Most Marriage Conflicts Aren’t About Right and Wrong

A couple describes their latest fight. Maybe it's how the dishwasher gets loaded, or what time the kids should be in bed, or whether you deal with a problem the moment it comes up or sleep on it first. The details change, but two things are always true: both of them are frustrated, and both of them are certain they are right. Check out the blog post here for more details and links.

This episode came out of the last one. I said in passing during the leadership episode that most marital conflict isn't about right and wrong, someone in our forum asked whether I had ever written about that, and I hadn't. So here it is. Most of what you fight about has no morally correct answer. Scripture doesn't specify a bedtime, and there is no commandment about loading cutlery handle up or handle down. Those are preferences, formed by your upbringing, your personality, your family culture, and a thousand experiences your spouse wasn't there for.

The trouble starts when a preference gets promoted to a moral issue. Once the fight becomes right versus wrong in your head, compromise stops feeling like flexibility and starts feeling like losing, your spouse's disagreement stops being a difference and becomes a character flaw, and you are no longer negotiating, you are prosecuting. Along the way in this episode: reality tunnels, and why marriage makes them worse rather than better; how Paul handles two live church disputes in Romans 14 by refusing to rule on either one; three questions that tell a preference from a principle; where the guardrails sit, because abuse is never a preference-level issue and agreement is not a moral sanitizer; and four things to do when it turns out to be a preference after all.

In this episode:

• (0:00) Intro
• (0:13) The fight you keep having
• (1:13) None of these have a right answer
• (2:08) When a preference gets promoted to a moral issue
• (2:30) Reality tunnels
• (3:54) Romans 14: the church fight Paul refused to settle
• (5:45) Three questions: principle, damage, or preference
• (6:48) Abuse is never a preference, and hurt is not harm
• (7:39) What to do when it's a preference
• (9:27) Unity is not uniformity
• (9:55) Try this

Links mentioned in this episode:

• SWM 162 - What does biblical leadership in marriage actually look like?
• SWM 037 - where I first talked about reality tunnels
• SWM 148 - 14 red flags your marriage is drifting
• The Mirror Game - a simple 4-step communication skill
• SWM 130 - Building resiliency in marriage
• How to use conflict to create intimacy
• Join our supporter forum
• Send me your question
• Book a discovery call