The Internet floods us with ideas, tips, and tricks for couples to grow in their relationship with God. Sifting through it all can get overwhelming. Which works and which doesn’t? Let’s separate the wheat from the chaff and look at the ideas that truly work.

Be Doers, Not Just Hearers

Couples who share religious faith experience higher overall marital satisfaction (Perry, 2015). So yes, being married to a fellow believer is great! But that’s just the beginning. You need to go beyond passively hearing about your beliefs and actively start to do what your belief tells you.

Research also has shown that when couples take specific spiritual actions together, they experience better marriages than just by sharing the same faith (Mahoney et al., 1999). If you want to strengthen your union, you need to take steps in your spiritual journey together.

As you grow in your shared faith, your marital satisfaction and quality go up. Marriage becomes healthier and more satisfying.

Is Personality a Factor?

It’s rare for couples to have the same personality and expression of spirituality as each other. And sometimes those differences can be discouraging. If you are shy, you might feel disheartened that you don’t seem to have the same energy for God as your extroverted spouse. If you’re more outgoing, you might think you’re spiritually shallow because your quieter spouse spends more time in personal prayer than you.

The apostle Paul addresses this in his letter to the Romans. He describes how you are different parts of the same body, that each of you has something unique to bring to the table. Recognizing that you “have gifts that differ according to the grace given” to you, Paul exhorts you “to exercise them accordingly” (Romans 12:6).

And research backs him up on this. Dyer & Luckey (1961) found that differences in personality type do not affect spirituality in marriage. There is no right personality type to grow spiritually, so you shouldn’t worry that your spiritual growth doesn’t look like your spouse’s. Instead, focus on what’s important: sharing your journey pursuing God.

How Couples Can Grow Spiritually

So what are some specific ways to grow in your relationship with the Lord as partners? Here are some easy, yet effective methods to accomplish this:

1. Hold Weekly Check-Ins

Hectic schedules can easily cause you to forget to touch base with each other, so you might start to drift apart. To prevent this, Willford & Willford (2013) recommend that couples hold a weekly check-in. Consistency is vital because it shows your spouse that you are prioritizing and valuing this time with them.

In these check-ins, you should cover these important topics:

Celebrate the Wins. What were the highlights of your week? Share moments that gave you joy, and give your full attention to them when they share theirs. Rejoice in each others’ triumphs, remembering to thank God for these blessings.

Share the Struggles. Be real with each other. Open up and share your frustrations and problems. Use the scheduled time to gather your thoughts so that you can have a healthy discussion on these difficult topics. Process together, and bring them before the Lord in prayer.

Dream of the Future. What are you hoping? Planning? Where is God guiding you? As a couple, you need a glimpse of the future before you, to know that you are striving towards the same dream together.

When you make it a point to have these deep conversations with each other, you develop incredible intimacy, growing in your relationship together.

2. Pray Together

Joint prayer is another excellent way for couples to thrive. When couples regularly pray together, they experience higher marital quality, higher levels of trust, and reduced conflict as praying teaches them to forgive each other (Fincham et al., 2008).

Sometimes you might be tempted to use your joint pray...

Cognitive biases are those sneaky little brain shortcuts that happen without us even realizing it. They make life more efficient and most of the time are helpful… but sometimes they can backfire too! Today we’ll look at three more of these biases so you know what they are, why they happen and how to stop them from messing with your marriage!

Reactance Bias

What Is This Cognitive Bias?

Gotta love this one: when you feel like someone is trying to force you to do something, you react by doing the exact opposite. 

Why This Happens

Reactance happens when a person feels that their freedom to make choices is being threatened.

If you feel that your choice is being taken away, you are likely to act in a way that reaffirms your own ability to choose. Usually, by acting in a way that is the total opposite to what you were being pressured into[i].

Here’s an example of reactance in action: when the legal drinking age was increased from 18 to 21, research shows that young students aged 18 to 20 started to drink much MORE, as an act of defiance against the fact that they weren't allowed to drink any more. The fact that they were being told they weren’t allowed something just made them want it even more.

In marriage, this may happen when you demand that your spouse does something (e.g., helping with housework, cutting down on some unhealthy behavior, spending more time with the family, etc.), and they feel like their freedom is being threatened. Quite often, they will react negatively by taking even less care of the house, or spending more time away, and so on[ii].

