Training Temperance

You can have too much of a good thing. Couples can suffer from excess when they spend too much too quickly. Spouses can wound one another by speaking too many unguarded words. Even their sex life can come to compromise other parts of the marriage if it is not balanced with many other ways of expressing love. 

 

Temperance is the virtue of keeping yourself and your relationships balanced and in harmony. The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines temperance as “the moral virtue that moderates the attraction of pleasures and provides balance in the use of created goods.” The objective is to allow our will, guided by prudence, to curb and control our instincts and keep our desires within the limits of what is good for us.

 

In Dante’s Paradise, the temperate souls dwell in the Sphere of Saturn, a congregation of contemplative and mystical souls. In Dante’s day, Saturn was the farthest known planet from earth. Temperate souls are placed in this outermost planet in part to symbolize the ways that their self-discipline has allowed them to distance themselves from all earthly attachment and focus their desire instead exclusively on God.

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Here on earth, temperance is extremely difficult because it is not giving things up. Instead of giving up your pleasures and wishes, temperance is about setting limits on them. You can’t give up food, you should not give up sex within the marriage, nor stop enjoying praise from friends. Temperance is not about giving up good things but rather finding a balance. It rejects the extreme indulgences of overeating, drinking too much, drug addiction, excessive gambling, desperate attention seeking, and dullness of mind, but it also rejects overly strict diets, pointless privations and refusals to share in the pleasures of others. Temperance urges us to fast, but only when the fast prepares us for a feast, only when a rhythm is found between times of fasting and meditation, and times of enjoyment and sharing.

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 In essence, temperance is about impulse control. It is about refraining from good things so that we appreciate them more, and so that they do not take over our lives.

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In discussions of temperance, the Church fathers often draw their examples from three domains that are very relevant to the vocation of marriage: speech, consumption and sexuality. In addition, we would like to add a fourth important domain where moderation is often lacking in contemporary marital vocations: labor.

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Moderating speech

 

The praise and attention of others is a good thing--except when you start to pursue it. Sharing secrets and experiences is a way to bond together--unless it descends into gossip, rants, or meaningless chatter. A central conundrum of marital life is the challenge between, on the one hand, having a true, honest and intimate sharing of inner lives between spouses and, on the other hand, sharing everything you are thinking and feeling without caring whether it builds your relationship or undermines it.

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Venting is simply a way of expressing yourself and letting go of any suppressed thoughts. It's a quick verbal release of pent-up emotions with no real mischievous intent. As the name suggests, venting is an attempt to allow our emotional reactions to run through us by sharing our negative feelings briefly, in a safe place, with a safe friend or family member that we can trust to keep our confidences. It’s brief, it’s intense, and it helps us process our hurt, sadness, anger, or other strong emotion enough to either let it go, or to get us to a point where we can begin to problem-solve the situation.

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For one couple Dawna worked with, however, her complaints consistently moved beyond momentary venting. Dyanna’s complaints were not brief, and she returned to the same issues and mulled over the same events again and again. Her husband Malik said that what started as "venting" over specific recent interactions often spiraled into extended complaints that rehashed past grievances, leaving him feeling caught between defending their children and supporting his wife.

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Using the reflective listening and empathic response techniques described in the introduction to this section, Dyanna and Malik shared their feelings and concerns about her behaviors, then moved on to problem solving.

 

To start, Dyanna agreed to limit her initial venting to five minutes, timed if necessary, after which the conversation must end, or shift to problem-solving. Malik's role was to offer brief reflective responses without becoming an "echo chamber" for her complaints. There is no guarantee that the simple intervention they are trying will work, but it’s a start, and now that the issue is out in the open, they will be able to revisit it and continue to try new solutions as needed.

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Moderating consumption 

 

We all need to eat, and we enjoy eating well, but we don’t want our eating to become obsessive and lead us into gluttony, obesity, anorexia, or an infatuation with faddish diets. Similarly, social media offers a wonderful way to connect with, share stories with and stay informed about distant friends, family and colleagues, but spending hours each day on social media may interfere with your family and social life in the here-and-now. 

 

Temperance is about moderating our desires for good things so that they don’t become bad things.

The family who plays together stays together. Playing an online game to relax can be a lot of fun, but many of these games become—and often are designed to become—addictive and endlessly time-consuming.

