Authors-choice: Hope & Revival

This blurb from Elle, a woman’s fashion magazine, advises that “For years Prozac and the pill have given women emotional stability and sexual freedom, but new research suggests that these drugs can negatively affect everything from our sex drive to our choice of a mate.” This article reports that contraceptives and antidepressants both reduce a woman’s sex drive and also change their perception of males.
Why are women taking these antidepressants? One of the side effects of the pill is depression. So doctors try to combat the effects of the pill by prescribing antidepressant. But antidepressants also reduce a woman’s sex drive. So a woman is taking the contraceptive pill to help her have sex and supposedly be happier and then taking an antidepressant because she’s taking a pill that causes depression. And she’s not any happier and she doesn’t even want to have sex.
What they’re also discovering is that when women go off of the pill, they’re no longer interested in the man that they’re with. They picked him when they were in the state of pseudo-pregnancy. There was another video featured on NBC10.com called “The Divorce Pill”. It reported that women who go off the pill have a higher sex drive than they had when they were on the pill, but they’re no longer interested in the man they are with; they chose him under the influence of the pseudo pregnancy hormones in their bodies. I suspect there is more to the story than that. I suspect that many of these women are going off the pill because they want to have a baby. When a woman decides to have a baby she starts looking at guys with a whole different set of eyes. Is this man going to be a good father to my children?
As a matter of fact, don’t be too impressed if someone comes up to you and says I want to have sex with you. That’s a saying that’s not particularly flattering. But if someone comes up to you and says I want you to be the parent of my children, fall over. That’s a marriage proposal. And a marriage proposal is one of the most incredible things that anybody’s ever said to another person. A marriage proposal means, I want someone with your eyes, your laugh, the way you walk and most importantly your values. I’m going to trust my children to you. A lot of people have sex with people, but they won’t entrust their children to them.
How many people in our culture court and get married with the view towards having a child? How many choose a spouse because that spouse will be a good parent? I tell my students when dating to consider whether the person they are interested in would be a good parent; that person will also make a good spouse, for good parents are generous and responsible and hardworking, and such are the qualities that make for a good spouse.
One of my former students who had been a good Catholic went off to graduate school, became completely infatuated with a young man and started having sex with him. She realized that she was very confused and it wasn’t right. She stopped have sex with him but was still crazy about him. It was an incredibly passionate relationship, though not sexual. He was a very lapsed Catholic and in fact, hated the church. She remained in the relationship for about five or six years. At one point I said either you have to marry him or you have to break up. She said she was still crazy about him and didn’t think she could imagine finding another man that fascinates her as much as he did. But, she said, “I don’t want him to be the father of my children. I want to raise my kids catholic. He hates the church. I can’t have children with him.” I recommended that she write those words down and look at them and see what conclusions she ought to draw. She soon broke up with him and a few years later met and married a wonderful, fascinating man and started a family.