100%

I am surrounded by newly married and newly engaged people. And I myself am in the throes of studying and praying and waiting in regards to marriage and what that means; and why God would have me learn and wait and grow in these years.
And I am tired of people telling me that I don't know what I'm talking about or can't contribute to the discussion because I'm single. "You cannot understand the temptation I go through." "Your ideas about marriage, about birth control, about sex; it will all change when you get a boyfriend. By the way, when is that going to happen?" "Talk to me when you have a ring on your hand." "You don't know the first thing about the struggle to find purity."
Nothing could be farther from the truth! Pope John Paul II was a celibate and single man. Mary, the virgin Mother of God, was just that, a Virgin. Paul, the apostle, a single man. The priest who cleanses you of your sins and brings you Jesus in the flesh each week, a single man. I am a single woman whose heart is learning to find total communion with God.
The word of God doesn't change, the will of God isn't something that is based on circumstance. The teachings of the Church make up the "foundation and the pillar of the truth". Satan uses the same lies with all of us.
JPII, when he was still a cardinal, starts Love and Responsibility with a foreword that made my throat choke up; where he says that it is because he is a celibate man who is a shepherd of many, that he is perhaps more qualified to speak on the subject. He can objectively look at marriage, and combine all of his counseling experiences and knowledge of God and his Word into true statements that gel and are reinforced by experience.
My heart and my mind and what I know of God (what little bit of faith Christ can grow in me) deserve to be given a place in the lives of people I love; to be given a voice. It makes me ache to know that what I most long to protect in the people I love, in their future families; is ignored.

What I want for my sister, my cousin, my friends, (maybe myself as God wills) is that they would be in a marriage where their bodies and their spirits are given 100% to each other with absolutely nothing standing in the way. That every part of them that represents God, including their fertility and their gender, is given to their wife/husband; that they give and love and cherish and yes, even reproduce, that they make it the goal of their marriage. Not that sex is just something they do for fun or because they can't resist. Having sex is imitating God - God would never hold back from us, he has already given himself completely to us. Holding back in sex by using any kind of birth control or using someone to satisfy an urge for fun without giving yourself totally and embracing them 100% isn't real. It makes the I love you an "I love most of you" or an "I love you" that doesn't follow through in real action; in the most tender and exposed moments of a marriage.

I feel very frustrated about what I feel and know being ignored, and so this comes out as being more than a little bit forceful. Please know this isn't meant to be an attack against anyone - it's just an effort to speak. And it is not carefully edited or super-well-researched, it is just what I have said in the moment. Let me know what you think...