Starting Marriage with 30 days of cold showers

As some of you may know there are some great benefits to cold showers in terms of muscle recovery, stress reduction, and general wellness surrounding cyrotherapy. One of the most well known proponents for the healing aspects of the cold is Wim "Iceman" Hof. He has his own set of interviews, blogs, and youtube videos on his various breathing techniques that he claims help him enjoy life at the highest level.

However, as a newly married couple, why would we put ourselves through 30 days of cold showers? Could it be for the benefit of our relationship? By taking that tough first step into a cold shower every morning we are showing ourselves that any noxious stimulus eventually normalizes. By the end of the 30 days I no longer dreaded the cold, I almost embraced, almost. 

While I can't speak for my new wife, I want to compliment her resilience in this matter as it was mostly my hard headed doing that caused us to go these 30 days without a warm shower in our own home. We did allow ourselves one week of solace during our honeymoon as it was just too difficult to continue to challenge ourselves in a tropical paradise. However, once we got home we realized we had 2 weeks left.

On top of the challenging aspects of the cold shower, it was also a very strong motivator for the 2 of us to continue to workout daily. Sometimes marriage can lead couples to a sense of complacency. The thought that you now are legally bound to this other individual makes some feel that they no longer have to pursue the best version of themselves. We made a point in our vows to never become complacent and to continue to push ourselves and each other everyday in our married lives. 

There really are a multitude of benefits behind taking cold showers for 30 days and we both got to experience them to the full effect. However, the main reason why we went 30 days without warm showers is that we became home owners in 2019 and got dealt our first "home owner" challenge of our hot water heater going out. While I can pretend that we were trying to benefit from cold showers, we truly were just enduring the situation dealt to us. 

Life has a way of handing out challenges at very interesting times. As newlyweds, we were unable to enjoy one of the things many people in America take for granted, hot water. We could have gotten the problem solved earlier, however with the availability of dwindling professionals such as plumbers, we were unable to get the problem taken care of before leaving for our honeymoon. This left us returning from paradise to the reality of cold showers again. After what ended up being  a full month, we thankfully have gotten to enjoy the luxury of warm showers once again. 

The moral of this is to find benefit and gratitude in any situation you are dealt. I honestly believe this situation brought us closer together as a newlywed couple. Would I do it by choice again, probably. Would I force my wife to take part in something like this for health benefits, not likely. It did show me how lucky I am though to have a partner that will put up with something as annoying as a month of cold showers in order to save about 60% of the initially quoted price by just allowing the time to shop around. If we had taken the first quote from the first plumbing company, we would have started our marriage with a hefty bill that was ultimately avoidable.

Enjoy the things in life such as hot showers and amazing partners, not everyone has the opportunity to have these easily overlooked luxuries.