to be very, very cautious about that kind of situation.)

If you're trying to decide whether to marry a woman who has engaged in sexual sin in the past, but who now says she shares your beliefs about sex, then the obvious question is: How long has she been living according to her new beliefs, and how successfully has she done so? Sexual immorality (like any other kind of immorality) is habit-forming, and breaking habits takes time and hard work. If you've had an alcoholic in the family or among your friends, you know that how much confidence you have in that person not relapsing is entirely a function of their level of commitment to staying out of temptation, and how long they've successfully been on the the wagon.

And of course, if you have a history of sexual sin, expect any woman considering marrying you to be asking exactly the same questions about you.



This post is so long already that I'm hesitant to pour more words into writing a conclusion. But then, no one ever said that living a counter-cultural life style would be easy or involve low word counts.

Fertile Attraction

One of the things that sets humans apart from most other creatures is that we don't have a "mating season" or period of going "into heat" which is the only period during which we're interested in getting it on with the opposite sex -- we are notoriously interested in Topic A all the time. However, several recent studies have been digging into the question of whether, unconsciously, men can actually sense when a woman is fertile and respond to her differently as a result.

The New York Times wrote up one of these stories a couple weeks ago in which Florida State researchers had various men come into their laboratory, and spend a few minutes playing Legos with a demure 21-year-old research assistant:

The 21-year-old woman was carefully trained not to flirt with anyone who came into the laboratory over the course of several months. She kept eye contact and conversation to a minimum. She never used makeup or perfume, kept her hair in a simple ponytail, and always wore jeans and a plain T-shirt.

Each of the young men thought she was simply a fellow student at Florida State University participating in the experiment, which ostensibly consisted of her and the man assembling a puzzle of Lego blocks. But the real experiment came later, when each man rated her attractiveness. Previous research had shown that a woman at the fertile stage of her menstrual cycle seems more attractive, and that same effect was observed here — but only when this woman was rated by a man who wasn’t already involved with someone else.

The other guys, the ones in romantic relationships, rated her as significantly less attractive when she was at the peak stage of fertility, presumably because at some level they sensed she then posed the greatest threat to their long-term relationships. To avoid being enticed to stray, they apparently told themselves she wasn’t all that hot anyway.

This is, it seems, part of a growing body of data suggesting that while we as humans are not consciously aware of when a woman is fertile, there are in fact observable differences in how women behave and how men react to women that correlate to the woman's fertility cycle.

One major question, however, is how exactly it is that men get these queues to which they respond differently. Is it some sort of physical difference? Does a woman look or smell different when she is fertile, in some way that men are not consciously aware of but respond to? Or is it that women unconsciously act differently?

In one recent study, it was found that women tended to give more attention to their hair, make-up and clothing when near their peak fertility:

Using a sample of 30 partnered women photographed at high and low fertility cycle phases, we show that readily-observable behaviors – self-grooming and ornamentation through attractive choice of dress – increase during the fertile phase of the ovulatory cycle. At above-chance levels, 42 judges selected photographs of women in their fertile (59.5%) rather than luteal phase (40.5%) as “trying to look more attractive.” Moreover, the closer women were to ovulation when photographed in the fertile window, the more frequently their fertile photograph was chosen.

And perhaps most interestingly, though firmly in the "don't try this at home" category, a group of researches got exotic dancers to provide daily information about the tips they earned from lap dancing and also their ovulatory cycle. Dancers received dramatically more tips during their fertile days:

Eighteen dancers recorded their menstrual periods, work shifts, and tip earnings for 60 days on a study web site. A mixed-model analysis of 296 work shifts (representing about 5300 lap dances) showed an interaction between cycle phase and hormonal contraception use. Normally cycling participants earned about US$335 per 5-h shift during estrus, US$260 per shift during the luteal phase, and US$185 per shift during menstruation.

