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It's always best to know where to really concentrate our efforts so we can give our marriages the best chance to survive.
Huffington Post has come up with six marriage mistakes that can easily lead to divorce.
Research suggests that friends are often more upset when they think their best friend is being mistreated than when they're experiencing the same mistreatment themselves.
Besides, most of us don't really understand how our conditioning and wiring as women differs from our husbands' conditioning and wiring as men.
That's why conversations about men with female friends often lead to husband-bashing, which helps nobody.
The solution is to limit talking about your marital problems to just two people.
All too often, women think that talking to our husbands is the way to make them see how their behavior affects us.
If the behavior doesn't change when we first bring it up, we want to talk more, longer, or louder because we think maybe they didn't get it the first time.
One of the biggest pet peeves for men is that feeling of being nagged or badgered, especially if they don't know what the problem really is.
Also, the rules of polite, kind, nice conversation that women try to follow often come off as indirect, manipulative and mysterious to men.
Women often conclude that their husbands don't care because they haven't changed after a particular conversation.
Research has shown that happiness does increase when your husband changes for the better, but that change originates with you.
Paradoxically, the women who focused on becoming the person they want to be, rather than on how to get their husband to change, were happier down the road.
Living parallel lives with your husband is the slippery slope to disconnecting completely.
The bonds of marriage thrive on having interest in one another, working toward common goals and spending time with one another.
Couples who are trying to reconnect after their children have left home often come to realize that they don't know each other anymore.
One of the most difficult scenarios you come across is a couple in which one or both people are stuck viewing each other through a negative lens, expecting the worst.
Our brains do a wonderful job of seeing what we expect to see, and we are much more likely to view our husbands as doing everything wrong when we have developed a negative view of them.
The mentality that goes along with using words like "I deserve" includes a form of entitlement that kills the softness needed for a couple to cherish one another.
Saying "I deserve" is inherently a demand.
It's very different from knowing internally that you are worth more, and having the communication skills necessary to ask for more.
Knowing what you're worth helps you inspire your husband to cherish you.
