Marriage With Meaning by Rabbi Daniel Young

Author:Rabbi Daniel Young [Young, Rabbi Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: iUniverse, In.c
Published: 2010-12-17T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4:

Investing in Your Marriage

If you had to guess right now what this chapter will be about, what would you guess? Some will see the word investing and immediately assume that this chapter is about money matters. After all, you’re getting married and your financial picture will, at least in some ways, change. Others may look at this and be expecting a chapter about the effort required to maintain a healthy relationship. Both would be right. In researching happy and healthy marriages, I have come to believe that important lessons about maintaining a healthy marriage can be gleaned from a financial model and vice versa, that important lessons about finances can be learned from understanding how emotional ties are fostered and strengthened.

To best get at these comparisons, I would like to share an idea that some psychologists and students of the human condition call the “Emotional Bank Account.” We are all familiar with a financial bank account. All of us have them. Our bank accounts allow us to deposit money and withdraw it to pay bills. Most will not be familiar with the idea of an emotional bank account, however. Willard Harley defines the concept for us: “Within each of us is a Love Bank that keeps track of the way people treat us. Everyone we know has an account and the things they do either deposit or withdraw love units from their accounts. It’s the way your emotions encourage you to be with those who make you happy. When you associate someone with good feelings, deposits are made into that person’s account in your Love Bank.”80 This is to say that a nice thing that someone does for us or a time when that person meets our expectations makes a deposit in our love bank account for that person. We are going to focus in this chapter on the most important account in your love bank: your spouse’s.

The good news is that as most couples approach marriage, their love bank accounts are in decent shape—if they were not, they would be delaying the marriage or breaking off the relationship. But a healthy emotional bank account at the time of marriage does not determine that there will be a healthy account a month, a year, or a decade from now. But don’t think for a moment that there is nothing you can do to keep a positive balance in your emotional bank account! This chapter will be devoted to giving you the tools to keep a healthy balance in both of your bank accounts—emotional and financial.

To do this, we will look at the emotional and financial bank accounts from three different perspectives. First, we will look at the immediate future and seek to figure out how to keep a positive balance on a day-to-day basis. Next, we will look at the short-term picture, which will largely focus on developing a cushion in these accounts so that when bad times come, we have enough emotional and financial strength to weather them.

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