My husband and I had been married exactly six days when we had our first argument. On the surface it was over a little thing — where to eat dinner that night. But my husband saw a deeper, more significant issue at play: Would we run to our parents when we had a need or would we face the need head-on together? Though the argument was minor I remember it as a foundational moment in our new life together.
In the heady days of wedding planning engaged couples can get carried away with romantic fantasies, never imagining that a minor disagreement might someday lead to a major argument. Unfortunately conflict in marriage is inevitable.
Human nature
Buddy Landry, assistant professor of marriage and family counseling at the University of Mobile, said, “How common is conflict in the first year of marriage? I can say with a degree of certainty that it happens in 100 percent of marriages. There’s no marriage in which it will not occur within the first year and it’s likely to occur within the first few days or weeks.”
It’s just human nature, Landry said. Two people cannot live together without conflict of some sort arising.
“Marriage brings together two different people with different perspectives, different expectations and different backgrounds,” Landry said.
Those differences aren’t necessarily bad. In fact differences are part of God’s design for marriage, according to June Hunt, author of “Marriage: To Have and to Hold,” a Biblical Counseling Keys resource, and founder of Hope for the Heart, a worldwide biblical counseling ministry.
God’s desire in marriage is to “mold the character of His children into the likeness of Christ,” Hunt writes. “In a marriage relationship God uses the distinct qualities, strengths and desires of women and men to help shape their character to reflect Christ while preserving their unique traits and personalities.”
Landry said merging those unique traits and personalities in marriage often is challenging especially during the first year.
One big source of conflict is the expectations each individual brings to the marriage. Sometimes one spouse brings unfair or unrealistic expectations into the marriage but often the expectations are not better or worse, or more or less realistic, Landry said. They are just different.
Household responsibilities are a good example.
Boys and girls learn to be men and women from their parental figures, Landry said. So a man, by observing his own father, learns the role he is to play as a husband. Likewise he learns the role a wife plays by observing his mother. The way these individuals play their roles are normal to him.
However, his wife has grown up in a different household where men and women play their roles a bit differently and that is her normal.
“The newly married couple has got to create a new normal for themselves in terms of the common ground they share and resolve their differences in a way that brings them together rather than pushing them apart,” Landry said.
Other issues like extended family relationships, finances, sex and parenting must be handled in a way that sets a positive tone for future conflict as well. The goal of premarital counseling is to help a couple establish healthy patterns from the beginning, Landry said.
Negotiating differences
“Premarital counseling helps couples face the day-in, day-out realities of married life,” Landry said. “It helps deflate some of the unrealistic expectations each person may have and helps them learn to negotiate their differences.”
The hoped-for result is better communication and better conflict resolution, Landry said.
“Human behavior is notoriously hard to predict but the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Patterns set early on are more likely to persist as a relationship persists. So if you set a path for success by interacting positively with your spouse and handling conflict in a healthy, functional way, you are more likely to handle conflict successfully in the future.”
Positive communication also is biblical, Landry said.
“Scripture exhorts us to speak the truth in love. Truth and love can’t exist separately — they must go together,” he said. “Marriage should be a place for the expression of hurts and concerns but that communication always must be tempered with love.”
One strategy that is useful for married couples, regardless of how long they have been married, is the “5-to-1 ratio” of positive communication, which relationship researcher and author John Gottman calls the “magic ratio.”
That means for every one negative feeling or interaction between spouses, there must be five positive feelings or interactions, said Larry Daniels, a licensed family and marriage therapist and counselor for Pathways Professional Counseling, a ministry of Alabama Baptist Children’s Homes & Family Ministries.
Fostering this type of positive communication may take discipline, training or even the help of a professional counselor or minister, Daniels said. However, he likens the work to the type of preparation athletes undertake in order to perform their best. The results are worth the effort.
“With a little assistance from others, along with regular training, preparation, investment and consistent practice, any of us can be more efficient and healthy with anything we put our mind to including having a happier marriage.”
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