The kicker? Exotic dancers on The Pill did not show the fertility peak in earnings, and earned less overall than the non-pill using dancers. The authors of the study seem to think this probably suggests some sort of subtle scent or appearance difference during fertile times, though (going from our experience as a married couple charting fertility over the last decade in relation to NFP) I would strongly suspect that it's instead that the non-pill using dancers in some sense telegraph more sincerity or desire when fertile.

Whatever the reason, it's a mildly interesting area of developing research. And for those NFP-using husbands out there who find fertile periods frustrating, this now provides scientific evidence that it is not just their imagination: their wives really are hotter than most other women.

NFP and Fasting

When trying to explain the Catholic understanding of sexuality to someone "outside", I almost invariably find myself falling back on analogies relating to diet and gluttony. It's a natural comparison, and while modern society has lost any sense that it's reasonable to have any less sex if you want to have fewer children, people are able to get more righteous then ever over the point that if you want to be fit you must, must, must eat moderately and exercise more.

Indeed, diet and exercise may be the one thing relating to sexuality where modern culture understands a great deal of self denial. After all, one of the motivations for all this diet and exercise is, I think one may honestly admit, to look better while naked.

Which leaves the obvious question: Why has a Church which finds itself swimming against a quickening current in regards to its teaching on birth control nearly totally abandoned any sort of severity in regards to fasting?

Sure, we're an "Easter people" and all that, but maybe some rigorous self denial for the sake of religion would help us with some rigorous self denial for the sake of our faith. I've been pretty much as bad as the next fellow on this -- doing the mental calculation of whether I can make one more cup of coffee and still make the hour fast before mass or falling to the "I'll say some extra prayers tonight as a sacrifice instead" temptation on Fridays outside of Lent when meat is all that appears on the menu. But this is, after all, part of the problem. The constant NFP lament is "Look, we played by the rules all those years before we were married. Why does there have to be frustration now too?"

If virtue is a habit, perhaps it's time to form some more habits around denial of appetite.

Real Sex vs. the Contraceptive Mentality (Part 4 & Conclusion)

[Continued from Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3]

NFP and the Contraceptive Mentality

In concluding this series, I'd like to address the question which originally set me on on this overly extended journey: Is it possible for users of Natural Family Planning to have a "contraceptive mentality" and if so what does that mean in the context of NFP?

I've described the contraceptive mentality as: The idea that having sex and reproducing are two activities with no necessary connection, that having sex in no way suggests a desire or willingness to have children with the person you are having sex with.

At root, I think that NFP is formulated in such a way as to be in direct opposition to the contraceptive mentality. According to an understanding of sexuality rooted in human instinct and biological reality, the way to avoid conceiving children is to not have sex. This is also the means of avoiding conception which is considered acceptable by the Church in the context of its understanding of the moral nature of sexuality. NFP is considered morally acceptable by the Church for the reason that it consists of avoiding pregnancy by not having sex, with the modern refinement of allowing the married couple to understand with a certain degree of confidence when it is that they need to avoid having sex in order to avoid conception. Rather than abstaining all the time in order to avoid pregnancy, the couple can abstain for between a quarter and half out of the woman's cycle, and achieve the same result with relative certainty.

For us as human persons, this requires a degree of self mastery over our natural instincts. The modern NFP-using married couple finds itself in a situation (well housed and fed by historical standards, healthy, and lying in bed with a member of the opposite sex with whom one would certainly not object to having conjugal relations) which would seem to scream: Have sex! Reproduce! But for various prudent reasons arrived at by human reason, they may well consider it important at a given time to overcome that instinct and abstain for a portion out of each month in order to avoid having children for a time.

However, while this use of periodic abstinence to avoid pregnancy does not necessarily involve the contraceptive mentality, indeed emphasizes quite the opposite, I think that as NFP-using couples we do find ourselves subject to the temptations of the wider culture in this regard.

