Marriage and Relationship Advice

You feel pain when someone you love betrays or injures you. Certain actions or attitudes – unfaithfulness, selfishness, addiction — can wreak emotional and even physical wounds on a relationship that’s supposed to make you feel happy and safe. And when those wounds come from the person with whom you’ve joined yourself, heart and soul, in a covenant before God, the knife twists–and the pain increases. The truth is, sometimes love hurts because we’re fallen creatures living in a fallen world. This broken world often hands us unwelcome trials – a job loss, a miscarriage, a chronic illness, a child with special needs. But sometimes our own needy nature causes us to inflict pain on our spouse by succumbing to volcanic anger, abuse, or an addiction (pornography, alcohol, even television). Whether it’s done unwittingly or intentionally, we damage our marriage when we go MIA emotionally, fight, or react to conflict in passive-aggressive or narcissistic ways instead of ways t...

Marriage — that living, growing relationship between you and your spouse — can be impacted by its external environment. For instance, are you spending too much time watching TV instead of interacting with your husband or wife? Are either or you stressed by outside factors such as your career, your kids, interfering friends or family, or even your hectic schedules? Or maybe the internal dynamics of your relationship are showing symptoms that there’s a different potential problem. Whatever the case, it’s critically important you do everything you can to keep your marriage vital and strong — in other words, healthy. The following articles will help you diagnose the state of your most important earthly relationship, and give you the checkup you need to maintain or regain your marital health.