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Henry and Camille, for example,  were part of a generation that grew up with video games. When they met they quickly discovered they had a shared love of The Legend of Zelda and other popular games of that era. They found gaming together far more entertaining than watching movies or television shows. They were interactive and encouraged one another to play better.

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Initially, gaming was a real plus in Camille and Henry’s relationship. After their wedding and a couple of kids, however, Camille began to realize she was spending more time watching television in their bedroom while Henry gamed online with his group of guy friends. 

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Using reflective listening techniques, Camille expressed how lonely and disconnected she felt because Henry spends most evenings gaming online with his friends rather than spending time with her like they used to when dating.  Henry explained that he used gaming with friends as a way to decompress from work stress, preferring action games to the strategy games Camille enjoyed.

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The discussion led to a constructive compromise where they agreed to set specific nights for gaming together, with Camille taking the strategic role while Henry handles the controls. Additionally, Henry agreed to come to bed with his wife each night, even on evenings when he planned to get up later to game with his friends. Their compromises were an effort to temper his game playing to put them back in balance.

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Moderating sexuality

 

Initially, Karen and Ron had a dynamic sex life with a lot of play and tenderness. Over the years, as they advanced in their careers, their work lives began to encroach on their coupleship, leaving time for chores and scheduled activities but little time for intimacy. At some point one of them made the suggestion to schedule their sexual liasons. Karen was the partner who kept track of this on the family calendar, although for privacy’s sake their sexual liaisons were represented by a small heart, every Wednesday and Saturday, except if Ron or Karen were sick, out of town, or otherwise occupied.

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When Ron expressed his frustrations about missed opportunities for intimacy, Karen revealed that she felt their scheduled approach to sex had become mechanical and lacked the romance and emotional connection she desires. After a discussion, they acknowledged that their current system of scheduled intercourse had reduced their intimate life to a routine that neither found fulfilling. Karen expressed a desire to be "wooed" rather than treated as a "Wednesday and Saturday sex object." Ron, though intimidated by the prospect of changing their approach, agreed to work toward a more spontaneous and emotionally connected intimate life, provided that Karen agreed to review their sexual intimacy every month with a frank talk on how the process was working for both of them.

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Karen and Ron’s hope in scheduling lovemaking was to remove it from the everyday worries of work or household chores. They expected that knowing they were going to be sexually intimate would give them a little lift during their days, without having to worry from day-to-day about how to invite one another into intimacy, build excitement, or make plans for elaborate dates. What neither intended was that they would stop spontaneously reaching out to one another because they didn’t want to pressure the other, or face rejection if it wasn’t a Wednesday or Saturday evening. And when events conspired to prevent sexual intercourse on a scheduled day, one or the other spouse inevitably got hurt.

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Church teachings on sexuality—especially its positions against masturbation and contraception and sex between unmarried persons—are often treated as old fashioned and even as mired in an opposition to genuine human sexuality.  In fact, the Church is advocating for a sexuality that is more loving and generous because it is rooted in temperance rather than indulgence and, as a result, in generosity rather than self-gratification.

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At the root of this teaching is the idea that sex is intended to be an interpersonal language through which a couple expresses love. Mastering that language requires discipline and a focus on quality over quantity. Sexual passion is a gift, but only so long as it is tempered by a genuine respect for the spouse as a unique person worthy of love.

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This leads to a paradox in which, on the one hand, each spouse gifts the other with their body, yet which rejects every form of sexual submission and obligation in favor of a rich communication between the spouses about their sexuality. The true goal is a reciprocal gift of selves to each other.

 

To accomplish this, a couple must be prepared to have times of sexual fasting as well as times of feasting, and to have times of deep communication and reflection on the wonder of their sexual intimacy.

 

In this story Ron and Karen found themselves on the extreme end of the temperance to indulgence continuum. Risk was taken off the table due to their rigidly scheduled sexual liaisons. In a sense, they had become ascetics in the ways in which they were parsing out sexual intercourse, which left no room for the expression of marital passion and the deepening of their love. Tossing out the calendar meant each was responsible to embrace their partner’s sexuality and express love accordingly. Moreover, they were each newly responsible for initiating lovemaking in a mutually gratifying way. But it also meant taking risks—the risk of pursuing and failing to ignite a similar passion in the other.