The assumption which has, over the last 80+ years since the use of artificial birth control became widespread, become so basic to our culture as to be completely unspoken and unconscious, even among those of us who see ourselves as standing in opposition to it, is that a happily married husband and wife will have a "good sex life" consisting of regular marital relations, sometimes passionate or creative, sometimes comfortable and familiar, which expresses the couples love and affection for one another. Even for those of us who see fertility as a part of our marriage equal to and related to conjugal bliss, it's nearly impossible to shake the feeling of, "We're married; we should be able to do this."

Some NFP guides try to soften and direct this frustration: During the fertile part of the cycle, if you are delaying pregnancy, is a great time for date nights and cuddling and other non-sexual expressions of affection.

The message seems to be that one should somehow be able to channel all of one's desire for sex into the non-fertile periods of the cycle. You, as an NFP user can have sex whenever you want, if only you can first have the first have the self control to only want it when you can have it! And you should be able to do this, because marriage isn't just about sex. Just be organized enough to schedule the non-sexual parts of your marital relationship for the fertile parts of the wife's cycle.

I think this overly optimistic view of NFP misses a basic understanding of human nature which we ignore to our own confusion and frustration: We are as creatures designed to "want" to reproduce a good deal more than we as thinking human beings desire to, and going against our instincts in this realm requires a degree of self denial which is often experienced as frustration or unhappiness. We are unlikely to feel entirely satisfied while practicing NFP because practicing it means denying our instincts.

This is particularly hard for us in the modern world because the understanding of sex which existed before the 20th century is remote and nearly irrecoverable for us -- the understanding which saw it as something of a double-edged sword, intensely pleasurable but at the same time as potentially high in cost. If the relationships of prior centuries often seem to our modern eyes a bit distant or dour, it is in part because it is impossible for us to recover the real sense of potential cost which applied to sexual intercourse -- both because pregnancy is less risky now and because even for those who have never in their lives used contraception the idea that "we should be able to have sex" is inescapable.

I don't think that this is in any way a strike against NFP. Certainly, it makes the spacing of children easier upon a couple than not having the ability to read the signs of fertility, and I think that the reduced sense of risk or fear surrounding sex is indeed a good thing for marital relationships. However, we must at the same time understand that in seeking to apply prudence to our reproduction, and do so without use of artificial means which separate sex and reproduction, we necessarily will have to exert a degree of self control which will result in some degree of difficulty and frustration. If we deceive ourselves that such things can be achieved without difficulty, we set ourselves up for nothing but frustration and disappointment.

For those of us who reject artificial contraception, not getting pregnant requires not having sex, and not having sex means denying one's natural desires, which, as any dieter can tell you, requires self denial which is not always pleasant.

Real Sex vs. the Contraceptive Mentality (Part 3)

[Continued from Part 1 and Part 2]

Enter Artificial Birth Control

In Part 2, I discussed the sense in which marriage customs and sexual morality can be seen as an adaptive response to controlling childbearing. I'd like now to turn to the question of artificial birth control.

In my first job out of college, a small chemical distribution company, I sat next to the customer service group, and thus found myself overhearing a lot of middle-aged "girl talk". One anecdote I particularly remember was recounted by a woman who'd married in the late sixties. She told about how when she and her husband were still engaged, she'd gone with her mother to a wedding, and her mother had taken occasion to whisper to her that it was generally known that the bride had "had to get married."

"I'm just so glad you're a good girl and you'll never need to get married quickly like that, my mother told me," she said. "Of course, what she didn't know is that I'd been on the pill for the last three years."

I think this does a good job of underlining a massive shift in social structure and morality which the advent of plentiful and efficient birth control allowed. The adherance to social and moral norms ("being a good girl" as the mother put it), which had previously been essential for avoiding the bearing of children out of wedlock or a hasty marriage to the father of an impending child, was now rended unnecessary by The Pill. Artificial birth control is certainly not 100% effective, but it is effective enough to allow people to separate sex and reproduction in their minds. Having sex with some given person or at some given time becomes one choice, having a baby with some given person or at some given time becomes a totally separate and unrelated choice.

