Depending upon your upbringing you may have once held a high esteem for your various mother / father figures and as part of that formed some idea of “how things are supposed to be”. All of us seem to possess some deep seated desire to believe that our upbringing had qualities that should be carried over into our relationships as we reach maturity. Now care has to be placed here as there seems to be an increasing number of less than ideal conditions for child rearing and models for parenthood in the modern system.

Every family has its share of issues and some of us may have even grown up without a family. Both you and your spouse brought into this marriage a certain set of expectations of the marriage relationship. As you proceeded through the years, you may have noticed that your spouse does not quite subscribe to your ideals of the way things should be done and vice versa. Part of this is just natural gender and personality differences; however, some of this can be attributed to your family of origin. Ask your counselor about this phenomenon.

For example, certain cultures within America will breed males that expect that the wife stay home and pump out children and do the dishes all day. The trouble is that if your spouse didn’t grow up this way, she will have a hard time accepting this as reality. It is time for you to understand that her reality is not what yours is or what you expect hers to be. In these sub-cultures, the men are “good men”, perhaps similar in style to John Wayne; however, are lacking sensitivity to certain areas. It doesn’t have to be this way if you were raised in one of these subcultures.

In other situations, a person may have grown up used to his parents constantly arguing and bickering. Arguing would then become nothing for the individual raised in this environment; however, for the spouse raised in a non-combative home, well, the very thought of conflict is going to be repulsive.

Your task here is to understand what your spouse grew up with that perhaps you have been setting the wrong expectations while simultaneously understanding what parts of your childhood that were wrong that you have used to poison your marriage. You can’t correct your spouse - you can only change you, but if you do things for the right reason they should start to look at themselves eventually. Unfortunately, as long as the two of you are having trouble you can not expect your spouse to change at this juncture - you just have to accept and understand what may motivate them.