Hey, Casey, if you've only had a few periods since going off the pill, your current experiences are not necessarily indicative of your future with menstruation.

"The Pill" can have a long after-effect after you stop taking it. For example, when I went off the pill at age 23 because I wanted to get pregnant, I ended up going nearly a year without a single period. I was worried that pregnancy might not be in my future. But eventually it stabilized and I did get pregnant with my daughter (who is now almost 50!).

My periods pre-pill were very erratic & that's why my mom put me on the pill at age 15. I could go as long as 6 months without a period and as little as 3 weeks. Basically she wanted to know if/when I got pregnant, and she wanted to avoid my getting pregnant at all. Which is kind of funny because by my own choice I did not have sex (just heavy petting) until my 18th birthday...

It was nice to have my periods regulated. It also saved me a lot of pain, as I learned much later, at age 35, when I went off the pill because at the level of hormones in pills then, it increased the incidence of breast & cervical cancer. After that I used a diaphragm. I was lucky that my menopause came at age 42 so I didn't have to worry about unwanted pregnancy.

In the last few years before menopause my periods were actually normal and regular.

Just because your periods now are less painful than they were before "the pill," doesn't mean it will remain that way. Tho it COULD. It could also be that you still experience the benefit of having taken the pill for medical reasons for some years.

You don't know when your body self-corrected from what you had before. It might have been better to have gone off the pill occasionally just to see if you still needed its medical (as opposed to contraceptive) impact.

Still, whether the impact remains requires a "wait and see" period of time.

Unfortunately our bodies don't read the literature about what they are supposed to do.