This, I would argue, is the "contraceptive mentality" in its most basic form: the idea that having sex and reproducing are two activities with no necessary connection, that having sex in no way suggests a desire or willingess to have children with the person you are having sex with.

From a societal point of view, I think this puts us into a state of clear and major change. Whereas there used to be very clear biological and societal reasons to strongly pressure people not to engage in sex outside of marriage (primarily women -- there was always the double standard resulting from the fact that it is women who become pregnant) in addition to the moral reasons which we as Christians recognize, these practical and secular reasons for avoiding sex outside of stable relationships have been reduced to half-hearted (and unpersuasive) suggestions like: Wait until you are emotionally ready.

Who, after all, at such a moment is really sitting around thinking, "Oh, but perhaps I'm not emotionally ready."

Thus, when its full implications are considered, the contraceptive mentality removes virtually all of the practical reasons for seeking permanence and exclusivity in sexual relationships. And, indeed, the loss of these is pretty much what we see around us.

However, this renders us very confused creatures. As biological creatures, we still have the physical pleasures and instinctual emotional ties associated with sex which developed because of its reproductive function. And yet most of us do not think of sex as being reproductive. The fact that natural incentive and natural effects have been so totally disengaged must have a major effect on us -- and the fact that sex is something both so attractive and so essential to the relationships which are the building blocks and perpetuators of society means that the imbalance resulting from this de-coupling of incentive and effect will reverberate throughout society in major ways.

[to be continued: Part 4]

Real Sex vs. the Contraceptive Mentality (Part 2)

[Continued from Part 1]

Restraint, Relationships and Planning Parenthood

When I say that we "naturally want to avoid having children" at certain times, I would imagine that the image that comes immediately to mind is of birth control, abortion or infanticide, and most traditional societies have seen these in some form or other. However, I'd like to turn our attention to something so basic and so prevalent that we don't think about it much.

From an anthropological point of view, the entire structure of our romantic and family relationships serves as a way to control childbearing, limitting it to situations in which offspring can be supported. Consider: Requiring that young women remain virgins until marriage ensured that children will not be born without a provider. Nor was the decision to marry, when it came, a strictly individual affair. Marriage was negotiated and approved by the wider families, because the families were in effect committing to help support the new family unit being created. Many cultures also required the husband's family to pay a "bride price", not simpy as compensation for the lost contribution of the daughter to her own family, but as proof that the husband was of sufficient means to start a family.

Once in place, this set of cultural mores and laws provided an easy way to adjust to want or plenty: In good times, people married young, in bad they married late and some did not marry at all. Within a marriage, the strong cultural ideal of the faithful wife ensured that if husband and wife avoided intercourse to space children the husband would not find some other male getting his genes in on the sly, while the cultural rules surrounding legitimacy assured the wife that even if her husband was unfaithful during such a time, any children resulting would not supplant hers in terms of inheritance or prestige.

A dramatic example of the extent to which marriage age was used to manage fertility can be seen in Wrigley's Population History of England, which makes a strong case that the English population explosion in the mid eighteenth century through the early twentieth was a result of a decline of in the average age of first marriage for women from 26 to 23. (This, coming at the same time as increased life expectancy caused the population to grow dramatically, and triggered a round of Malthusian worrying by the cultural elites.)

With marriage choices as the primary means of regulating reproduction, the other key factor, in addition to marriageable age, was the number of people who never married. In Western Europe from the Middle Ages through the Industrial Revolution, 10-25% of women never married. In poorer countries such as Ireland, both late marriage and spinsterhood came into play with the result that as few as 30% of the women of childbearing age were married at any given time. (Comprehensive demographic data here. Example table of percentage of women of childbearing age married by country and decade available on page 21 of this paper.)

