Not too long ago, bloggers began debating a distinctly modern question: Can women “have it all”?  That is, can they excel as professionals, wives, and mothers without compromising any of these commitments?

Transitioning into married life (quite recently) as a graduate student at Princeton has helped me think about this problem.  My thoughts, though, are less about how to balance parenting and a full-time job—I don’t have children and my only job is to read lots of books and write about them—and more about prior questions that some Domers will face even sooner: Can I keep a clean and cheerful apartment andspend enough time studying?  Do I have to cook every night now?  How do I budget two incomes to cover the needs of two people?

As a practicing Catholic, I’ve also had to consider questions that many of my Princeton colleagues don’t.  Which natural family planning (NFP) method, for example, will work best in my marriage?  Could I devote enough time to parenting at this point in my graduate education?  How do I explain my countercultural, seemingly antiquated views about sex and marriage to my colleagues?

Here I’d like to discuss these questions, since I know many Notre Dame women—smart, accomplished, independent, faithfully Catholic women—are already thinking about them.  I won’t tell readers howto be married grad students—there just isn’t one right answer.  Instead, I’ll tell them to go for it.  As I hope to convey below, I’m still learning how to balance the new responsibilities of marriage and the old ones of studying, but the challenge is incredibly rewarding.

To begin with the ordinary: Before marriage I really wasn’t sure how I could be a good student while also taking care of a home (in our case, a small apartment).  Those who know me best know that I’m almost obsessively neat.  How on earth, I wondered, would I keep not a dorm room but severalrooms (including a bathroom, oh boy) tidy and even attractive?  All while completing a full course load and preparing for my general exams on the side?

I also remember asking married girlfriends about cooking: Do you cook every night?  How do you make time for it?  Where do you get all your recipes?

Once the semester hit, I quickly learned one of the most important facts of married life in grad school: You can’t, and shouldn’t, take care of a home by yourself.  You might, like me, actually enjoy cooking, cleaning, organizing, and dreaming about how you would design your place if you had an infinite budget.  But the demands of your academic vocation are a very good reason to divide up household duties.

So, my husband—also a grad student, and a real hero of mine in more ways than one—gladly washes the dishes when I cook.  We eat leftovers several times a week.  He vacuums, and I scrub the toilet.  I make the bed; he makes the coffee.  We’re still figuring out how to make and stick to a budget, but it’s a team effort.  Our home isn’t always clean, and sometimes laundry has to wait an extra couple of days.  Sometimes, too, our clothes are clean, but our work lags behind.  But we keep trying!

Indeed, marriage has given both of us a greater sense of purpose in meeting the rather mundane requirements of sharing a home with someone.  For my part, tidying up the living and dining space in our apartment before dinner is one small way to make life more pleasant for my husband, as I promised I would do on our wedding day.

Obviously I’m not suggesting that married women see household chores as their responsibility by default.  The success of any marriage, of running any household, requires playing on each other’s strengths.  If my husband loved cooking, I would be the one washing dishes.  If his work required him to be away from home for many hours of the day and I weren’t a student, I probably woulddo most of the chores.  My point is just that these practicalities worried me before marriage because I had forgotten that the number of workers would double.  As a grad student embarking on marriage, I wasn’t taking on an impossible task.

In fact, marriage has proven quite helpful for my academic progress.  As a fellow grad student, my husband completely understands the challenges I’m trying to meet not only at home but also in school.  He’s an excellent conversation partner, editor, and in a way only he can be, advisor—my professors aren’t the only ones who can hold me accountable for my work!

A second concern I’ve had about life as a married grad student is the feasibility of parenting while in school.  Many of my friends have become mothers quite early in their marriage—a feat that continues to impress me.  Sometimes it’s been hard for me to accept that a vocation to academia, the long education it requires, and my own intellectual limits make it prudent to put off motherhood for a while.

Disagreeing with the liberal sex ethics of most of my Princeton friends means trying to avoid having children in a way they think unduly burdensome—namely, natural family planning.  I won’t lie and say that it’s easy—using NFP to avoid pregnancy means working against the natural wax and wane of a woman’s attitude toward sex in each cycle.

