Marriage:
A Covenant of Seasons
Some may think the “seasons of marriage” correspond with years of marriage: Spring is for early years, summer is the busyness of family life and work, autumn, for retirement years, and winter for old age.
This book understands the seasons in a marriage as cyclic. A young, newly married couple may experience a winter of struggle in communication or intimacy. An older couple might enjoy a springtime in their relationship. All married couples have many springs, summers, autumns, and winters in their lives.
Excerpt from Summer Intimacy:
Where Is the Season?
When you listen to your spouse’s pain as he or she admits to losing touch, you feel pain yourself. You hurt for your beloved--while feeling a stab of risk. Encouraging your spouse to take time to nourish his or her spirit to rediscover what has been buried beneath the demands of the season, is not always easy. It means giving your spouse the gift of time. In this season when so many other needs clamor for a share of your time, individually and as a couple carving out time for yourselves seems impossible. But it is vital! Taking time for yourselves individually, creating opportunities for each other to have personal time, and taking time fro ourselves as a couple cannot be delayed until it is convenient; it must be prioritized.
How difficult this is; it looks impossible and feels selfish--and our society offers little support. Putting your relationship first means making deliberate choices that give you the time you so desperately need. Intimacy will not just happen. It takes commitment and perseverance, the hallmarks of the summer season. It takes making your relationship a priority.
Without private and intimate time--separately and together--your covenant is at risk. What a wonderful gift to have an intimate lover who listens to your needs and says, “You are important to me. I want you to be whole, to sparkle with life and vitality. I want you to grow. Take time.”
Reneé, remembering her husband’s days in medical school, expresses the need this way: “I told Gene that we are like cups. We can only hold so much. Once we are full, we have no room to add more, even if we want to. When we try, the cup overflows. If you fill yourself up with all the details of medicine, you will have no room for anything else. You have to pour some of those concerns out to make room for other things.”
Couples needing time together learn to use a variety of opportunities, wherever and however they are found. One couple used driving time or long, intimate conversations. Even their young children didn’t change that routine. “After riding for a while in the car, the kids would fall asleep, and we could talk.”
Stay up late or get up early to give yourselves the quiet you need together. Take a night or weekend away, send the children to a relative or friend, find someone to sit with your live-in elderly parent, turn off the television; all are ways to open opportunity for intimacy.
Intimacy in the summer seasons is the still point in the midst of swirling activity. It is time and place to rest, to “come home” and remember who you are individually and together. Pouring our some of those “other concerns” makes room for each other. No matter what other roles you play or demands you must meet, God continues to call you to intimacy, to himself, to each other.
Intimacy is a time of renewal, of healing, of hope. It is a time of re-creation, a time to talk and listen, to share tears or joy, to embrace and lay in each other’s arms. When you open yourselves to each other, you open yourselves to God--who loves the two of you into wholeness and holiness.