What we see when we view demographic history is that marriage (and chastity outside of marriage) is an adaptive trait which allows us as rational creatures to regulate our fertility. The fact that the signs of female fertility are hard to discern means that any sexual act with a woman of childbearing age may result in the creation of a child. And the set of moral and societal norms surrounding marriage provide us with a way to manage that fact responsibly in order to have children only when we believe we can support them. This evolutionary analysis actually leads to a definition of marriage which is startlingly similar to a traditional Christian understanding of marriage: In both cases one of the primary ends of marriage is to assure that children come into being only when others are prepared to love and care for them.

[to be continued: Part 3]

Real Sex vs. the Contraceptive Mentality (Part 1)

If you move in conservative Catholic circles much, you have doubtless heard the phrase "contraceptive mentality". Though used frequently and negatively, I think there is value in delving a bit more deeply into what we mean by the phrase. I was moved to write this in semi-response to an interesting post by Brett Salkeld a couple months back which sought to explore the bounds of what a "contraceptive mentality" is. Another good resource on the topic is this post at Catholic Culture on the contraceptive mentality.

While recognizing the dangers of trying to be too wide ranging in subject matter in the limited space of a blog post, my goal here is to set out answers to the following:

• What is a "contraceptive mentality"?


• How is a contraceptive mentality contrary to how humans are "meant" to function morally and sexually?


• How, if at all, does NFP (natural family planning) relate to a contraceptive mentality?

I think it's easiest to think about the idea of a contraceptive mentality against the backdrop of how we function sexually as human creatures -- a term I use advisedly in that I want to emphasize our rootedness in a certain biological reality of being primates with certain biological systems and instincts, while at the same time not ignoring our rational, emotional and moral sensibilities in the sense that "human animal" strikes me as implying.

Uncertainty and Conception

One thing that sets us apart from most other higher primates is that humans have fairly even sexual drive all of the time. Or, at least, men have sexual drive pretty much all of the time. Women seem to have more variation in their level of interest, and indeed there is a fair amount of evidence that one driving (though unconscious) element of their drive is that they are more "in the mood" during the times of the month when they are fertile than when they are not. Another thing that sets us apart from most other higher primates is that a woman's fertility is not marked by unmistakable physical signs (change of color and swelling of the genital area, changes in smell, etc.) (Though Bonobos have often been compared to humans in regards to their relatively constant sex drive, they are like chimps in that female fertility is readily apparent through external signs.)

Thinking about humans naturalistically, this makes a fair amount of sense from an evolutionary point of view. The exceptionally long period it takes for human offspring to reach maturity, and the importance of learning social/cultural patterns in order to function maturely as a human, makes rearing by stable family groups highly desirable. Other higher primates, with their visually obvious mating periods, do not tend to form strong pair-bonds between mates. Indeed, quite the contrary: because a female's fertility is obvious to all males, the tendency among chimps, gorillas, etc., is for any adult male who can get within reach of her to try to get his genes into play. There are a number of different approaches a male primate may use in order to try to assure he is the one who succeeds in fathering a child on her, but there's a fair amount of competition and free-for-all involved. For humans, since it isn't immediately obvious when a woman is fertile, a male stands the best chance of passing on his genes by forming a longer term, exclusive relationship, since it's only by having relations consistently over at least a month (and knowing that other males have not succeeded in getting in on the action) that he can have reasonable assurance of being the father of any offspring. Take this relative exclusivity out into years instead of months (with the incentive of successfully fathering multiple offspring) and you've solved the problem of having both parents around to help rear offspring which take a long time to mature.

Evolutionarily speaking, there are differing incentives for men and women, which can be used to sketch different stories about men's and women's sexual drives and instincts. But I don't think it's overly controversial to assert that a compromise which suits both sets of drives well is found in monogamy, serial monogamy or polygamy -- relationship dynamics which are exclusive and stable, though not necessarily equal. (As the prevalence of polygamy in many cultures illustrates -- there's nothing but upside for a male from an evolutionary point of view if he can have exclusive access to multiple women rather than just one.)

