Enjoy Your Ideal Marriage (And Life) By Cultivating Margin
Enjoy Your Ideal Marriage (And Life) By Cultivating Margin
By Bradley Bennett
I rarely have to try to get busy… It just happens!
In fact, I’m usually so busy with stuff I don’t really want to do that I rarely have the time or energy to focus on things I really care about, like Amanda and our marriage.
Can you relate?
It feels like we’re constantly expected to do more, be more, and have ever more. So we stuff our schedule until it’s ready to bust, and we load up our credit cards until we’re swamped in debt, but all this does is leave us feeling…
Stressed.
Overwhelmed.
Burnt-out.
And unhappy.
Many, myself included, wear this overloaded lifestyle like a badge of honor. But it does nothing but eat away at everything in our life, especially our marriage. The stress, overwhelm, and unhappiness leave us unable to love each other with our best.
Amanda and I have been there… We’ve felt the negative effects that come with an overloaded life, but we’ve also chosen to stand against it. We’ve decided we aren’t helpless victims at the mercy of our schedule or culture.
Recently, we began pursuing how we could truly prioritize our marriage and enjoy it to the fullest. We realized quickly that we had been missing one critical ingredient… Margin.
What Is Margin?
In a literal sense, margin is defined as: the extra amount of something (such as time or space) that can be used if needed.
That’s a pretty dry explanation, but there are two portions that I need to focus on: extra and if needed.
Margin is the little extra that we hold in reserve and use it if needed to love our spouse well within our marriage.
It’s impossible to have anything extra, though, when our lives are constantly in a state of overwhelm. And in fact, this is the exact reason most people don’t have margin at all.
Dr. Richard Swenson, M.D in his book: Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives provides another definition of margin,
“Margin is the space between our load and our limits. It is the amount allowed beyond that which is needed. It is something held in reserve for contingencies or unanticipated situations. Margin is the gap between rest and exhaustion, the space between breathing freely and suffocating.”
In marriage, margin can often be the gap between fulfillment and stagnation. The difference between your ideal marriage and one of disappointment.
The change is amazing once we create some space between our load and our limit. In order to paint the picture, I want share with you some of the fruit Amanda and I have experienced after cultivating margin together.
Margin Gives Us Peace
All of us are busy and we each feel the pressures, but an overloaded lifestyle often comes without much peace. It’s hard to have peace when we are constantly frazzled by having consistent activity and no rest.
When our load is greater than our limit we experience stress because we have no extra. Every little thing we have is being invested into not drowning.
Margin provides peace by doing the opposite and reducing our load to a point that we can manage.
Margin Gives Us Freedom
You may not realize it right now, we didn’t either at first, but you are a slave to your busyness. Things like our schedule, overly-emotional burdensome friends, and an unchecked work life imprison us.
They shackle us with so many obligations and distractions that we no longer have the time or energy to do what we want.
Margin grants us freedom from the constant pressures of an overloaded lifestyle. We have the room to maneuver and the extra time, energy, and resources we need.
Margin Protects What Is Important To Us
An overloaded lifestyle will trample all over your priorities until they are left by the wayside. It will consume you with so much insignificant stuff that you won’t be able to tell the difference between what’s important and what’s urgent.
Margin allows for us to put protective barriers around the important parts of our life, like our marriage and relationship with God. We can allot extra time and energy to them because they are what truly matters.
This has allowed Amanda and I to give each other our best time and energy, as opposed to the ragged leftovers from an overloaded life. This has been great for our marriage, but it’s been an extended process and we are nowhere perfect at this.
How We Are Cultivating Margin In Our Marriage
Laying down an overloaded lifestyle in order to cultivate margin may seem daunting, I know it has been for us, but there are some practical steps you can begin taking today.
1. Start With The End In Mind
The best way to change anything is with the end in mind. You must know where you want to go in order to know how to get there. Give yourself a goal to shoot for.
Sit down, pray, and talk through what is ultimately important to you. What do you feel God wants for your marriage and what is it that you personally desire?
Spend time crafting what Amanda and I call your “Ideal Marriage”. This is the marriage you desire, in the light of God’s calling, to have.
Talk with your spouse and write down the different characteristics you want. Here are a few key areas to talk through:
- Vacations
- Regular Time Spent Together Daily
- Finances
- Spiritual/Prayer
- Frequency of Sex
2. Create Crystal Clear Priorities
Once you have created your ideal marriage, pull out the things that you absolutely must have. For example, a few of the things Amanda and I pulled out were that we wanted to eat dinner each night together and have the financial margin to become debt-free.
These were non-negotiables that we both felt were important to prioritize.
It’s important that you are both crystal clear about these priorities or they will become a source of frustration, not freedom. Take the needed time to talk and process through your them so you are united and committed.
3. Make The Necessary Changes To Cultivate Margin Around Your Priorities
Now that you have your priorities and goals clearly written out, all you need to do is put together a plan on cultivating the necessary margin to allow those things in your life.
Completing all of these changes may take a little while, but at the end of the day you will be giving yourself the needed margin to build and enjoy your ideal marriage.
In order for Amanda and I to regularly eat dinner together, we had to change how we scheduled things. I rarely, if ever, say yes to doing anything after 5:00 on weeknights. In fact, I say “no” to more things than I ever have in my life… and it’s been wonderful.
You see, each “no” we give is actually a “yes” to something else. We are saying “no” to overload and “yes” to the margin needed to love our spouse well!
Cultivate Margin Consistently
Friends, I ask that you make cultivating margin in your marriage a priority today and for the rest of your days. Many of us have stagnated marriages that are imprisoned by our overloaded lifestyles.
In Matthew 6:21 Jesus notes,
“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
When it comes to treasures, what is more important than our time and energy? Where we invest those things will determine, to a large extent, where our heart is.
Many of us have, for too long, given our treasures and our hearts to frivolous excess and obligations, while tossing the leftovers to our marriage.
God did not create us to be slaves to a hectic lifestyle and he didn’t create marriage to operate consistently in the midst of one. In order to build a fulfilling “Us” Marriage, we need the reserves and extra that we can only gain through a life with margin.
My hope is that you would say yes to cultivating margin and would have the extra time, energy, and resources you need to love like each other like we are called to.