What To Do About It

The first step is to recognize when this bias is at work within yourself. You can learn to challenge this whenever it occurs and we have more on this in the bonus guide for today’s episode.

If you are married to someone who is quite prone to reactance bias, you can also learn to phrase your request differently. Research shows that that there are ways to phrase requests so that they are less likely to trigger reactance bias. These ways are[iii]:

Use less threatening language: instead of "you have to" or "you must” or “I need you to", try "could you" or "I'd like you to"

Add a 'postscript' to your request: adding phrases to the end of your request that make it seem like more of a choice. Eg "it's up to you, but it would really mean a lot to me" or "only if it isn't too much trouble”. If you notice, these post scripts underscore that you’re giving your spouse the option to choose.

Empathy: help them see why this particular is an issue for you and allow them to see it from your perspective. This is so your spouse can want to help instead of feeling like they have to help.

Mood Bias

What Is This Cognitive Bias?

When judgments and actions related to your marriage are influenced by your current mood. And this occurs even if your mood has nothing to do with the current situation.

Why This Happens

Emotions, decisions and memories are all linked in the brain. When we are feeling one particular emotion, the brain activates memories and thoughts that fit with the current mood, and dampens memories/thoughts that do not fit with it[iv].

This can cause your mood to affect the way you relate to your spouse, even if the source of your mood has nothing to do with your marriage. Let me give you some examples tied to various brain functions:

Memory: feeling sad or angry causes you to recall more sad and angry memories and makes it harder for you to recall happy memories[v]. For example, if you come home from work feeling frustrated it will be easier to recall things your spouse has done that frustrate you. See how your mood has nothing to do with the current situation? But can impact your marriage?

Attention: feeling anxious or down causes you to focus your attention onto things that fit with these emotions[vi]. For example,

Cognitive biases are assumptions and judgments and error that our brains automatically make without us even knowing it’s happening. They are like automatic mental shortcuts. But the problem is: they could be messing with your marriage without either of you even realizing it!

We have a brainy episode for you this week.  We’re going to be talking about cognitive biases in marriage. This is about how your brain gets in the way of your connection with one another, and how to deal with that.

What Is Cognitive Bias?

As we pointed out in the intro, biases are assumptions, judgments and errors which our brains automatically make without us knowing. Often they are "shortcuts" the brain takes to help us process information and make decisions more quickly. Biases are not necessarily bad nor are they a sign of mental illness (although they do get stronger when we are stressed or experiencing anxiety/depression), and often they are useful[i].

But sometimes they can influence our thinking in unhelpful ways without us knowing. These biases can impact all areas of life, including marriage. So it’s good to know about them, why they happen, how they affect us and what to do about it.

The Spotlight Effect and The Illusion of Transparency

What Is This Cognitive Bias?

The spotlight effect is "the tendency for people to overestimate the extent to which they believe that others see and attend to their external appearance"[ii]. Essentially it means you expect people to notice things about you (like how you look) and notice things you do (both good and bad) far more than they actually do.

This was originally tested by a study done in 2000[iii] by asking study participants to walk through a crowded cafeteria while wearing an embarrassing t shirt. The participants expected that everyone would notice them and judge them for wearing a silly shirt, but in actual fact hardly anyone noticed or cared. That’s overestimating the extent to which others notice your appearance.

The illusion of transparency is similar, but to do with our thoughts rather than our outward actions. It is the "tendency for people to overestimate the extent to which their internal thoughts, feelings, and attitudes ‘leak out’ and are seen by others.[iv] We expect others to be able to read our thoughts and emotions a lot more clearly than they actually do. This is also sometimes called the "mind reading bias" because we expect people to be able to read our minds much more accurately than they really can.

Why This Happens

Our actions, thoughts and appearance are always obvious to us than to others. So when we do something embarrassing we expect it to be just as obvious to everyone else. Equally, if we do something good or succeed at something, we expect everyone else to notice and can become annoyed when they don’t. Or when we see something a certain way, it is abundantly clear to us and we expect others to be just as lucid.

