Is Your Marriage in the Dead of Winter?

I happen to love the physical winter season. I love the cold and snow! But I don’t love being in winter in my marriage. When you are in the winter season everything feels cold, lifeless and dead. You do not feel any life to your marriage, or what you have seems to be on death’s door. That sounds so bleak and terrible, but the reality is many if not most all marriages will experience a winter season. So, the good news is literally millions of marriages survive a hard winter. They come back and move into the spring season.

          So, what do you do when you realize you are in winter? Well, first as I said in the fall season, realize what has happened. We must acknowledge that we are not in a good season. We are in the dead of winter and we must take action, for the marriage to survive and move out of this season. One of the first things to do is decide if you need assistance. Many couples will need the assistance of a coach, or counselor when they are in this season.

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“No matter how long this takes, no matter if we feel nothing for each other, we will not walk away, we will not throw in the towel.”

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          There are multiple different reasons that we may end up in a winter season of our marriage. We may have just not done the tending well, in the other seasons and we have drifted apart, lost focus and connection. But many times, there may have been outside stressors, painful hard circumstances that just rock our world. When we are in these kinds of painful situations it is easy to lose sight of each other, turn on each other, maybe even blame each other. We are empty and there is just nothing left to give each other. This is why it can feel so cold, lonely and dead.

          But the winter does not have to kill your marriage. You can decide that it will not! You are going to take action. Hopefully your spouse will be on board also, but even if they are not at the beginning, you can decide to take action and start to move forward. Depending on what may have led to being in winter, may direct what you need to do to start to move out of winter.

When Johnny and I lost our oldest child, we moved into a winter in our marriage. It was primarily due to the grief, but there were other factors also. One of the things we did was really make a willful, intentional decision that basically said, “No matter how long this takes, no matter if we feel nothing for each other, we will not walk away, we will not throw in the towel.” We purposed to just be in the winter and not leave. There may be times that the mindset has to be determined and declared, even if we are not there emotionally. Even if it is still cold.

We did move from winter back into spring, we reconnected and actually began to build something deeper because we had been through the pain and came out stronger. The winter is hard, and it may feel like you can’t make it. But don’t give up, don’t give in to the emotions of the season, determined to move toward the spring. God’s grace is always sufficient even in the winter.

~Carla