Which Season of Marriage are You In?

There are different ways to look at the seasons of marriage, one way is dividing it into types of chronological ages/seasons. When you look at marriage in this way, it is somewhat easy to determine which season you are in, and you don’t normally repeat a season.

          There is also a second way to look at the seasons of marriage. You can look at the season of your marriage mirroring the physical seasons of our world. The earth experiences Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter each year. Depending on where you live in the world the timing of the seasons may be different (opposite of another part of the world), the length of time in a season, and the severity of the seasons may all vary.

          Marriage is often like the physical seasons. We can cycle through multiple seasons over the course of a lifetime of marriage. One of the reasons this is important to know and remember is that often we find ourselves in a “hard” season. Maybe it is the cold of winter and your marriage feels frozen. The reality is that you don’t have to stay in winter forever. You can do things to help move from one season to the next. Unlike the physical season, you can’t make February in Minnesota feel like July, but you can do things to move your marriage to a different season.

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Nothing stays the same; the seasons will come and go. We can count on that, so we need to count on that fact that our marriages will change.

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          One of the first things we are going to explore over the next few blogs is what do the different seasons look like, how do you know where you are in your marriage? We want to assess our current season, so that we can either do things to make that spring exciting season stay or beware of a season where the climate is starting to change. You must know where you are first.

          Knowing that we can do things to stay or move out of a given season should give us hope. Also, knowing that we may cycle through various seasons over time reminds us that our marriages are not static. We do not say “I do”. I am married now, check that off the list, move on to other things. No, our marriages will be a lifelong adventure of experiencing all kinds of seasons with beauty and challenges. Genesis 8:22 says “As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease. (NIV)

           In some ways the changing of the seasons is really one of the few things about life on this earth that we can expect.  Nothing stays the same; the seasons will come and go. We can count on that, so we need to count on that fact that our marriages will change. We will look over the next few weeks at what each season may look like and how best to approach each one.

~Carla