How This Cognitive Bias Affects Marriage

These two effects can lead to increased anxiety: thinking that your spouse is scrutinizing your appearance and thoughts can lead to high anxiety and over-compensating by trying to mask your emotions. Eg "I have to look my best all the time or my spouse will notice and think I'm not making any effort" or "If he/she notices I'm upset it will upset him/her too, so I need to make sure it doesn't show"

They can lead to feeling unappreciated: thinking that your experiences are obvious to your spouse can leave you feeling unappreciated when they don't react. Eg "He didn't even notice my new hairstyle" or "I was obviously upset and he/she didn't even ask why"

They can also contribute to poor conflict resolution. Thinking that your grievances are obvious to your spouse can lead to conflict avoidance or passive-aggressive behavior. E.g., "I shouldn't have to tell him/her why I'm upset! it should be obvious!"

So what if you are in a marriage that you are totally committed to but really not enjoying or appreciating. You are unhappy but it is quite a stable situation. And you aren’t leaving. How can you make the most of this situation? We’ll look at how folks find themselves in a spot like this and how to make the most of it.

Long Term Unhappy Marriages

Let’s start by looking at what we mean by “unhappy” in this situation. Overall marital quality is a combination of marital satisfaction and marital stability[i]. Using these two dimensions you can categorize marriages into four groups:

High satisfaction, high stability

High satisfaction, low stability

Low satisfaction, high stability

Low satisfaction, low stability

Long term unhappy marriages fall into the third category: low in satisfaction but high in stability.

Why Do People Stay?

There are various reasons people may choose to stay in an unhappy marriage, divided into "reasons for staying" and "barriers to leaving" (from Heaton & Albrecht, 1991)

Reasons to Stay

Economic: you may be financially much better off even if you aren't happy in the marriage

Familiarity: even if you aren't truly happy in your marriage, after many years together you may appreciate the stability and routine of life

Belief that marriage is sacred: your religious commitment to marriage may keep you there.

Barriers to Leaving

Fear of being single or not being able to find another spouse

Stigma around divorce

Inability or doubts about your ability to fend for yourself (e.g., if your spouse is the main earner or handles important household issues and you don't know how you'd cope without them)

Not wanting to distress your children by separating (even adult children).

How To Make The Most of It

Find Positive Reasons to Stay

This first point is to do with a change in your mindset, rather than trying to change your circumstances. A research study from 2004[ii] interviewed unhappy couples about why they stay together. They found that couples whose only reasons to stay together were barriers to leaving were much more likely to end up divorced.

So you need to try and find positive reasons to stay together, rather than thinking you have no choice. For example, wanting to stay in the marriage because you believe that God values your marriage and values your efforts to stay together is a better way of thinking about things than only staying together because you believe divorce is sinful. That’s putting a more positive slant on the reason for staying. This slight shift can have a big impact.

It's Better Than Divorce

Couples may be able to take comfort from the fact that staying together is often better for you than divorce. A research study from 2002[iii] found that, even in unhappily married couples, divorce generally did not increase their levels of happiness or life satisfaction. So sticking together and working on issues is often the best thing to do.

Don't Disengage

Couples in an unhappy marriage often end up withdrawing away from each other. This leads to a breakdown in communication that can ultimately make divorce much more likely[iv].

Our recommendation is that you try to keep talking and engaging with each other even if you are unhappy. Even if you cannot manage to be develop a lot of closeness, just remaining friendly and respectful will make the situation much more bearable[v].

Accept Who Your Spouse Is

Spouses in long-term unhappy marriages should try to accept the person their spouse is, rather than trying to change them or remaining bitter about what they wish their spouse was like.

Trying to change who your spouse is often ends in resentment and conflict. On the other hand accepting and supporting who they are can improve how you relate to them, as well as freeing you from the "responsibility" of who they are and what they do....

Most times when Christian podcasters take up a topic like this we tend to get preachy about not entering into an unequal yoke, where you have a Christian marrying a non-Christian. While we fully agree with the truth of Scripture on that subject, in this episode we want to look at this issue more from the perspective of how to best face this issue as a couple when you find yourselves in a marriage where you don’t share your religious values, or even don’t share convictions about your faith to nearly the same degree. 