 

Periods of fasting are times for reflection. Spouses who pursue their partners must continually reflect on how well they know them, and how best to woo and please them. Times of abstinence are also times for reflecting on work schedules that make sexuality a chore, or turn sexuality into a case of “getting relief” for your desires so you can plunge back into your work.

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Which brings us to…

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Moderating Labor

 

For Jim, success didn’t lie in winning so much as in not failing. He’d had a fairly lax attitude toward work in high school and college, until he was fired without warning from a work study job. The failure haunted him, and even years later he was extremely sensitive to his company’s demands. As his anxiety and stress grew, so too his expectations of what he’d be able to do. He often told Rhonda he needed to bring work home in the evening and on weekends because he needed to accomplish more in his workday than he seemed capable of doing.

 

He always believed the load would lighten in the next quarter, or after the next big project, but Rhonda saw that this never actually occurred. Worse, she never knew when he was actually working on his laptop, or when he was just surfing and playing to relieve his anxieties about work. The lack of clear boundaries made it hard for her to spend time with him.

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And then the Coronavirus pandemic sent him home to work permanently, and Rhonda knew she needed to address the issue during their weekly State of Our Union meeting.

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"Because you work from home during this Covid 19 pandemic, you are spending almost all your time on your laptop. You tell me you are working. I feel lonely and isolated because I miss spending time with you. I think we spend less time together than ever, even though we are at home together all day long."

 

"You are feeling lonely and sad because you believe I am spending more time working than with you," Jim reflected. "You see this period as us having more time together, yet I'm spending less time with you."

 

"It's like technology is taking over our lives. Work is creeping into our family time. I believe you are disconnecting from our family," Rhonda said.

 

Jim pushed away possible retorts to concentrate on listening. "You don't think I am maintaining a good balance between work and family because the internet has me at the company's beck and call. This is a problem for you because you feel neglected."

 

"I've read that maintaining balance between personal needs and work is key for long-term satisfaction," Rhonda added. "My greatest fear is you are simply using work to spend less time with me." Her voice caught.

 

"That is the farthest thing from what I am intending," Jim said. "I am burnt-out and unmotivated. I try to multitask but end up wasting time. I keep putting out fires until other tasks become fires. I can't focus or get organized."

 

"You aren't trying to avoid me. You're just disorganized and overwhelmed with your office demands."

 

"Maybe being connected 24/7 is lessening my productivity," he said. "I find myself checking every ding from my phone. I don't enjoy work anymore, but feel pressure to produce the best material. That makes me anxious, so I start looking at news or Facebook just to avoid the anxiety."

 

"You're feeling extremely anxious and burnt out. You've been dancing as fast as you can but not getting where you want to be," Rhonda reflected.

 

"I'd guess your old nemesis perfectionism is at work," she continued. "You have an ideal you aren't living up to. You escape through time-wasting activities, but the work and anxieties pile up. Somehow this is cutting me out of your life.  I'm sorry your job is difficult, but you seem extraordinarily conscientious. I wonder if you're ever able to mentally disengage from work."

 

"You want to be a priority," Jim responded. "You want me present when I'm with you, not carrying work mentally."

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"Exactly. How do you feel about that?"

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"Mindfulness is something I've read about. I find myself constantly reconsidering the past or dreading the future. With office routines gone, the workload seems insurmountable," Jim confessed.

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"This problem with me being distant is just the tip of the iceberg. I'm so burnt out. I spend time chewing over what I've done wrong, including neglecting you, but I don't know how to change."

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"I don't know who you think is looking over your shoulder," Rhonda said. "Your boss loves your work. You won an award last year."

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"I don't think it will ever be enough for you. After listening, I feel anxious that you won't prioritize our time together. Work seems like a bottomless pit you keep throwing yourself into."

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"You are right," Jim winced. "I'm not really present when I'm with you."

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Rhonda teared up. "I'm lonely. These months of social distancing have dampened my social life, making me more aware of how little we interact. I need you to get this under control."

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"I have mindfulness techniques and ideas for better work/home balance, but I haven't tried them," Jim admitted.

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"What have you got? Maybe I can help," Rhonda offered.

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"The pomodoro technique - work for 25 minutes, then take a 5-minute break to decompress. My problem is I use the break to check emails or social media."

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"You know what to do but keep sabotaging yourself."

