Routine maintenance in the average household is ongoing. The heating and cooling system is checked annually or semi-annually. The pest control company comes by quarterly to make sure the home is pest free. The pool company comes weekly to clean and chlorine.
Family members are scheduled for routine dental cleaning and treatments. Vehicles are set for oil changes every 4,000 or so miles and tires for rotation at the same time. The lawn is mowed weekly, fertilized regularly, and treated for any bad spots that might have come up. The dog and cat go to the vet for their annual checkups and shots.
Routine ongoing maintenance is an accepted part of our life when it comes to various things upon which we depend. Without it we can expect breakdowns, expensive repairs, and inconvenience.
Why wait until your marriage is beyond repair? When it comes to marriage, most people do no routine maintenance or regular checks to make sure that everything is functioning as it should. Instead, we wait until the marriage is broken and then we try to figure out what went wrong and what we could have done to prevent it from breaking.
Unfortunately, some marriages cannot be repaired because the damage is too great. The time for repair was long before any visible signs of damage appeared, at a time when routine marriage maintenance might have found the weakness while it was still repairable.
Too late for repairs or just in the nick of time? It’s never too late to schedule maintenance checks for your relationships. Maybe your marriage is broken beyond repair but what about the relationships with your children, your siblings, your parents? How about friendships that you’ve pushed to the back while you’ve dealt with marital problems?
Maybe there’s still time to do some maintenance to keep your marriage together, to solidify it. Doing routine checks won’t catch every problem but they certainly show you care enough to ask your husband or wife if they’re happy within the marriage and if not what would make them enjoy the marriage more.
Routine maintenance should be used to keep everything we value in tiptop shape. Aren’t our relationships of the utmost value? Don’t they deserve preventative care the same as we schedule for the car or the pool?