Religious Values Are Good For Marriage

Just as a quick disclaimer around terminology — we are born again Christians who believe that salvation is faith in Jesus Christ. We believe that Biblical Christianity is a faith, not a religion. In other words, the blessing that God has for Christians comes through faith in Christ, not through a set of religious practices, law-keeping or following a set of rules. Which translates into the fact that we don’t think of our faith as a religion, nor do we normally call our faith-based practices “religious practices”. 

However, in the research literature, nearly all studies lump anything to do with God or faith under this term “religion” or “religious views” or “religious practices”. So for the sake of keeping things simple, we are just going to roll with the most commonly used terminology in the research journals.

To start off then, there is strong evidence that religious views and spirituality have positive effects on marriage. There are a number of reasons for this[i]:

Christianity promotes positive values like love, faithfulness, patience, forgiveness and kindness, all of which are good for marriage

Christianity also encourages positive behaviors, such as putting your spouse's needs before your own, resolving conflict positively, and regularly connecting through joint prayer and church attendance

Christianity teaches that marriage is sacred, meaning that those with religious beliefs are more likely to remain faithful and committed to the marriage over their whole life

Christians often have stronger support networks than non-Christians (from their church communities), giving them more people to turn to for support and guidance

All of this means that when both spouses are of the same faith, and both place high importance on their religious values, marital satisfaction is normally high[ii].

When Your Religious Beliefs Don’t Align

Misaligned values can occur when one spouse is very committed to their faith and the other isn't, when one spouse is religious and the other isn't, or when spouses are committed to different religions. All of these situations can impact the marriage, but probably not for the reasons you would expect.

Reduced Positive Behaviors

Now just note as we go through this that we are dealing with studies of the general population. So I’ll say something like, non-religious people will probably display less actions that are good for the marriage. Note the tentative language: “will probably”. Please don’t be offended if you are non-religious — we are reporting on statistical issues here and you may well be an exception. We acknowledge that there are highly religious people who are terrible marriage partners. And we acknowledge that there are non-religious people who are devoted, loving and magnificent spouses. 

We aren’t making global statements. We are just pointing out general trends in a population. If you are an exception, great. If you are not, I hope you’ll make some room to consider what the research is saying and think about how you might apply this thing to your marriage, as we do to ours.

Generally, spirituality leads to attitudes and actions that are good for marriage. If one spouse is non-religious or less committed to their faith, they will probably display less of these attitudes and actions.

This was tested by a research study in 2015[iii],

Today we navigate the thorny territory of physical attractiveness and what happens when you feel like you’re just not attracted anymore. The answer to this dilemma is maybe not what you would expect!

So you’ve been married a while, maybe twenty years or more. And maybe you’re finding that your spouse is settling into middle age and no longer taking care of themselves physically. And you still love them, but you’re finding it harder and harder to be attracted to them, at least on a physical level. This is a common enough challenge.

Does Physical Attractiveness Affect Marriage?

Research generally shows that there is a link between how attractive you perceive your spouse to be and how satisfied you are with the marriage[i]. This effect is generally much more pronounced for men than for women. Probably because we are socialized that way.

What happens as couples get older? Husband’s perception of their wife’s attractiveness appears to remain important, but this factor becomes less important for women over time. Here are three studies that looked into this issue: Meltzer et al[ii] in 2014 found that for the first 4 years of marriage, physical attractiveness of your spouse was a strong predictor of marital satisfaction for men, and a less important predictor for women.

Murstein & Christy[iii] back in 1976 investigated the same thing in middle aged couples who had been married for between 10 and 20 years. The physical attractiveness of their wife was still an important predictor of satisfaction for men but the reverse was not true for women in this age group. This was also true for older couples who had been married for 30+ years  according to Peterson & Miller,  in a study from 1980[iv]. So attractiveness does remain important on some level throughout marriage, normally moreso for the guys, but not always.

What about when one spouse becomes less attractive or "lets him/herself go"? Couples normally rate themselves as being equal in terms of attractiveness at all stages of life[v]. This means that a young couple might both decide they are not supermodels or anything but they are both a solid 7 out of 10. Maybe 20 years later they give themselves a 5. Maybe in their golden years a 2 or 3 — but generally in a couple each spouse will give themselves an equal score to their spouse. 

However, when this was not the case and one spouse lets him or herself go or becomes less attractive in their spouse's eyes, the researchers noted that this normally does not impact marital quality[vi].