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"I could put my phone away and set specific break activities. Email should be a work task, not a break. And I should schedule virtual coffee with colleagues."

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"Those are great ideas. Now what about time for us?"

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"I really want there to be a 'no work zone,'" Rhonda said. "I want you to mentally switch from work to home without the traces of work all over you."

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"I can certainly try." Jim pulled Rhonda into his embrace. "I'm sorry I've been neglecting you. I'll try for better balance. I know I say you're the center of my life, but then I center on work. I'll do better."

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Rhonda's eyes filled with tears. "I love you so much," she said.

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Labor has become a tremendous problem for many couples in modern society. Finding a healthy work-life balance is the topic of hundreds of self-help books. As with communication, sexuality and consumption, the challenge is to find a balance between the legitimate need to meet the economic requirements of the family, and the necessity of putting spousal relationships ahead of the never ending demands that jobs and careers can place on families.

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In this account, Rhonda’s concerns about being neglected turn out to be just one part of a bigger problem in which work has colonized every part of Jim’s life. Internal anxieties about meeting his own standards for quantity and quality have spoiled Jim’s enjoyment of his work, yet drive him to ever greater efforts. Underlying it all is a fear of failure, and the economic and emotional consequences losing his job could mean. But as 

 

Rhonda tries to point out, most of these anxieties are of his own making.

 

Our society has coined the term “workaholics” to describe an addiction to work. But workaholism is really about our attitude toward work, not the number of hours we put in. Most workaholics don’t love work; they get through it. The ancient requirement to set one day aside from labor as a day of rest was a recognition that we must fast from labor not merely to “re-energize”—a very modern take on leisure—but to reflect and refocus. 

We all need time—daily breaks, weekly breaks, annual vacations—in which we can remind ourselves that our labor supports our vocation and must never be allowed to destroy it.

 

Discernment 

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Signs your life may be out of balance:

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1. Your “to do” list appears to be endless and overwhelming.

2. You are very busy but not sure you are accomplishing anything. You feel trapped, as if you are on a treadmill going nowhere.

3. Your life feels joyless. You are frequently tired, have headaches or other physical and emotional signs of stress.

4. You feel like you have lost your purpose and your direction. You seem to be living a schedule set by others.

5. You are having a hard time disconnecting from one activity to be fully present in the next. Work, family, spirituality all seem to bleed into one another.

6. While your sex life involves a pursuit of pleasure and connection, it lacks a sense of wonder, romance and sexual intimacy.

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Practical Advice 

 

Temperance, with the other Cardinal virtues of prudence, justice and fortitude, is intended to remind us that the purpose of our lives is not simply to avoid evils but to keep our minds, bodies and spirits healthy so that we can go out and do good in the world--starting with our marriages and our families. How can we learn to practice temperance in our lives and our marriage?

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1.  Focus on your vocation. One of the most fundamental issues in intemperate lives is a lack of purpose. In the vocation of marriage, the fundamental purpose toward which you should be oriented is your vocation. Whenever you are feeling overwhelmed by the daunting array of activities facing you, it is important to step back and ask yourself, “Which courses of action will bring me closer to my spouse, and which will move me away?” In his book The Rhythm of Life, Matthew Kelly advises us that spending just ten minutes a day reflecting on what we are doing and how it ties to our goals, dreams and life purpose, can be a game-changer.

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2. Share your focus. When a spouse is accused by their partner of neglecting them for work, the response “but I’m doing it all for you and the kids” is so common that it has become a cliché. It is crucial that as you increase your focus on your vocation, that you do it in dialogue with your spouse. The State of Our Union meeting can be an ideal place to do this. Any week when neither spouse has an urgent issue to address, the couple can use the communication skills to reflect together on how they feel about the marriage, what their goals and purposes are, and where they want to see their marriage in one, five or ten years. Christians should also be sharing their focus with God, in prayer, praying for good discernment, prudence and wisdom.

3. Practice temperance in everyday life. The end goal is to make temperance a habit, something that governs our actions without our even having to think about it, St. Thomas Aquinas tells us. To do this, we need to practice temperance every day. In Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything B.J. Fogg describes research showing that people build new habits effectively by setting small daily quotas for themselves. Committing to sending one text message daily telling your spouse one reason you love them can build to taking one, 5-minute break to call and connect with your spouse in the middle of the work day, and then to untimed daily calls planning an evening activity.

