Fruitless

Earlier this year, I was contacted out of the blue by a girl I had dated in college.  I hadn’t seen or heard from her in thirty years, so it came as quite a surprise.  Over the past several months, we’ve corresponded and have filled each other in about the directions our lives have gone.  I wondered several times why this person from my distant past had reentered my life.  But when she started asking me questions about Catholicism, I felt I’d possibly found the answer.

This girl (I still can’t help referring to her as a “girl”), whom I’ll refer to as “Molly,” is from the Bible Belt and was raised in one of the Baptist denominations.  When we first started dating, she made it clear to me that she did not believe in premarital sexual relations.  As a young man, I may have been initially disappointed upon hearing that news, but I respected her more for it.  (And, as a Catholic, I should have been completely on board with that policy.)  It was actually good to have a relationship that was free of sexual pressures and all the baggage and possible consequences that go along with them.  The result was a close friendship that still had its healthy share of attraction and romance.  When I decided to transfer out of that school, my relationship with Molly ended.  (It’s something I still have regrets about, but I’ll save a discussion about remorse over the past for another article.)

Back to the present, Molly was sharing with me recently some of her frustrations with life.  She confided, “You know, I’ve always done my best to follow God’s teachings, but I have so much misery.”  After college, she was married to someone for nine years.  They never had children, and at one point I asked her why.  She replied that she didn’t really love the man and therefore felt it would be wrong to have children with him.  (She even told me that she would say a prayer, while taking her birth control pill, that she would not get pregnant.)  At that point, I had the delicate task of telling her that, despite her prayers and rationalization, she had actually done the complete opposite of God’s will.

Our culture has for decades denied the simple reality that the primary purpose of marriage is the bringing forth of children and raising of a family.  And while there may be some for whom, through no fault of their own, this is not possible, the intentional thwarting of this purpose can only lead to decay.  (Is it mere coincidence that the use of the pill has a direct correlation with the divorce rate?)  I suggested to Molly that a child may have been the very thing to bring joy and a common purpose into her marriage.  Though her husband may have had qualities she found undesirable, becoming a father can bring about profound changes in a man.  (This is something to which I can attest.)

After her divorce, Molly had a boyfriend for a while.  She shared with me that she had sexual relations with him.  This deeply disappointed me, especially given her prior beliefs about sex outside of marriage.  I asked her, “Do you think fornicating was a good thing?”  She admitted that it probably was not, though I’m not convinced she regrets it.  But then we live in a pleasure seeking culture that permits and encourages “consenting adults” to do as they please (so long as they practice “safe sex”), all the while ignoring or oblivious to the damaging effects of fornication.

Molly eventually remarried but still did not have any children.  At one point I had mentioned something about the validity of her marriage.  This was something that puzzled her.  I then had the difficult task of trying to explain the insoluble nature of marriage.  I said, “Well, if your first marriage was valid, that means your current one cannot be.  However, since you purposely avoided having children in your first marriage, it was most likely not valid, which means your current one could be.  However, if you’ve purposely avoided having children in your current marriage, then it may too be invalid.”  I fear this may have been too much for her to digest.

I didn’t tell Molly all these things to shame her or otherwise make her feel bad.  However, it was obvious to me that she was very confused about what constitutes “God’s teachings.”  For someone who likes to talk about the Bible as much as she does, she apparently missed or ignored the repeated command in Genesis to “be fruitful and multiply.”  That’s not merely some metaphoric bit of advice.

Molly’s story is, sadly, not uncommon.  I personally know many couples who divorced after years of childless marriage.  And it always amazes me how otherwise intelligent people don’t see the connection.  I admit there is a part of me that wishes I could go back in time.  If I could, I might have married Molly while we were still young and had a bunch of kids with her.  Somewhere along the line, our culture has forgotten that’s actually the natural thing to do.