We came across an article from Dr. Stan Tatkin, a therapist who specializes in couples and secure-functioning relationships. He's the developer of the Psychobiological Approach to Couples Therapy (PACT) and the author of Wired for Love. The man knows what he's talking about.
His framework identified six habits that married couples need to stop doing if they want their relationship to survive. When we read through them, we looked at each other and said, "This is Friday night material." Because every single one of these hits close to home, not just for other people, but for us too.
Here are the six.
1. Believing That Love Is Enough
This is the one that catches people off guard. You're in love, you feel strongly about each other, and you've built a life together. So that should be enough, right?
It's not.
Love is critical. Nobody's dismissing that. But love without a plan is just a feeling. Proverbs 29:18 says where there's no vision, the people perish. The same applies to marriage. If you don't have shared purposes, aligned goals, and a clear sense of what your union means beyond "I love you," you're building on emotion alone. And emotion shifts.
There are a lot of people who genuinely love each other but can't stand being together. "I love you, but I don't love being with you" is a real sentence that comes out of real mouths. And some people only love you through the good seasons. When the trials come, when life gets hard, when it's not fun anymore, they're gone. That's not ride-or-die love. That's fair-weather love, and it won't hold.
Here are some questions worth sitting with as a couple: What does our union actually mean? What's the purpose of us being together beyond the feeling? What are our shared principles, and how will we govern ourselves to keep each other safe? If you can't answer those questions, love isn't your problem. Direction is.
2. Trying to Prove You're Right
You can be right and still lose.
That's hard for most people to swallow because we're wired to defend our position. When we believe we're right, everything in us wants to prove it, argue it, and make sure the other person acknowledges it. But in a marriage, being right is often the fastest route to being alone.
First Corinthians 13 says love takes pleasure in the flowering of truth. Notice it says truth, not your version of events. Often, two intelligent people in a relationship both genuinely believe they're right. And they probably both are, from their own perspective. But perception is individual. Your spouse saw it one way. You saw it another. Neither of you is lying. You're just looking at the same situation through different filters.
Stop trying to prove your point and start trying to understand theirs. One of the most effective things we've learned through maturity is this: instead of telling someone what you want them to think, ask questions. Let them process the information on their own. When a person arrives at an understanding by themselves, it sticks far deeper than anything you could have forced on them.
The relationship has to be protected at all times. If winning the argument means damaging the marriage, you didn't win anything.
3. Trying to Fix Each Other Instead of the Problem
This is where a lot of couples waste years.
You're not going to fix your spouse. They're not going to fix you. Dr. Gottman's research backs this up: roughly 69% of the issues in any relationship are perpetual, meaning they're tied to fundamental personality differences and they're not going away. Ever.
So instead of trying to change who your spouse is, focus on the actual problem. Treat it like a puzzle you're solving together, not a trial where one of you is the defendant.
You have three options with any ongoing issue: ignore it, endure it, or cure it. Some things about your spouse you can safely ignore because they don't actually affect the marriage. Some things you endure because the person is worth the inconvenience. And some things require an honest conversation and a mutual solution.
Charmaine is meticulous. That's who she is. It's not going to change, and honestly, it's an advantage in a lot of areas. If you were smart enough to choose this person, be smart enough to work with who they are instead of against them.
4. Having Emotional Conversations While Driving
This one sounds specific, but it's more common than you'd think. A lot of couples save their hard conversations for car rides because the other person is trapped and has to listen.
The problem is that the person driving cannot process emotional information safely. Their brain is occupied with traffic, navigation, and keeping everyone alive. When you dump a heavy conversation on them in that state, they're going to either shut down, get defensive, or get angry, and none of those outcomes help.
Dr. Tatkin puts it plainly: the person driving doesn't have the resources to handle the task. An emotional conversation will push them into fight-or-flight mode, and that's not safe for your relationship or for the other drivers on the road.
If you want someone to truly hear you, sit down. Face to face. Eye to eye. Not from the passenger seat while they're merging onto the highway.
5. Having Crucial Conversations Over Text, Email, or Phone
If a conversation matters, have it in person.
The majority of communication isn't words. It's body language, tone, facial expressions, eye contact. When you send a text, all of that disappears. Your spouse is left reading words on a screen with no way to gauge your sincerity, your emotion, or your intent. They fill in the blanks with whatever their current mood suggests, and that almost never goes well.
We'll be blunt: having a serious conversation over text is cowardly. People type things they would never say face to face. They get "text courage" and fire off messages that do real damage, messages they'd never have the nerve to say while looking their spouse in the eye.
If you need to address something important, wait until you can do it in person. Sit down. Look at each other. Let your body language, your tone, and your facial expressions communicate the things that words alone can't carry.
6. Neglecting How You Say Hello and Goodbye
This last one is subtle, but it's powerful.
Dr. Tatkin says that separations and reunions, whether you consciously feel their weight or not, are deeply important to human beings. How you end the day together and how you start the next one affects your sleep, your health, and your overall wellbeing.
A lot of couples let their marriage turn into a business operation. You clock in, you clock out. You pass each other in the hallway. You sleep in the same bed but you stopped saying good night two years ago. No morning kiss. No "I love you" when you walk out the door. No intentional reconnection when you walk back in.
That erosion is quiet, but it's real. Your marriage needs rituals of connection. A kiss before you leave the house. A real greeting when you come home, not just a nod from the couch. An actual "good night, I love you" before you close your eyes. These aren't trivial gestures. They're the daily deposits that keep the emotional account from going bankrupt.
Think about it: you would greet your boss at work. You'd say goodbye to a friend leaving dinner. Why would you give your spouse less than that?
Small Habits, Big Damage
None of these six habits seem catastrophic on their own. That's what makes them dangerous. They're the kind of things you do on autopilot, the patterns that settle in so gradually you don't realize they've taken root until the damage is already done.
Pick one of these this week. Just one. Identify whether it's showing up in your marriage, and if it is, start working on it. You don't have to overhaul everything overnight. But you do have to start paying attention, because the habits you ignore are the ones that will cost you.
Remember: Love, laugh, and learn together.
