I have read a lot of these lists, including the one that used to sit on this page. Poor communication. Financial stress. Loss of intimacy. Unresolved conflict. In laws. Different life goals. Every item is real. I could not honestly remove a single one of them.
And they do not help anybody, for a reason that is easy to miss. What a couple tells me in the first 10 minutes is the presenting complaint, and the presenting complaint is almost never the problem. It is the place where the problem became visible. Treating the visible spot is why couples spend 3 years arguing about money, get much better at arguing about money, and are no happier at the end of it.
Why every list of common problems is true and useless
A list of common problems is a list of symptoms sorted by popularity. It is roughly as actionable as being told that the most common reasons people go to a doctor are pain, tiredness and a cough.
The other thing the format does, which is worse, is that it makes couples feel diagnosed. You read the 10, you recognize 8, and you conclude that you have 8 problems. You do not have 8 problems. You almost certainly have 2, and they have been generating symptoms in 8 places for years, which is why fixing any one of them individually never seems to hold.
What actually happens in a first session
A couple arrives with a list. Ninety minutes later there is usually one sentence on the whiteboard, and both of them recognize it, and it is not on the list they came in with. That gap between the list and the sentence is what this page is about.
The translation, complaint by complaint
Here is the same material, presented the way it actually behaves in a room rather than the way it gets written up.
The complaint
The problem
We have money fights constantly.
One of you believes the other has been making unilateral decisions about a shared life. The amounts are almost irrelevant.
We do not communicate.
You communicate constantly. What you have stopped doing is finishing anything, so every conversation carries the last 40.
There is no intimacy anymore.
One of you has been going without something for a long time and stopped asking, and the body kept better records than the calendar did.
Her mother is in this marriage.
Nobody ever decided who holds the line with which family, so one of you keeps being asked to defend a boundary that is not yours to hold.
We want different things now.
You are both still running an agreement you made 9 years ago as different people, and neither of you has renegotiated it out loud.
We argue about the kids nonstop.
Two inherited sets of rules from two different childhoods, running at the same time, in the same living room, neither one ever stated.
Read the right column and notice how few distinct things are actually in it. Six complaints, and underneath them there are about 4 mechanisms doing all the work.
The 5 problems that are actually under there
After enough couples, the same short list keeps turning up. I am not claiming this is exhaustive. I am telling you what I keep finding when I dig under the presenting complaint.
What is usually actually wrong
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1. A ledger nobody agreed to. One of you is keeping score of effort, time or sacrifice, and the terms were never stated out loud, so your partner is failing an agreement they have never seen. This is the single most common thing I find and it almost never presents as itself.
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2. A stack of arguments that never ended. Not fights, unfinished fights, still live, still retrievable. When every disagreement immediately becomes a list of everything since 2021, that stack is the reason, and no individual topic can be resolved while it exists.
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3. A role neither of you actually chose. Somebody became the organizer, the earner, the disciplinarian, the one who handles the families. Nobody voted. It happened during a busy year and then hardened, and one of you has been quietly furious about it since.
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4. Something one of you is holding. A fact, a decision, a debt, a feeling about the marriage that has not been said. Everything above it will keep failing to resolve, and the person holding it usually knows exactly what it is.
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5. An agreement that expired. You made a plan as two people who no longer exist. Nobody broke it, it just stopped describing anybody, and running an expired agreement feels remarkably like incompatibility from the inside.
Notice what is not on that list. Not liking each other is not on there. Being fundamentally incompatible is not on there. In several years of doing this, genuine incompatibility is rarer than almost anybody believes, and it is usually the label people reach for at the end of a long stretch of one of the 5 above.
The question that finds yours in 10 minutes
You can do a decent version of this at your own kitchen table, although it is easier when somebody neutral is holding the room.
The reason this works is that presenting complaints are public and problems are private. The complaint is the version you have rehearsed and could deliver to a friend. The problem is the sentence you have never finished saying, usually because saying it feels disproportionate or unfair or like it would start something.