But I also know that using birth control isn’t any easier.  Even if I’m taking what might look like the harder path, I’m also avoiding many health risks that medical literature increasingly associates with the use of hormonal contraceptives.  Indeed, I think one of the greatest injustices to women in this century is the healthcare profession’s failure to inform them, especially young women, of the full implications of using birth control.

And, while I don’t have ample space here to defend fully the Church’s teachings on sex and marriage, I would argue that using birth control could only give me an illusion of the reality that marriage is—a commitment to complete union with my husband, at the levels of mind, heart, and body.  By consuming a pill or using a condom to inhibit the full bodily union that sex makes possible, we would deliberately give each other something less than what our marital vow calls for.  Knowing that I’m called to faithful marriage and graduate work at the same time makes me confident that the trials of balancing them are also part of my calling—and that I’ll therefore have the grace to bear them with good cheer.

This point about fidelity to the Church is a good segue into the final thoughts I want to offer here.  What I have to say is not specifically about married life, but instead simply about being a faithful Catholic woman at a secular university—a possibility many Notre Dame women surely face, regardless of whether they want to get married.

For the first time in my life, my academic institution lacks the Christian ethos and cultural norms that pervade life at Notre Dame, my all-girls high school, even my grade school.  The challenges this new situation poses are incredibly stimulating, and I love studying at Princeton largely because of them.  They make for rich conversations and friendships with my colleagues, who for the most part do not share my views about sex, marriage, or even the existence of God.

Still, I’m aware that this difference makes me not just a minority in my community, but a unique phenomenon.  For one thing, my friends don’t recognize moral authority beyond human reason; indeed, they can hardly see why anyone would.  Yet I know that we can and do have excellent reasons to assent to God’s revelation through the Church—an authority that extends to basic moral truths, which are revealed andaccessible by natural reason.  So I can and do accept moral teachings as true and reasonable even before making a philosophical argument for them—something my friends can only see as a kind of intellectual suicide.

As a Catholic woman, though, I am doubly anomalous.  In the liberal worldview that informs most of my friends and professors, I have bought into one of the most patriarchal moral traditions in history.  My opposition to contraception and abortion makes me naïve at best, deluded at worst.  I am collaborating in my own continued oppression.

This thought doesn’t daunt me as it used to.  Actually, it excites me.  I’ll confess that there is something incredibly motivating, liberating, even fun, in being the puzzle that liberalism can’t solve.  By liberal lights, I am contradicting my own best interests. As it happens, though, I am by God’s grace thriving.  I am, all at once, a joyfully Catholic, happily married, and (so far) professionally successful woman.

These experiences  have helped me appreciate my faith in an entirely new way.  Rather than persist in fear that there’s no place here for people of my persuasion, I now care deeply about persuading my friends that the truth is infinitely more capacious and beautiful than they thought it (better, He) could be.

This doesn’t mean I think I have all the answers, that I don’t love my friends unconditionally, or that I can’t learn a great deal from them.  I hope our relationships keep growing because I don’thave all the answers, I dowant to love them unconditionally, and I plan to keep learning from them as I already have.  This very friendship also motivates me to help them consider ideas and evidence, possibilities and realities, that they’ve never seriously contemplated.  These are the unexpected opportunities that come with my calling as a Catholic academic in the making.

Again, there are many ways to balance marriage and graduate study.  I don’t mean to suggest that I’ve chosen the best way, or that I’m excelling at it.  I only want to say that college women—particularly Catholic women—needn’t fear they have to sacrifice a career in order to be married, or that marriage in grad school will be miserable because they might have to use NFP, or that they will be lonely as Catholics in a largely secular corner of the professional world.  Marriage is a terrific support system—intellectually, spiritually, and socially.  Despite cultural messages to the contrary, marrying early in your professional life can be a powerful foundation for personal and professional success.

Gabby, editor-in-chief emerita, is a graduate student in political theory at Princeton University.  She and her dashingly short husband fear their kids will be invisible to the naked eye.  Contact her at ggirgis@princeton.edu.