Common Marriage Problems – Not Making an Effort 

It’s so tempting to take things easy once the ring is on your finger. So many of us decide that the hard work is done and that going forward a marriage doesn’t require any effort. One of the most common marriage problems is to just take a back seat, let life pass you by and assume that married life is for every no matter how little effort you make.

The ‘marriage is easy’ assumption has never been so wrong. Married life is hard work especially for those that have been used to living life their own way. There are so many things to disagree over and have differing opinions on. It’s so easy to assume and a common marriage problem to believe that your partner should think like you, have the same ideas as you and want the same as you do. Such an assumption has never been further from the truth.

I should imagine that most of you have heard the saying ‘opposites attract’ and it’s very true. Look at the number of couples you see walking down the street and think about how many of them you look at and wander just why they are together. It’s really common in marriage for partners to seem a bad fit but it only becomes a problem when couples don’t except their individuality. When people accept what they are and who they have married opposites can really work and complement each other but one of the most common marriage problems is to try and turn partners into something they will never be.  

What couples have to remember is that people might loose their rough edges, learn a few things or might mellow over time but deep down they are always who you married warts and all. Couples have to learn to accept their partners for what they are, pull together to make the partnership work and learn what marriage truly means. It’s a really common marriage problem to bail out when marriage isn’t quite the fairy tale that it was expected to be but in our marriage vows we state ‘for better, for worse, to death do we part’, that doesn’t mean ‘until the going gets tough’!

Admittedly, there are a few actions and indiscretions that no one can be expected to forgive, but for a lot of married couples divorce is just used as an easy and a lazy way out. Rather than fixing a few small common marriage problems couples tend to just let them ride and fail to even accept what is happening to their marriage until it gets to a point when a lot of hard work has to be done to turn the marriage around.

The secret to a perfect marriage isn’t to marry a clone, its learning how to accept each other, making an effort to understand each other, learning how to communicate and knowing how to recognise and fix those little niggly common marriage problems before they escalate out of control.