The couple sat in my office, both looking off in a far-away stare. Between them was a silence that had been building for years. Both were faithful churchgoers, both raised in Christian homes, and each convinced divorce wasn’t on the table. Still, somewhere along the way, the conversations had shrunk to logistics—who’s picking up the kids, what’s for dinner, did you pay the bill? They came to my office because, in their words, “We don’t fight anymore. We don’t talk. It’s like we are roommates.”
After almost three decades of counseling, I’ve learned that this scene is more common than the screaming matches people imagine occur in unhealthy marriages. What is far more common in Christian marriages is couples who are deeply committed to the institution of marriage, but whose marriages are quietly dying on the vine. They lack the intimacy, depth, and friendship that are required for marriages to be truly successful.
As someone who counsels couples every week, I’ve observed four fault lines that keep surfacing in the marriages that come apart. Naming them is the first step toward repair.
1. The Communication Famine
Across nearly every major study on Christian marriage, communication ranks as the most cited struggle. Researcher John Gottman has shown that the average distressed couple waits about six years from the onset of unhappiness before seeking help—six years in which patterns calcify and contempt takes root.
In most couples, the famine rarely looks like loud arguments. It looks more like silence—parallel lives under the same roof. Conversations reduced to schedules and groceries. One wife described it as being roommates with a marriage license.
Communication is rarely the actual problem. It is the visible water line of something deeper—criticism that has hardened into contempt, defensiveness that refuses repair, withdrawal that protects the heart by starving the marriage. Paul’s instruction in Ephesians 4:15 [JM1] to speak the truth in love and to put away corrupting talk isn’t a communication tip. It is a covenant obligation grounded in a deeper one: we belong to one another in Christ.
The first practical step I give couples is small and almost embarrassing in its simplicity. Twenty minutes a day. No phones. No screens. No agenda. Talk about something other than the children, the calendar, or the conflict. Famines break one conversation at a time.
2. The Expectation Trap
This may be the most distinctly Christian issue on the list. In counseling, it sounds like this: “I thought marrying a Christian meant we wouldn’t have these problems.” Many believing couples enter marriage having done premarital Bible study but no actual premarital counseling. They confuse spiritual maturity with relational maturity. They are not the same thing. A man can know his Bible deeply and still not know how to listen to his wife.
Underneath this struggle is a quiet prosperity gospel applied to marriage—the assumption that obedience guarantees ease, that two believers will somehow bypass the long, slow work of being sanctified through one another. But Genesis 2 describes one flesh as a calling, not a condition. And Ephesians 5:22–33 frames marriage in the shadow of the cross. Sacrificial love is, by definition, hard. The cross is in the covenant from day one.
I often ask couples to write a marriage mission statement—a short, honest statement of what they actually expect of each other in time, attention, money, sex, parenting, and faith—and then revisit it every year. Most expectations only become destructive when they remain unspoken.
I have watched the same pattern hold. The couples who flourish are not the ones without these fault lines. They are the ones who name them early, fight them together, and refuse to fight alone.
3. Infidelity in Its New Forms
Few things devastate a marriage like infidelity. But what counts as infidelity has expanded dramatically since most pastors were trained.
Pornography is no longer only a husband’s struggle. I now sit with wives wrestling with the same temptation. Emotional affairs flourish in workplace messaging channels and late-night texts. Old flames reappear through social media. Couples present in my office with no physical affair, just a thousand small betrayals of attention—the partner who is more present to a screen than to a spouse.
The deeper issue is rarely sexual. It is unmet emotional needs, unaddressed resentment, isolation from accountability, and a device in every pocket that functions as an always-available exit door. Jesus himself expanded the definition in Matthew 5. The heart-orientation of fidelity protects the body of fidelity. We guard our marriages by guarding our gaze, our messages, and our attention.
Phone transparency, shared calendars, and same-gender accountability relationships outside the marriage are not signs of distrust. They are walls of protection around something sacred.
4. Mental Health and Emotional Disconnection
This is the rising fault line, and the one the church has been slowest to name well. A study done by the Barna Group in 2020 found that while 53 percent of practicing Christians turn to a loved one for support in hard times, only 26 percent turn to a professional counselor, psychologist, or psychiatrist. Barna’s 2025 family research also flagged anxiety, depression, and loneliness as the top mental-health concerns parents named for their children.
In the counseling room, this looks like one spouse silently depressed and the other quietly resentful and exhausted. It looks like anxiety presenting as control. It looks like midlife trauma surfacing two decades after the wound. It looks like unprocessed grief that has hardened into withdrawal.
Underneath much of this is the church’s lingering ambivalence about mental health care. There is an unspoken assumption that if you had more faith, you wouldn’t need a counselor. But 2 Corinthians 1 reminds us that the God of all comfort does not bypass our pain. He meets us in it and equips us to meet others in theirs. Proverbs 11:14 calls an abundance of counselors a sign of wisdom, not a failure of faith.
Pastoral care, biblical counseling, and medical and clinical care are not competing categories. They are partners. Couples who treat them that way recover. Couples who refuse one in the name of another often do not.
The Pattern Beneath the Pattern
Each of these four fault lines worsens in direct proportion to one thing: isolation. Communio’s survey of over 20,000 active churchgoers, published by the Institute for Family Studies, found that 24 percent of married active church members report struggling in their marriage, with churchgoing women 31 percent more likely than churchgoing men to report struggling. Many husbands are simply unaware of the problems in their marriage.
Marriages are far more likely to fail in privacy than they are in community.
I have watched the same pattern hold. The couples who flourish are not the ones without these fault lines. They are the ones who name them early, fight them together, and refuse to fight alone. They invite their church in. They invite trusted peers in. They invite a counselor in.
That is what it looks like to shepherd a marriage—as the psalmist wrote of David—with integrity of heart and skillful hands (Psalm 78:72). Integrity names what is real, and skill addresses it well. Both are needed. Neither is optional.
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