Are You Bitter in Your Marriage? So Was I.

By J. Parker

When you’re not getting the sex you should get, it’s easier to become bitter in your marriage.

I get it. Really, I do.

Let me tell you a story about my own marriage, share what I learned, and encourage you to consider those lessons for your own marriage.

My marriage was failing.

We’d been married around ten years when I became 90% certain my husband and I weren’t going to make it. More than half of our interactions involved arguments, crying, or storming off, and that doesn’t count all the sniping at each other or mumbling under our breaths. Even as I type this, I’m embarrassed at how bad things had gotten.

When not with my husband, I read books and articles on marriage, I attended women’s Bible studies, I prayed and listened to sermons. I was at the peak of concern for my marriage’s health, and yet my marriage was falling off a cliff like an Acme anvil dropped by Wile E. Coyote.

Why did my biggest efforts to save my marriage coincide with it moving further and further from rescue?

My heart was bitter.

Since you’re not my therapist, I won’t go into all the details on that paradox. Suffice it to say that there were a number of reasons why things were so bad, and my husband and I eventually got to most of them. The rest, we’re still working on, because relationships are always a work in progress.

But among our problems was how bitter I’d become. At the same time that I loved my husband and wanted our marriage to thrive, I resented him for making everything so difficult. I was frustrated by how marriage itself had promised happiness and delivered heartache.

I was angry at God for not answering my prayers and fixing our problems. Wasn’t He supposed to bring “the same power that raised Christ from the dead” to bear in my life? (Ephesians 1:18-20.) Shouldn’t that be enough to resurrect my marriage? Did He not want to save us?

My words were mixed.

If you’d sat me down and asked me how I felt about my husband and my marriage, I’d have shared how deeply I wanted to be with my husband, how hurt I was by our conflict, how much I believed God could heal us, and how determined I was to make things work.

But if you’d followed me around all day and tracked what I said to myself and to others about my husband, you’d have heard the bitterness. Loud and strong.

From my perspective, I was trying, trying, trying, and my husband was the problem. He needed a lightning bolt from God to shock him into seeing how great a spouse I was and how much he needed to change.

I was right in some ways: I cared a lot about my marriage, and my husband needed to change some things. Yet, with hindsight, I can see how my self-righteousness and bitterness made our recovery so much harder.

My husband withdrew more.

Even when I spared my husband those words of bitterness, I carried that attitude into our interactions.

Not surprisingly, my bitter attitude—even when based on right motives and justifiable concerns—made my husband more feel more hurt, become more defensive, and withdraw further from me. After all, who wants to be around an embittered person all day long? Especially when they’re embittered about you?

Look, there’s a reason that Proverbs not only says, “Better to live on a corner of the roof than share a house with a quarrelsome wife,” but says it twice (21:9, 25;24).

I didn’t even have to say a word to be “quarrelsome.” I’d soaked in my resentment so much that it colored my perception of what happened, made me less likely to extend grace, and seeped out in my nonverbal communication.

It came through in my attitude, the attitude I cultivated by thinking and speaking bitterly about my husband away from him.

My lesson in kindness.

How did my marriage turn around? Well, nothing I had done thus far had changed my husband in the ways I wanted. Out of desperation, I turned to changing myself. What did I do?

It’s a longer story, but mostly I stopped worrying so much about what my husband was and wasn’t doing. Instead, I started living out 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 (the Love Is passage) and Galatians 5:22-23 (Fruit of the Spirit).

I literally went through my days reciting these “lists” of love and righteousness in my head and checking my actions against them. Some days, I got no further than “love is patient, love is kind…” And that alone forced a change in my behavior and attitude.

I’m not saying progress arrived quickly or that we reached perfection. But one change that happened fairly soon was that I stopped disliking my husband so much. And then I started to see that he had a point about some things.

Most importantly, I began to recognize how much he’d been hurting too.

My takeaway for all of us.

The emails and comments I (and Chris) receive run the gamut—from hopeful to hopeless, from asking for help to expressing anger. Sometimes, I can tell that a marriage isn’t going to make it. Maybe there won’t be a divorce, but there won’t be restoration either.

What’s the biggest clue? Entrenched bitterness toward the other spouse.

Such bitterness often comes out as criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and/or stonewalling—what the Gottman Institute has called the Four Horseman. These communication styles have been shown to predict the end of a relationship.

The communication doesn’t have to be verbal, by the way. A well-timed grimace or an eye-roll communicates plenty. (If you raised a teen, you know.)

Are you bitter in your marriage? So was I.

When I was steeped in it—sometimes with good reason—my marriage had little to no hope. More than that, I distanced myself from what God wanted to do with me and then, yes, with my marriage.

Jesus said, “For the mouth speaks from the overflow of the heart” (Matthew 12:34, CSB). What we cultivate in our hearts will come out, eventually.

It takes effort and the working of the Holy Spirit, but let’s cultivate patience, kindness, hope, and love in our marriage.