That comes as a bit of a surprise, right? Let’s look at it in a bit more detail.

How Is Attraction NOT Linked to Marital Quality?

The reason declines in physical attractiveness tend not to impact marital quality is that attraction is based on much more than physical appearance. Attraction to your spouse is partly physical but is also strongly determined by the levels of intimacy in your marriage, the emotional connection between you, the quality of time spent together, your attentiveness to one another, the level of support your spouse offers, your self esteem, the frequency of sex and other relationship factors[vii].

In other words, attraction is a multi-dimensional experience. This makes sense, of course, although I think the truth of this is obscured in a pornified culture. In a pornified culture you are led to believe that the most attractive person offers the best sexual experience. In reality, a lifetime of developing all these beautiful facets of marriage (emotional, spiritual, relational) are what culminate in the best sexual experience. 

That is a lovely concept and a true one that we should all strive for. But the flip side is also true: that if you are less attracted to your partner, while you may have fixated on their physical appearance, it is much more likely that the overall marital quality is just not there. In other words,

More than 1 in 6 people regularly work shifts outside of the normal Monday to Friday work week[i].  In today’s episode we want to look at some of the unique challenges that shiftwork can bring to marriage. And not only the challenges but how you can work together as a couple to make the most of life even when it is hard to see each other due to one or both of you being involved in shift work.

About 17% of workers regularly work in shifts outside the regular work week[ii]. Lots of folks have learned to make this work and we know a number of friends and family members who have been long term shift workers and have had successful marriages over the long term. However, it definitely presents some challenges and can lead to increased conflict. Let’s begin by looking at some of the problem areas associated with shift work and marriage.

How Shift Work Affects Marriage

Shift work can create a unique and extreme form of work-family conflict: where the roles and responsibilities of your job and your marriage start to negatively impact each other.

Shift work can affect marriage in three main ways[iii]:

Competition: this is where the two roles of career and family life compete for your time and energy so that you have to sacrifice parts of one in order for the other to function well. In shift work this normally means the family life has to suffer so that you can continue to function at work. Shift work typically disrupts normal sleep patterns making it harder to spend time with your spouse and family. Poor sleep can also harm your mood, energy levels and physical health, which can reduce the quality of the time you do get to spend together. If you’ve been working all night you might now always be in the best mood to chat when you get home!

Spillover: this happens when low mood, fatigue and other negative effects spill over from work to home, or from home to work. In shift work this often happens when tiredness and low mood from the job are brought home, leading to negative interactions with your spouse at home. Negativity at home can then spill over into the work life, creating a cycle.

Compensation: this is where you invest more in one of your roles to compensate for the fact that the other role isn't going well. For example, people whose marriages are not going well may invest more into their work and derive their happiness and satisfaction from their career instead. Some research[iv] suggests that people in distressed marriages sometimes seek out shift work in order to avoid facing their spouses and dealing with their marital problems. This of course leads to further distancing and breakdown in communication.

Now, these impacts do not have to happen. They are not inevitable. But they are some of the common challenges that shift work presents to marriage. And any or all of them can happen at the same time.

Your Shift Pattern Matters

What is interesting to note is that the overall impact on marriage depends very much on what your shift pattern is. "Shift work" in the research can mean anything from occasionally working weekends to consistently working nights or anything in between.

Generally research finds that all forms of shift work can have a negative impact on areas of marriage such as overall happiness, positive interactions, levels of conflict and sexual satisfaction[v]. But different kinds of shift work were found to have different levels of impact. These are, from least impactful to most:

Weekend work

Fast rotating shifts (eg 3 days nights followed by 3 days daytime work)

Slow rotating shifts (eg 1-2 weeks working nights followed by 1-2 weeks working days)

Long-term night shifts

The faster rotating shifts make it easier for couples to get into a rhythm and still see each other fairly regularly on a week by week basis, whereas the longer rotating shifts and night shifts make regular time together much harder.

Having a fight with your spouse is a stressful, upsetting experience that can leave you bewildered, frustrated and feeling stuck. In this episode, we want to give you a straightforward strategy that you can use to help break yourselves out of a downward spiral of increasing conflict and unhappiness.

