A Surprisingly Sane Blog

I have this ongoing inner battle related to sex that I imagine I can probably blame on either:

A) my Catholic upbringing;

B) the fact that I’m technically insane;

C) alien abduction and brainwashing at a young age;

D) all of the above.

Take your pick.

But whatever the case, this is a very true issue that I have dealt with since… oh, I don’t know… maybe my entire life?

Catholic dogma has added all kinds of rules to sex.  You have to be open to creating new life.  No birth control, with the exception of “Natural Family Planning”.  Sex with only ONE partner, and only after you have been married in the Catholic church.  Oral sex for foreplay purposes only.  No ejaculation outside of the wife’s vagina.  Masturbation equals selfishness and death by beheading.  No touching of the breasts or genital area unless part of foreplay or you will burn in hell for all eternity.

Shall I go on?

I am mortified to admit (but I do it anyway because… well, this is my uncensored blog, and I’m sick of keeping this kind of agony to myself) that for the majority of my relationship with James, I have been haunted by my lack of ability to break these rules with a clean conscience.  But finally, finally, I feel like I have pulled free from their evil clutches and am running at lightening speed towards the dark side of sex for pleasure.

However, believe it or not, we actually followed these rules, every single one of them, for the majority of the first nine months of our marriage and the year prior to our wedding vows.

Yes.  After a few years of sinful sexual contact (although not without serious guilt), we chose to repent like good Catholic kids and lived through, er… survived with only one slip-up… a year of abstinence.

And during the first nine months of our church-sanctified marriage, we followed the Catholic Rules of Sexual Intercourse… complete with adherence to The Creighton Model of Natural Family Planning.  Which, of course, gives you two options when it comes down to fucking:  you either do it during a fertile time to achieve pregnancy, or you abstain from all genital/fondling contact during the fertile times to avoid a pregnancy.

Oh, and depending on where you are at during your cycle, you also have rules on what time of the day you can have sex.  Because, you know, if you do it in the morning before you’ve had an entire day to check for fertile cervical mucus during the pre-peak time of your cycle… you are choosing “make a baby” behavior.

Spontaneous sex equals irresponsible sex if you are not open to creating a new life at the time.

No joke.  I only wish I were kidding.

But here’s the best part:  using this model of self control is meant to bring the husband and wife closer together, and bring you high levels of satisfaction in your relationship because it increases the “self esteem of the couple,  thereby reducing the need for superficial reinforcement with genital intercourse“.

(Can you hear the sarcasm dripping from my Satan-influenced words?)

Yes, that’s what is says in my little booklet that the program gave me.

You know, because genital intercourse (I gag when it’s called that, by the way) is merely a superficial way of expressing your love for your partner.

**Oh, you hear those cricket chirping, too?**

Yeah.  So, moving forward.

Now, religious fanatics have mentored me on this very thing (trying to convince me that God wants couples to experience this miraculous way of non-selfish married life, nonetheless), and I have come to the realization that there is no way on earth or in hell that a bunch of men who aren’t allowed to have sex can interpret the Bible and God’s word with a positive spin on this intimate act.

Yes, religious fanatics.  Judge me, condemn me to hell.  Tell me that with enough prayer and Faith in God’s plans that this is actually the most satisfying way of life with your partner.

Experience has taught me otherwise.  I had to learn it the hard way.

Let me tell you, following this “expected” Catholic behavior was more damaging than anything else James and I have ever experienced together.

It added an unimaginable amount of stress and frustration onto a God-allowed marital act that was difficult for me to start with because of other issues unrelated to Catholicism.  It made sex this controlled thing, and we were never able to just relax and enjoy each other.  Any sexual fondling had to lead to sex, so there was always pressure on both of us to “perform”.

I don’t know about other women, but the fertile time in my cycle is when I am the most interested in sex.  I am biologically just an animal.  I can’t help it.  Some of the non-fertile times in my cycle are simply not good times for me to “perform”.  But doing so because it was the only time I could have sex without getting pregnant so-help-me-God-or-strike-me-down-with-lightening put all kinds of pressure on me that made me believe that sex wasn’t something intended to be enjoyed.

It was a very damaging thing.  Having to control sexual desires and impulses during the only time I wanted to be intimate made the times where we COULD have sex a sick joke.

I felt used and dirty when sex actually happened because I simply wasn’t allowed to enjoy it with all the rules added to it.  I couldn’t lay naked with my husband and enjoy touching his soft skin and give him sexual pleasure without it leading to church-sanctified acts of genital intercourse (gag, that term again).  He wasn’t “allowed” to go down on me to bring me to orgasm during my fertile times because getting each other off would condemn us to licking shit-filled mud for all eternity if, by God, he didn’t ejaculate inside of me.  There was no such thing as bringing one-sided sexual pleasure, even if both of us performed oral on each other, because we wouldn’t be “fully sharing ourselves with one another”.

Okay, all you goody-goody, perfect Catholics.  Throw stones at me.  Tell me that if I were a true Child of Christ that prayer and Faith could have gotten us past this.

It didn’t.  We tried so hard to make it work, to be good Catholics.  Serious guilt weighed me down, giving me panic attacks and making me believe I was a terrible person for wanting to make love to my husband without any pressure or stress or rules added.  For wanting to use birth control so I could have sex with him without the certainty of possible pregnancy when I was fertile

Finally, we got pregnant.  It wasn’t because we wanted a baby.  We weren’t ready.  I mean, you never really are ready for a baby, but it truly wasn’t a good decision at the time.

The pregnancy happened as a result of guilt.  We were to the point where I was crying in frustration because I had a husband who wouldn’t dare touch me during the only time I ever wanted to be intimate with him.  He felt sick every time we were “allowed” to have sex because he knew how much pain it was bringing me.

Eventually, we decided to chance it, and had sex during my fertile time with wild abandon.

It was incredible.  We never knew how good it could be.

But then, of course, I got pregnant immediately.

I felt like I’d been tricked into making more little Catholics by the church.  James and I grew apart, and I felt disgusting and unattached to my baby during my pregnancy.  I suffered through natural childbirth, hated breastfeeding, and struggled with postpartum depression that left me feeling like a hideous, empty hole.

Now we can both say that Julie is one of two of our greatest treasures in our lives (of course, April being the other one!), but at the time, our desire to follow the rules and be good Catholics nearly destroyed our marriage and my sanity.

We learned the hard way.

Ever since then, we have used non-Biblical means of avoiding pregnancy.  Never again will I torture myself and my husband trying to follow rules that were created by sexually frustrated men.

And you know what?

I have no guilt about it, no qualms about our choices to use various means of birth control.  I truly believe that if God intended for that fucking Creighton Model of Natural Family Planning to be a positive thing, then it wouldn’t have made us feel like shit constantly.

And let me tell you, making my husband sweat mercilessly by candlelight, the panting “God, I love yous” uttered from our breathless lips, the explosion of goosebumps on warm, moist skin from my lover’s fingertips, the hair-grabbing and nail marks and moans and intense passion…

…all worth the slightly reduced sensation caused by condoms, which, according to Church dogma, is not giving one another to each other fully and “significantly reduces the pleasure and satisfaction which occurs with intercourse”.

Give us *almost* all of the pleasure, and reduce the responsibility of possible outcomes by 99.7% chance any day.  It’s worth it, and complete bullshit that it “significantly reduces pleasure and satisfaction”.  Tried and tested proof allows me to say that.

I have finally learned how to make love to my husband the way that I believe God truly intended.

Current Mood: Esctatic

Tags: Sex

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 2:24 pm and is filed under Confessions, Marriage, Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.