Training Temperance

You can have too much of a good thing, and it can affect your marriage.

Couples can suffer from excess when they spend too much too quickly. Spouses can wound one another by speaking too many unguarded words. Excessive work at the expense of family time can disrupt healthy relationships. 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. 

Lent has begun, which makes this an excellent time to reflect on temperance in our marriages.Temperance is the virtue of keeping yourself and your relationships balanced and in harmony. The Catechism defines temperance as “the moral virtue that moderates the attraction of pleasures and provides balance in the use of created goods.”

Temperance is extremely difficult because it is not about giving things up, but setting limits on them. 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 and wreck our marriages.

temperance can be extremely difficult precisely because it does not involve giving up your pleasures and desires, but 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. Thus temperance is not about giving up good things but rather finding a balance.

This virtue 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.

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.

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.

You can read about these four crucial domains and their role in your marriage in "Training Temperance" from out book Climbing the Seven Story Mountain.