Why the same problem shows up as a different fight every week
This is the part couples find genuinely useful, because it explains something they have found baffling for years.
If the actual problem is an unstated ledger, it does not surface as a conversation about fairness. It surfaces as a fight about a weekend plan, then a fight about a purchase, then a fight about who stayed home when the baby was sick. Different subjects, one engine. Which is why resolving each individual subject on its merits produces nothing, and why both of you have privately concluded that the other one is unreasonable about a strangely wide range of topics.
If you are having the same fight in a different costume every week, stop arguing with the costume.
Matthew W. Hoelscher, PCC
The version of this that shows up as constant small friction has its own page, because the mechanics of getting out of it are specific and I did not want to bury them here. That one is stage 1, stupid arguments and constant fighting.
What to do once you have actually named it
Naming it does more than people expect, and less than they hope.
What it does is stop the wrong work. Most couples in this position are not underinvesting, they are working extremely hard on the wrong thing, and have been for years. Redirecting that effort is usually the largest single change available.
What it does not do is resolve it. A ledger that has been running for 8 years is not settled by being named on a Tuesday. It is settled by being said out loud, in full, with the other person able to hear it without immediately producing their own ledger in defense, and that second part is where couples need somebody in the room. If most of what you recognized was in the family and money rows, there is a fuller treatment of those in love, marriage and family problems, and if you have already recognized that this is beyond a rough patch, the honest account of what the work looks like is in how to fix a struggling marriage.
The problems that are not marriage problems
Some of what arrives on the list belongs somewhere other than a coaching room, and I would rather say that here than 3 sessions in.
This goes elsewhere first
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Abuse of any kind
Physical, sexual or emotional. That is not a marriage problem with a marriage solution, and it goes to a licensed professional. I will say so on the first call.
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An active addiction
Everything else on your list will keep regenerating while that is untreated, and both of you will keep blaming the marriage for it.
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An untreated condition
Depression and anxiety disorders produce symptoms that look exactly like several items on the standard list. A licensed professional leads there, and I work alongside that.
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A decision one of you has already made
If somebody has privately decided to leave and is working through the process rather than the marriage, no problem solving will land until that is on the table.
If you want the version of this sorted by how much damage each item actually does rather than by how often it gets mentioned, I ranked them in the top 10 marriage problems in a stable marriage.
Talk it through
If you read the translation column and something in the right hand side landed harder than anything in the left, that is worth 25 minutes. Book a free 25 minute call. It is for first timers, it costs nothing, and all I am doing is working out whether I am the right person for what is actually happening.
Questions couples ask
What is the most common marriage problem you actually see?
An unstated ledger. One person keeping a running count of effort, sacrifice or time against terms that were never agreed out loud. It almost never arrives named as that. It arrives as money fights, or as resentment about who does bedtime, or as a partner who has become inexplicably sharp about small things. Once it gets said in full, in a room where the other person does not immediately counter with their own count, a surprising amount of the surrounding noise goes quiet.
We have most of the problems on the standard list. Is that bad?
Almost certainly not as bad as it feels. Recognizing 8 of 10 items does not mean you have 8 problems, it means one or two mechanisms are generating symptoms in 8 places. That is actually good news, because 8 problems would be overwhelming and 2 is a normal amount of work. It also explains why fixing them individually never seemed to hold.
How do we tell the difference between a rough patch and something serious?
The useful test is not how bad it feels this month. It is whether either of you has stopped asking for anything. A marriage with active complaints in it still has two people who expect a response. The one I take more seriously is the quiet one, where the complaints stopped a couple of years back and everybody described that as things calming down.
Do we both have to come in?
It is better and it is not required. Plenty of people start alone, and we work on your half of the pattern, which is the only half you control anyway. What I will not do is coach one of you on tactics for handling the other. In my experience the second spouse joins within a few sessions, once they see this is a conversation rather than a trial they are the defendant in.