Strengthen the Fence Around Your Marriage

Strengthen the fence around your marriage: what does that mean and why should it be important to you?

How Important is Your Marriage?

If you were wealthy and owned a precious, very costly painting, old and with a long history, you might have to create a temperature and humidity-controlled environment to keep it from deteriorating from age and protect its value. You might also need to put it in a secured area behind a fence where other people could not touch or damage it. You might also use security guards and an alarm system to keep it from being vandalized or stolen when you were not present.

Marriage is Priceless: Precious and Valuable

Shouldn’t your marriage and your spouse be even more valuable and important than an object of art? You are building an entire world with your spouse (your children, your friends, your family, your social life, your vacations).

The longer your history together, the more precious and more valuable your marriage and your spouse should become. This is ESPECIALLY true if you have children.

Protect Your Marriage

When you truly understand and internalize this concept, you will want to protect your relationship from deteriorating from age, and protect both your marriage and your spouse from vandalism (such as heavy flirting or someone mistreating your spouse) and from theft (such as infidelity or divorce).

Security Fence Around Your Marriage

Think of this as putting a protective fence and security around your marriage. And then think how can you strengthen the fence around your marriage. There are many different types of physical fences: some thick, some tall, some with barbed wire, some with double fencing. What kind of “fence” do you and your spouse want around your marriage?

Consider Your Spouse’s Feelings

Consider some sample situations, and how you would feel about them. Would you be okay with your spouse and an attractive person of the opposite sex:

• air-kissing?
• kissing lips to lips?
• giving a full-body hug (pressing front-to-front)?
• French kissing?
• traveling alone together?
• being the last two still sitting at the bar after an office party?
• taking a moonlit stroll on the beach? Hand-in-hand?
• sending 50 texts back-and-forth in one day?
• talking several times a day by phone and always for long periods while commuting to and from work?

If you don’t feel comfortable imagining your spouse engaging in some or all of these situations, then you know it should be outside your fence. The same rule goes for how your spouse feels about the above examples.

How To Protect Your Marriage

I believe you have to create a security “fence” by setting personal boundaries. Of course, these boundaries only work if each of you is committed, both in public and in private, to maintaining the limits.

Furthermore, I urge you to make the boundaries further out to give you a safety zone. It should be clear to you when you are even getting close to crossing the line.

Your Own Boundaries for Your Own Marriage

You cannot look to society for guidelines in creating your boundaries; you must look within yourselves. Society often wants us to believe that certain things are either okay or won’t cause harm just because in a perfect world they “shouldn’t” cause harm. Our society currently has a low level of morality and a high-divorce rate.

You and your spouse should discuss, in detail, exactly what boundaries are needed to keep the two of you happy together.

To Love and To Cherish…

Of course a spouse who is loved, cherished and supported is more likely to want to maintain boundaries around your relationship, so it is in your best interest to help create that environment. When you create a wonderful marriage, there is even more desire to want to maintain the good feelings and good relationship.

That is what I teach to the couples I work with, it is what I support in my writings, and it is the principle I live by in my own marriage, and I hope you will do the same.

Wishing you the ability and courage to love and cherish your spouse.