All of which is a long way of coming around to this basic point: Uncertainty about when conception can result from intercourse is a factor which has been central to shaping the development of human sexual and relationship dynamics throughout the existence of our species.

Evolution vs. Responsible Parenthood

The above discussion should immediately bring to mind a contrast between our modern attitudes toward reproduction and what in anthropomorphic terms we might term evolution's "motivation": A host of messages in our modern society tell us that we should limit the number of children that we have, while "evolutionary success" is based upon the number of grandchildren one has who survive to reproduce. Thus, while the instincts and physical characteristics of most animals seem centered on maximizing the number of offspring, those of us in modern society tend to focus on not having more children than we plan on (and often plan on few.)

It's common for Christians of a ruralist tenor to attribute this to modern industrial society, asserting that in an agricultural society children are an asset while in an industrial society they are a liability. I think, however, this is the result of simplistic thinking. I would propose that, ever since we became aware, humans have always sought some degree of "responsible parenthood", though it's true that the cultures of many modern developed nations are much more biased against childbearing than most throughout history. Still, even in societies in which large numbers of children were described invariably as a blessing, we as humans have, because we are conscious and see death and deprivation as evils, always sought to have the "right" number of children for a given time and place.

Evolution is a process which optimizes the success of populations, not of individuals. As such, it is evolutionarily advantageous for members of a population to produce more offspring than their environment is easily able to sustain. This achieves several advantages: More individuals means more genetic variation, thus providing a larger chance for the development of advantageous new traits. Large numbers of individuals also protect against unforeseen catastrophes and provide individuals able to exploit unforeseen opportunities (new niches, migration, competition, etc.) If available resources prove not to be enough, the least fit individuals will die off, which for the genetic population as a whole is also generally beneficial.

However, we as conscious and moral beings obviously don't want to see people suffering for lack of food or other necessities. However advantageous it might be for the population, we don't want to see people suffering for lack of basic resources. And so we naturally want to avoid having children at times when we think we cannot support them.

[to be continued]

Part 2

I Mean, Come On, Guys!

Just the other night I was telling Darwin that maybe I wanted a break from blogging. I'm kinda feeling over the internet, and also feeling like I don't really have all that much to talk about. But I had to laugh as I pulled the Wall Street Journal out of the wrapping yesterday. Sometimes a topic comes along that really just writes itself.

The feature article in the Personal Journal section was The Birth-Control Riddle: Fifty Years after the Pill's Debut, almost Half of all Pregnancies in the U.S are Unplanned.

Yet despite all these options, the rates of unplanned pregnancies remain high: Almost half of all pregnancies in the U.S.—some 3.1 million a year—are unintended, according to the most recent government survey, from 2001. One out of every two American women aged 15 to 44 has at least one unplanned pregnancy in her lifetime. Among unmarried women in their 20s, seven out of 10 pregnancies are unplanned.

An updated version of those numbers from the 2006 National Survey of Family Growth is expected to be released next month. But population experts don't anticipate much change; the rate of unplanned pregnancy was the same in 1994, and smaller studies have found that even newer birth-control methods haven't made much of a dent.

Why are the numbers so high?

The answer is a complex tangle of cultural, religious, behavioral, educational and economic factors. Many of those unplanned pregnancies become wanted babies. About a million are aborted each year and others are miscarried.

Almost half (48%) of unintended pregnancies involve contraceptive failures. In 52% of the cases, couples used no birth control at all. (Emphasis mine.)

I have to say that even if I felt so inclined to use contraception, what would be the point? Thanks to knowing NFP, I know when my fertile periods are, and I'd be too worried about the contraception failing to feel comfortable using it then.