The Issue: Rumination and Negative Cycles

A single argument is unlikely to have huge negative effects on a marriage. The problem is that after an argument couples tend to ruminate over it for a long time. You might keep going over and reliving the arguments in your minds, causing you to feel upset and angry with your spouse all over again.

Sometimes you will get "stuck" in this rumination to the point where a single fight can continue to affect you for a long time afterwards[i].

That’s an issue because this leads to negative reciprocity. Meaning, next time there is the possibility of conflict, one or both of you are still feeling angry about the previous fight. You therefore react more strongly to the current issue and you may bring up past hurts as well, causing the conflict to escalate. Perhaps your spouse says something hurtful or brings up a past annoyance, and you retaliate in kind. This happens more and more as time goes on[ii].

Don’t miss this point: this pattern of negative rumination and reciprocity has been identified as the biggest reason that marital quality declines over time as a result of conflict[iii]. It’s not the fight itself that damages your marriage: it’s the way you hold onto the hurt and keep bringing it up again and again. Rumination and holding on to past hurts also has negative personal consequences such as low mood, higher stress levels, higher blood pressure and reduced physical health[iv]. So it has cascading effects to other parts of your wellbeing.

The Best Thing To Do After a Fight: Break This Negative Cycle

Stopping this cycle of rumination and reciprocity lets the negative feelings end when the fight ends.

This means that the negativity and upset stop affecting your mood and will not influence how you react next time a potential conflict situation arises. Letting go of rumination also makes it much easier to make up with your spouse and resolve the conflict issue[v].

You will not always be able to prevent conflict from happening, but by breaking this cycle you can "draw a line" after it happens to ensure it does not keep affecting you.

Ok, you’re sold: now, how do you do this?

How To Break The Negative Cycle

1) Cool Off

Immediately after a fight our brains tend to be in self defense "fight or flight" mode, which makes thinking calmly and rationally very difficult. That’s the normal physiological response to a distressing event. To compensate for that, give yourselves time to cool off before you come back together to resolve the issue[vi].

For Christian couples, prayer can be a good way to help cool off from an argument as well. Research has shown that this can also make conflict resolution easier[vii].

2) Reappraise The Conflict

The best way to stop yourself getting stuck in rumination and bitterness is to think back over the argument from a different perspective and reappraise what happened. A research study from 2013[viii] tested this by training couples to imagine what their argument would have looked like if a neutral friend was watching them.

Here’s what they taught their study participants: "Think about this disagreement with your partner from the perspective of a neutral third party who wants the best for all involved; a person who sees things from a neutral point of view. How might this person think about the disagreement? How might he or she find the good that could come from it?[ix]”

What they found in the results of their study is that using this technique, couples were able to re-evaluate the argument and see more clearly if they were being irratio...

Today’s episode is on the lighter side. But did you know that researchers have actually done studies on the phenomenon of the man cold or man flu? You may be wondering if it’s really worse for a man to have a cold than for a woman? Well: like we say every time, we have the research, the truth and the answers you’re looking for!

That’s right, today we’re going to be talking about the very serious and culturally under-acknowledged and deeply stigmatized issue of man colds. 

Do Men Suffer More Than Woman?

Funny enough, there have been a few research journal articles published on the man cold or man flu phenomenon. There was a joke article published in the British Medical Journal where a researcher tried to establish whether men were immunologically inferior or if they were just wimps. Fast forwarding to the conclusion, the researcher from the University of Alberta suggested that “Perhaps now is the time for male friendly spaces, equipped with enormous televisions and reclining chairs, to be set up where men can recover from the debilitating effects of man flu in safety and comfort"[i].

Another Research Group Responds

Not content to let the issue lie, another group of researchers (who perhaps had too much time on their hands)[ii] wrote in to the British Medical Journal with their own investigation. "Being men ourselves, and having had several near death experiences enduring the flu, we were intrigued by the same question as Dr. Sue."

In their study 15 men and 15 women were injected with a flu virus and their responses were measured. They found that women have a stronger immune response to the virus than men, meaning that women naturally recover from colds and flu more quickly while men suffer from them more severely. "We indeed found that the male subjects did not erect shelves, maintain cars or attend a football match (or engaged in reproductive activities for that matter) directly following [our] study, illustrating how inflammation may affect social life.[iii]".

