Week 114: Marriages and Emotional Coldness

Please join us this week in praying for marriages that have grown emotionally cold.  Emotional coldness in a marriage can be as destructive as rage and is more insidious.  Rage is like a fire that ignites and is immediately recognized as damaging.  Emotional coldness, or emotional distance, as some would call it, is like freezing weather, uncomfortable for sure, but too often not identified as damaging until frozen pipes start to break.

The growth of emotional coldness in a marriage can have its origin in any number of situations.  Excessive attention to children to the determent of a spouse can cause a marriage relationship to cool.  The same can be said of excessive attention to work, to a hobby or, yes, even to a ministry.  Discounting the need to give and ask for forgiveness when a hurt has been caused to a spouse can be the seed-bed of emotional coldness.

Being unaware of how a spouse expresses his/her emotions can cause one to miss cues that would normally elicit an appropriate response like compassion or sympathy.  When these cues are missed, the other spouse can interpret the lack of response as a sign of an uncaring spirit or a self-centered attitude.  This misunderstanding can lead to emotional coldness.

Finally, physical distance can lead to emotional coldness.  It is not always true or even mostly true that absence makes the heart grow fonder.  Maybe even more dangerous to a marriage's emotional health is physical distance when the couple actually occupies the same house but for some reason one spouse or the other withholds sexual relations.

Please pray that married couples experiencing emotional coldness will

• Understand that, with the exception of their relationship with Christ, their relationship with their spouse is most primary and must be guarded above all others
• Recognize when children, work and other life-demands are impinging on their couple-time and seek to correct the imbalance
• Be quick to seek and give forgiveness
• Learn to recognize the emotional states of their spouse and respond as the sacrificial lover God created them to be
• Make effective efforts to stay connected when situations cause them to be physically separated
• Be sensitive to their spouse's sexual needs and desires and long to fulfill them as their would desire their own to be fulfilled
• Seek the wise counsel of couples they trust who can speak to them from their own experience and of God's provision