At first I had a knee-jerk irritable reaction to the fact that article made practically no mention of Natural Family Planning, but by the end I was glad not to have it lumped in with the other methods. Because NFP may involve family planning, but what it is not is contraception. Here, a money quote from the Catechism of the Catholic Church on the subject:

2399 The regulation of births represents one of the aspects of responsible fatherhood and motherhood. Legitimate intentions on the part of the spouses do not justify recourse to morally unacceptable means (for example, direct sterilization or contraception).

But we have not exhausted the riches of the WSJ in regards to making relationships work. On the other side of the marital behavioral spectrum, we have Honey, Do You Have To...?, an article about the little peevish things one's spouse does. It holds an instructive reminder that the jerks you shall have always with you.

When Jim Caudill's first wife sat him down and explained that she wanted a divorce, she had a long list of complaints: He didn't help enough with the kids. He didn't do his share of the housework. They were more devoted to work than to each other.

Then she brought up the English muffins. "She said, 'You never butter them to the edges, you just pat it in the middle,'" says Mr. Caudill, a 59-year-old winery marketing representative in Santa Rosa, Calif.

Mr. Caudill was stunned. But gradually, the message sunk in. "The weight of a small thing can be onerous," he says. "It's a symptom of a larger need."

OMG. She's talking about ripping apart a family and reneging on her vows, and to support this she brings in... the English muffins? Talk about moral seriousness.

Or, take this gem:

The dishwasher was a sticking point in Vige Barrie's first marriage. She says her husband often left his dirty dishes in the sink or on the counter, a habit that so infuriated her she even brought it up with their marriage counselor. "It was beyond me that he couldn't get his hand in gear to deliver a dirty dish a few inches over to the dishwasher," says Ms. Barrie, 57, who works in media relations at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. "Was I a maid?"

Ms. Barrie, who has since divorced and remarried, was dismayed to find that her second husband also leaves his dirty dishes in the sink. But she says she has finally learned to take it in stride. "By the time you marry a second time, you grow up," she says. "I realized how important it was to have a partner for the big life stuff and that the little life stuff ruins the present moment."(emphasis mine)

Too bad she learned this lesson in maturity too late to save her first marriage.

And if it turns out that it wasn't really that important, that other factors ruined the first marriage, then why even bring it up? I pondered this as I remembered sitting listening to another woman complain about her husband's similar habit. Here is a lady who considers herself to be in a very happy marriage, I thought, and yet why does she find it necessary to tell everyone about this dumb little trait of her husband's? What's the point of running him down like that, especially if it will simply make you focus on the small things that irritate you, instead of all the qualities about him that you rightly admire? Why deliberately rip holes in the seams of your marriage?

More to the point: let him who is without sin cast the first stone. For every complaint a woman can make about her husband, the husband can doubtless match in kind. (And vice versa.) But that kind of tit-for-tat beefing is hardly conducive to maintaining a strong mature relationship. Pulling the log out of one's own eye is usually a good starting point for marital happiness.

And I'm off, to do the dishes. For my husband, not at him.

The Sex Life Fallacy

[This is a re-post of a post from back in 2007, as prelude to developing some further thoughts on the topic.]

A couple weeks ago I wrote a bit about bonobos, the "sexy ape" which is sometimes referred to as the kinder, gentler counterpart to the sometimes violent chimps. A commenter later pointed out an article written by primatologist Fraans de Waal in the eSkeptic (an organ of the Skeptics Society) taking exception to the New Yorker article which inspired my post, in which article he was presented as something of an outlier, reaching exciting but perhaps somewhat exaggerated conclusions based on research only on bonobos in captivity.

It seems that Dinesh D'Souza had written a blog post based on the New Yorker article, and this had pretty much convinced de Waal that the entire thing was a conservative attempt to co opt discussion of his "sexy" apes. The Skeptics brought their own ax to grind to the table, remarking in an editorial note, "it is interesting that so many people wish to deny the undeniable relationship between humans and chimps, and at the same time cannot seem to help finding political meanings in primate behavior that supports either a liberal or conservative agenda."

