FF: Maintaining the Temperature of a Healthy Marriage

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Fall has arrived in our little corner of the world. We’ve had two frosts (I’m getting tired of covering and uncovering things in the garden) and we’ve stopped leaving the windows open all night.

Today on Facebook I saw some local friends discussing the need to run their heat for the first time this morning. However, at the Byerly home we’re a couple of weeks from a bit of bedroom heat overnight, and perhaps a month from cranking up the wood stove. It’s not because we take the cold better than others do (I’m from Texas, they were born here!), rather, our house is very well insulated. Aside from the basement being almost all below ground, the windows are double pane and there is a ridiculous amount of insulation in the attic. Because of this, the house does a great job of retaining heat; we don’t need to add heat as early as many, and when we do need heat we do not need to add as much.

This got me thinking about marriages. To be healthy, a marriage needs to maintain a good temperature; if it gets too cold, it’s in trouble. The two ways of keeping a marriage’s temperature high are to generate heat, and retain heat. I think we need both parts; we can’t generate enough heat to keep an uninsulated marriage warm, and no amount of insulation will keep your marriage warm if you’re not generating any heat. Without adequate insulation, you have to work too hard to keep your marriage temperature where it needs to be, and sooner or later you’ll get too tried to keep it up. Without good insulation, even a short period of not generating heat will result in a cold marriage. With better insulation, the little problems of life that interfere with generating heat are far less of an issue.

How do you insulate your marriage? What could you do to better insulate it?

[This post first appeared Sept 12, 2012.]

Image Credit: © Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash
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