5 Mistakes Young Couples Make Part 2

Yesterday I shared part one of two about the small, insignificant mistakes many couples make early in marriage. It isn’t that the mistakes are big, it is that if left unidentified over time, they become obstacles to the marriage God has in mind. You can read part one HERE.

Today I want to share part two. No marriage is perfect. Every married couple will make mistakes. How well we recognize and respond to those mistakes will make all the difference.

Here are 5 mistakes many young couples make and how to avoid them:

3. Don’t speak your expectations.

Most conflict in marriage is due to unmet expectations. You didn’t get from your spouse what you expected from them. You didn’t meet your spouses expectations. You didn’t help out around the house as much as she wanted. You weren’t as on time as he thought you should be. There was an expectation and someone didn’t meet it.

Every unspoken expectation will become an unmet expectation. No matter how brilliant your spouse is, she can’t read your mind. No matter how great your nonverbal skills are, he won’t be able to translate unspoken expectations to fully met expectations.

How do you avoid this mistake? Ask your spouse if you have any expectations of them that they feel like you don’t communicate. Talk through expectations. It is as you communicate expectations, you give your spouse the opportunity to fulfill those expectations.

4. Neglect sexual intimacy.

I met with a young couple a few months ago for marriage counseling and they had been married for a little over nine months. In the first nine months of their marriage they had been together sexually four times. She didn’t desire it as much as he did. He didn’t feel valued. She didn’t feel attractive. They argued about it more than they had it and by the time she would finally give in to his desire to be together, he was so frustrated he didn’t want to any more. The cycle would repeat itself about every two weeks.

Sexual intimacy is a gift given to every married couple by God to be experienced and enjoyed. It has a purpose in marriage. It is meant to be an overflow of the intimacy we experience with God and one another. To ignore it or neglect it over time creates huge distance between a husband and wife.

How do you avoid this mistake? Make sexual intimacy a priority. Sexual intimacy should be mutually offered, even though there will be times it isn’t mutually desired. This is a biblical principle that helps couples stay close to one another. (Many couples struggle in this area, so if you want more info, we wrote a whole chapter on sex in our book, Beyond Ordinary.)

5. Leave God out.

No one intends to leave God out of our marriage. If we’re honest, none of us truly leave God out. God becomes something we add on to our marriage in hopes of making it better. There is a part of all of us that believe that just because we love Jesus and go to church, we’ll have a good “Christian” marriage. God doesn’t want to be an addition to our marriage he wants to be at the center of it.

How do you avoid this mistake? The best way I have found to fight this drift in my own life is with one prayer: “God, how do you want to change me?” As I allow God to change and mold my heart, He begins to make his way into the center of my marriage. When I start asking God to change Trish or to fix something in our marriage, I neglect the change that God wants to do in me and my marriage stays the same.

There are probably 25 other mistakes that young couples make. These are mistakes that old couples make too. Our hope is that you can identify these mistakes early so they don’t have a cumulative effect on your marriage.

Which of these do you think is the hardest to avoid?