Here is something we tell every couple we counsel: you are not running from these problems, you are running into them. No matter how strong your marriage is, no matter how much you love each other, there are certain challenges every couple encounters sooner or later.
The good news is that knowing what is coming gives you a chance to prepare. You can put guardrails in place before you ever hit the curve. When you understand a problem before you are in the middle of it, you respond instead of react.
So let us walk through seven common problems every marriage faces, and what to actually do when they show up at your door.
1. Holding Grudges Over Minor Annoyances
Every one of us has done this. You notice something your spouse does that gets on your last nerve, and instead of addressing it directly, you find a quiet way to get even.
Here is how it plays out in real life. Say your wife just finished cleaning the whole house. Then you come home, drop your stuff on the kitchen counter, kick your shoes off in the family room, and flop down on the freshly made bed. Now she is walking through every room she just cleaned, dealing with your mess, feeling disrespected. So what does she do? She stops tying up the trash that she knows bothers you. She stops burning the candle you love to come home to. She did not solve the problem. She just created a second one.
That is passive aggression, and it goes both ways. Maybe your husband overspends and instead of talking about it, you needle him about something else. The pattern is the same, and it never works.
The truth is, everybody's pet peeves are different. What bothers Charmaine does not always bother me, and what I shrug off she notices immediately. That is not good or bad, it is just difference. You cannot hold a person's difference against them as a division point. Your spouse is different from you, they always will be, so do not stay mad at them for being who they are.
1 Corinthians 13 says love keeps no record of wrongs. A lot of us have memories that are a little too good when it comes to our spouse's mistakes. The answer is simple but not easy: confront the issue with love. You will never change what you refuse to address. Speak the truth in love, deal with it directly, and let it go.
2. Undervaluing Your Partner's Opinion
Your partner is never going to see everything exactly the way you see it. That is by design, not a defect in your marriage. So when you ask for their opinion, do not expect total agreement, and never diminish their outlook just because it differs from yours.
The Bible calls a wife a helpmate. She often provides insight you do not have, catching the blind spot you cannot see. In our marriage, I rarely make a big move without getting Charmaine's input first, because I have learned the hard way that when I act alone, it usually does not work out for me. Sometimes I see the money in an opportunity but miss the cost in time and commitment. She sees what I miss.
Matthew 18 says where two or more come into agreement, God goes to work. I want God involved in our plans, and Proverbs reminds us there is safety in a multitude of counsel, not just your own.
This matters even more when one spouse controls the finances or carries the title of head of household. Being the head does not mean being the only voice. Everyone in the relationship is valuable. You will not always carry the same workload, but you should always carry the same value.
3. Tallying Up Who Does More
This is the scoreboard problem. "I did this and this and this, and you only did that." The moment your marriage turns into a competition, both of you lose.
We are not here to compete with each other. We are here to complete each other. And the reality is that different seasons call for different loads. During the child-rearing years, a mother often carries more of the emotional weight, the nurturing, the feeding, because a husband simply is not built to feed that baby the way she can. That is the ebb and flow of marriage.
A lot of people believe marriage is supposed to be 50/50. It is not. Marriage is 100/100. You put in 100 percent and your spouse puts in 100 percent. But here is the honest part: there will be seasons where one of you cannot give your full 100. Maybe there is illness, a new baby, a job loss, a hard stretch. In those seasons, the other person carries more, and that is exactly how a team works. Some players carry more weight at certain points in the game. Picking up the slack for each other is simply what love looks like in a hard stretch.
4. Starting Off on the Wrong Foot
This one is especially for newlyweds and couples about to get married, though any couple can reset. How you start matters. You want to begin your marriage surrounded by a community of people pursuing the same thing you are, with good counsel, healthy habits, and the kind of friends who will speak wisdom when challenges come.
When we first got married, we did not have that. But after we got saved and started attending a Bible study, we built a strong community during our first year of marriage, and it made all the difference. That support helped us get on solid ground.
There is another way to start on the wrong foot, and it is just as important: starting without truth. It is amazing how many people discover major things about their spouse long after the wedding. A credit issue. A child they never mentioned. A whole history that never came up. Sometimes God gives grace to cover a season, but secrets have a way of surfacing later, and they hurt far more then than honesty would have hurt up front. Lay the foundation in truth from the very beginning.
5. Forgetting Your Own Self-Maintenance
In certain seasons, you can pour so much into your marriage, your job, your new home, or your kids that you completely forget to take care of yourself. New parents know this well. Between breastfeeding, caring for children after work, and trying to balance home and career, the version of you that used to show up starts to disappear.
Here is a practical tool we always recommend: get a calendar and put everything on it. Color coordinate it if that helps. When you can see your week laid out, you can see whether your priorities actually match your time. If your marriage, your family, and your own care are important to you but they are nowhere on the calendar, it is time to rearrange.
Self-care looks different in different seasons. Maybe it used to be getting your hair done, your nails done, putting on the lotion your spouse loves. In a busier season, self-care might simply be taking a nap because you are exhausted. Whatever it looks like for you, do not deny yourself that time. Self-care is welfare. Taking care of yourself is not selfish, it is part of being whole for the people who need you.
6. Having Unrealistic Expectations
You will never fulfill what you do not define. So many people are quietly disappointed in their marriages because they are not getting what they expected, but the expectation was never actually spelled out.
Defining an expectation means more than saying it out loud once. It means making sure you are both genuinely on the same page. You might say you want to have sex three times a week, or that you will cook four nights a week, but the word "a lot" means something completely different to each person. My "a lot" and your "a lot" might be miles apart. If it is not clearly defined and mutually understood, disappointment is almost guaranteed.
And here is the sobering part. Every unmet expectation will eventually get met somewhere. The question every couple has to ask is whether those needs will be met inside the marriage or outside of it. That is why defining expectations clearly, and revisiting them as seasons change, protects your marriage more than most people realize.
7. Keeping Secrets
Secrets are toxic to a marriage, every time. It can be something large, but often it starts small. You bought something and did not mention it. You ran into someone and never brought it up, and then it surfaces later in conversation and your spouse is looking at you sideways wondering what else you have not said.
Here is the thing. The issue usually is not the event itself. It could be completely harmless. You ran into an old acquaintance at the grocery store, no big deal. But if that person mentions it to your spouse before you do, suddenly your spouse feels blindsided and tempted to cover up their own hurt. A nothing moment becomes a crack in the trust.
So get in the habit of sharing the small things. Not because every detail is a crisis, but because transparency keeps the door closed to the enemy. Think of it as giving your spouse a heads up so they are never caught off guard by a landmine you could have flagged. It is not a secret, it is just keeping each other in the know. Honesty about the little things is how you protect trust for the big things.
The Common Thread
Look back over these seven problems and you will notice something. Holding grudges, dismissing opinions, keeping score, hiding the truth, neglecting yourself, fuzzy expectations, secrets. Almost every one of them comes down to communication and honesty.
No marriage is perfect. Ours certainly is not, and that is actually part of the point. When people see a couple from the outside, they often assume everything is flawless and wish their own relationship looked the same. But get close to any real marriage and you find two people who are still working on something. That is not a sign of failure. That is a sign of life.
The couples who make it are not the ones who never face these problems. They are the ones who face them together, as a team, with honesty and grace. Surround yourself with good community. Define what you both need. Confront issues with love instead of letting them fester. And keep choosing each other through every season.
Remember: Love, laugh, and learn together.