The de Waal article is marginally worth reading, but it strikes me that in his overall defensiveness (perhaps a combination of his less than flattering treatment in the original article and the fact that D'Souza, whom he clearly despises, picked up the story) leads him to engage in some poor rhetorical moves.

For instance, he says that all the examples of purported violence among bonobos are from captivity, and yet two of the examples in the article are recounted by Hohmann as having occurred in the wild.

On another occasion, he dispenses with what strikes me as a legitimate question as to whether or not all of the activity between bonobos which is usually described as group sexual activity for social bonding purposes is actually sexual (as in, whether the bonobos are relating to each other sexually, or just touching each other in what to humans would be sexual ways) by quoting the Bill Clinton/Paula Jones case. Clearly, that's not answering the question as to whether actions which would be sexual among humans actually carry that connotation among bonobos, and it's unfortunate to see that kind of unseriousness in response to what struck me as a pretty balanced, well researched article.

However, all this talk about whether the "hippie primate" who "makes love not war" is indeed the sort of gentle, oversexed creature that it is reputed to be got me thinking about the whole question of a "sex life".

You see, the thing that makes bonobos seem a bit unusual compared to many other animals is their tendency to engage in mating behaviors when not "in heat". While a tiny bit of this has been observed in chimps, chimp males are usually only interested in females when the females undergo the physical changes that indicate they're fertile.

In this sense, one of the things that has excited people about bonobos is that they seem to be interested in sex all the time -- just like many humans. While those of us who use NFP often note that Topic A becomes a bit more compelling during fertile periods, the signs of fertility are not widely observable among humans, and as a species we're pretty open to mating behavior at all times (headaches aside).

It's pretty common in popular culture these days to talk about the necessity of a "good sex life", a somewhat vague term which I take to mean having the openness and opportunity to have sex fairly often and enjoy it a lot. Well, that sounds pretty nice, doesn't it? And here's the bonobo to show that it's not just a human thing, it's a way that primates can get along and relieve tension so they don't fight all the time.

This fits pretty well with the human-as-mental-creature picture which has dominated our intellectual landscape since the Enlightenment. Here we've got this great thing we can do that forms close personal relationships and is a lot of fun as well. Shouldn't we all make sure to fit regular practice of it into our schedules?

Sounds like fun, but I think it fails to take into account our existence as physical creatures with biological systems that have specific purposes. There's a reason why they call them "reproductive organs", and it doesn't have to do with xeroxing.

Now this works out fine for creatures like the bonobos. Most species have a pretty scattershot approach to keeping the species going: every time you have the chance to conceive, you do; and if there isn't enough food or parental care to go around, the child dies. Most animals, left to their own devices, will get pregnant just about as often as their bodies and nutrition will let them. Pop 'em out, let 'em go.

However modern, first world, human society has managed to work itself in expected pregnancy to be very rare (and never to come unexpectedly) at exactly the same time it's decided that everyone needs a healthy and active sex life. Basically, we want to mate like bonobos, but not have every female going around the jungle either pregnant or with a small baby clinging to her back.

Modern birth control (and abortion) has made this possible to an extent, but holding mother nature in check with technology tends to add other complicating factors. It seems moderately hard-wired in humans for sex to create emotional pair-bonding, of the sort that you need between a pair of mates raising offspring that take 13-17 years to reach biological (much less intellectual) maturity. Taking the reproduction out of sex reduces the need for pairbonding, and so we provide ourselves with all sorts of ways to make ourselves unhappy why pursuing the "sex life" ideal.

I'm not saying that biological realities mean that sex should simply be a matter of closing ones eyes and thinking of England (though a vacation sounds like a good idea now that you mention it), but it seems to me that from a creature point of view we put ourselves into awkward places when we try to focus on having a "sex life" without admitting that we're really talking about a "reproductive life".