How to Get a Marriage Makeover — Part 2

Marriage doesn't create problems, Rick Warren argues in this episode — it reveals them. "If you had been a single adult all your life and you had not chosen to get married, you might be able to go all through your life with those habits and hurts and hang-ups, and nobody'd ever bug you about them. Because nobody's close enough to really see them." But marriage lets someone in close, and that proximity exposes what was already there. The question is what to do about it.

The Four Things That Sink a Marriage

Warren identifies four specific patterns that move a marriage from harmony to hostility and eventually to apathy. The first is unrealistic expectations — the silent assumptions about how marriage "should" work that were never discussed. The second is unaccepted differences, where spouses treat their own family-of-origin habits as normal and their partner's as wrong.