So some (not all) research shows that men may experience cold and flu symptoms more severely. But they may also communicate their illness in different ways. A study from 2018[iv] found that men and women "moaned and complained equally" when ill with cold symptoms but that men had a tendency to sigh and take long deep breaths more often. This perhaps suggests a tendency to exaggerate symptom severity.

Overall research suggests that men may experience cold and flu more severely due to women having a stronger immune response. I think this warrants some sympathy!

How To Help Your Ill Spouse

It is interesting to follow this gender issue further. We’ll give you some practical info to help be that caring wife that you always wanted to be!

Get Him To The Doctor!

Men are much less likely to seek medical help regarding illnesses than women[v], or may seek help but do so much later once symptoms have gotten worse. This is thought to be due to "traditionally masculine beliefs" about wanting to cope with illness on your own and being reluctant to seek help. So if your husband is complaining about illness but refusing to do anything about it, get him to a doctor!

Be Sympathetic, But Not Too Sympathetic

This one is interesting. Research from 2018[vi] found that your expectations of how severe an illness will be can actually impact how severe it is. Expecting an illness to be very severe can lead to negative mood and anxiety, and these can increase the severity of the symptoms you feel. So when comforting your spouse you want to be sympathetic and supportive, but making too big a deal of the illness can make it worse.

Your Communication Style Impacts Your Marriage More Than Your Cold

Now let’s look in a bit more depth about how illness can affect your marriage. Communication forms the link between illness and marital quality.

Thankfully, losing a child is a relatively rare event. However, this tragedy still happens to some in our world. And one of the common concerns I hear expressed is concern for the marriage of those who have lost a child. There seems to be a real perception that couples who lose a child are more likely to experience the failure of their marriage. We explore the research on this today and then turn towards helping each other through the grief.

Many people and researchers describe losing a child as the hardest thing a couple could go through[i] and we certainly would agree with this.

How Losing a Child Impacts Marriage

Bereaved parents experience intense and overwhelming grief at their loss, and have to cope with substantial changes to their life, their role, and their relationship. Parents have to deal with their own individual grief as well as attempting to comfort each other and deal with the changes to their relationship.

This is a subject we wanted to address here but we have to be up front that we have never been through this ourselves. Others have and there are helpful blogs and articles on the Internet from those who speak to this issue from a very personal place. Our approach here is different: we wanted to look at the research and see what happens not just in the life of this couple or that couple, but across the experiences of many marriages to see what could be learned.

Losing a Child Doesn’t Increase Divorce Rates

There’s no doubt that this loss can potentially have a huge impact on marital quality, but research finds no link between the loss of a child and marital stability.

So the idea that losing a child makes divorce more likely is in fact a myth[ii]. But it can definitely impact marriage in other ways, such as:

Increased strain and conflict

Reduced communication

Distancing

Reduced sexual functioning

Despite the extreme grief of losing a child, not all couples experience these negative outcomes: setting the grief and loss itself to one side for the moment, some couples end up stronger as a result of a tragedy like this. This is partly down to situational factors (things outside the couple's control, see below), partly down to how the couple grieves, and partly down to how strong the couple were before the loss.

Situational Factors

Cause of death: we want to be cautious about comparing the cause of death knowing that each case is so unique. But generally, losing a child in sudden or violent circumstances such as accidents, homicide or suicide is much more distressing to the marriage than other causes such as illness or stillbirth[iii].

Age at death: the older a child is when they die, the more the parents have invested in them and formed strong bonds with them, so the harder their loss impacts them[iv]

Other children: having other children can be a source of comfort when one child is lost, and provide a continued sense of purpose for the couple[v]. However, it can also increase the strain on the couple as they have to care for their surviving children at the same time as dealing with their own grief[vi].

State of The Marriage At The Time of Loss

The quality of your marriage prior to the loss can impact how you cope with the loss, for good or bad. For example, if your marriage has been child-centred, you may not have nurtured a strong bond between yourselves and so probably start the grieving process more alone. Hopefully, you would both be able to recognize the need to turn towards each other during a time like this.

But pre-existing strains and conflicts before the loss of the child can also lead to couples coping poorly with the bereavement. Couples who struggled with poor communication and conflict prior to the loss are unable to properly comfort and support each other during the grieving process, and so end up becoming distanced and non-communicative rather than facing the problem t...