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4. Practice Fasting, Feasting and Ordinary Time. The church organizes its annual calendar in ways that draw attention to its commitment to rhythm and balance in spiritual life. For example, the Baptism of the Lord marks a passage from Advent and the Christmas season to Ordinary time. Ordinary time continues until Lent and Easter, then resumes until Advent comes around again. The Church calendar is thus a cycle, a process in which we move from fasting and meditation, to feasts and celebration, to ordinary time and work. Out of 52 weeks, 33 weeks are spent in ordinary time.

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Ordinary time is not ordinary in the common modern English sense of something that's not special or distinctive. It derives from the Latin ordinalis meaning ordered, numbered and organized. Where fasts are times of contemplation and strong measures to transform ourselves, and feasts are times of celebration and thanksgiving, ordinary time is the time of work, of engaging in the regular order of everyday life. 

 

But that work includes not just the mundane labor that earns our pay, but also the work of prayer, of doing good in the world, and of engaging in our vocations.

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Our vocational life also has, or should have, these liturgical dimensions. There should be times of celebration--birthdays, anniversaries, Easter and Christmas. There should be times of meditation, penance and transformation. And there should be ordinary time.

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• Holidays: Early in our marriage, and especially after we had kids, we tried to keep the 12 Days of Christmas (Dec. 25-Jan. 5) as holidays, even though it’s a challenge in a society that wants Christmas season to start after Halloween and end on Christmas Day. Some years Mark has given Dawna an additional gift and a love note every one of the 12 days of Christmas. It is important to keep anniversaries and birthday celebrations as special times to celebrate the marriage and the family. Dawna insisted on Easter as a major family holiday, and Valentine’s Day also turned into a major family celebration.

• Ordinary time is the time to work on our vocation on a regular basis. We have our work, our leisure time, our children’s activities and, within this, we need to find opportunities to work on our marriage in a regular way. In his book The Relationship Cure Dr. John Gottman cites research showing that small gestures of love and affection every day do far more to build marital success than occasional big gestures. Ordinary time is the time to engage in these small everyday gestures of affection and appreciation.

• Fasting.What is perhaps missing from many of our family calendars are times of fasting and meditation. When do we take time out from ordinary time, as a couple, to meditate on our marriage, commit to change and transformation, and to make resolutions for how we will be better as we re-enter ordinary time? One solution is to plan an annual marriage retreat. While these can be expensive, there are many useful resources for planning your own marriage retreats. You can purchase do-it-yourself kits, or buy a book on creating your own retreat. Then rent a cabin for a weekend, or arrange a staycation at home, send the kids to their grandparents, and make it happen. Another interesting approach is outlined in John Gottman’s Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love in which communication exercises are built into dates over several weeks rather than a single long weekend. Other components of relationship workshops such as trust building exercises could also be worked into this kind of sequential process.

5.    Practice Natural Family Planning (NFP). Natural Family Planning, or NFP, is a technique through which a couple tracks the signs of the fertile and infertile phases of the wife’s menstrual cycle to achieve or postpone pregnancy. When we started our training in NFP, we understood it as "Catholic Birth Control." But our coaches described NFP quite differently: as a way of using temperance to enhance marital sexuality and intimacy. Jim and Ginger described marital sexuality with a risqué openness that really made it sound like a feast. But they described the periods of abstinence equally positively: as a time for focusing on romance, interpersonal intimacy and spiritual connection in preparation for the next phase of sexual intimacy. In their lives, NFP wasn’t an acceptable Catholic alternative to artificial contraception, it was a way to order one’s intimate life to be richer and more fulfilling at every level by alternating feast and fast with the body’s natural rhythms.

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References:

 

Dr. Gregory Bottaro. 2018. The Mindful Catholic: Finding God One Moment at a Time. Wellspring. 

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BJ Fogg. 2019. Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything Harvest.

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John and Julie Gottman. 2019. Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love. Workman.

 

John Gottman and Joan Declair. 2002. The Relationship Cure: A 5 Step Guide to Strengthening Your Marriage, Family, and Friendships. Potter.

 

Matthew Kelly. 2004. The Rhythm of Life: Living Every Day with Passion and Purpose. Touchstone.