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What are the things that cause the most conflict in a marriage?
By Fatherly — Last updated on Mar 17, 2023
If marriage is a fight club, then the first rule of the fight club is that social scientists are going to talk about it. Helping couples anticipate and manage predictable conflicts more flexibly is essential to maintaining healthier relationships.
So, what kind of conflicts are married couples having? Researchers have found that fights come in all different sizes about everything from intimacy to commitment, and tend to fluctuate with time.
But, you knew that. You may not have paid attention to what you argue about with your spouse the most.
As much as money looms large in our lives and culture, according to a study led by Lauren Papp, the associate dean of research at the University of Madison-Wisconsin’s School of Human Ecology, it is not a big area for spousal rivalry. The same goes for your sex life, which couples certainly do fight about but tend to resolve with relative ease.
To find these patterns, Papp and her colleagues had 100 husbands, and 100 wives privately keep track of their fights in diaries over the course of 15 days. When they tallied those fights, overarching patterns emerged.
The Top 12 Things Married Couples Fight and Argue About Ranked From Least to Most Common
12. Personality issues
Whether your spouse is too talkative, shy, flirtatious, or insensitive, it does not matter much to moms and dads compared to other types of marital conflict.
Fights about their spouse’s personalities only accounted for 5.5 percent of arguments reported by husbands and 8.6 percent by wives. That reflects other research that suggests personality is not as important a factor in mate selection as people think.
Of course, people don’t tend to date, marry, and have children with people they find insufferable. Still, beyond that, personality differences tend to show up in other conflicts without being the center of attention.
11. Friends
If you hate your spouse’s friends, they hate your friends, or you hate what they do together, these power struggles are slightly heavier for parents.
Fights about friends comprised 7.1 percent of husbands’ marital conflicts and 8.1 percent of wives. Although these fights were not about money specifically, the findings indicate that spending is more likely to come up in fights about friendship for wives but not husbands.
This may reflect a more traditional division of labor in a marriage where men see themselves as breadwinners in charge of how their spouses spend their money when they go out.
Interestingly, other research indicates that when husbands dislike their wives' friends at the start of a marriage, it is a significant predictor for divorce. Still, for husbands, it does not matter. Perhaps this is because men generally have fewer friends for their wives to hate.
10. Intimacy
Fights about having enough sex and showing enough affection are important to relationship happiness but often weigh less because couples tend to handle them constructively.
Arguments about intimacy comprised 7.9 percent of total conflict for husbands and 8.5 percent for wives. Papp and her colleagues speculate that conflicts about intimacy rarely come with a sense of urgency, unlike arguments about work, money, and children. Presumably, partners who are not overly impulsive can shelve these topics until they’ve decided how they feel and discuss them in a thoughtful way.
Of course, there are exceptions. In cases where one person does not want to have sex at all or cannot perform, but refuses to seek professional help, conflict about intimacy is almost impossible to resolve.
But barring any larger underlying issues, couples tend to come out on the other side of these conflicts for the better.
9. Commitment
Commitment and intimacy work similarly in that fights about trust, and fidelity are meaningful, but they happen less frequently than conflicts about work, money, and kids. When these conflicts occur, there’s typically an opportunity for growth.
Husbands only argued about commitment 8.2 percent of the time, and wives 9.1 percent of the time. Statistics on how many couples stay together after infidelity are difficult to come by because cheaters are rarely honest with social scientists — one informal survey estimates that somewhere around 15 percent of couples survive infidelity.
Yet, a growing amount of evidence suggests that attitudes toward cheating are becoming less black-and-white, and many happily married people cheat for reasons that have nothing to do with their relationship satisfaction.
And given the gravity of these impasses, couples are more likely to seek out counseling to figure out what caused them to cheat. This professional perspective can help couples navigate through the conflict more productively.
8. Relatives
Fighting about relatives is a lot like fighting about friends, but more intense because family is an extension of one’s self, people do not choose them, and unless the relationship is toxic, they’re rarely willing to cut them off completely.
That’s why discussions about extended family account for about 10.7 percent of fights for husbands and 11.9 percent for wives.
Whether it’s an overbearing mother-in-law, a racist grandparent, or an unemployed brother overstaying his welcome, these fights include a third party contributing to the conflict, which makes them more challenging. However, the significance of these fights really comes down to the boundaries couples set with their families. Still, like many of these conflicts, there are notable differences between men and women.
For instance, one study found that when wives reported high levels of closeness with their in-laws early on in the marriage, they experienced a 20 percent higher risk of divorce — but when husbands reported the same closeness, they were at about a 20 percent lower risk.
Psychologist Terri Apter suspects this may be because women tend to be more empathetic and forgiving when it comes to criticism of their mothers. In contrast, men tend to get more defensive about negative feedback directed toward their moms.
7. Habits
It’s surprising that chewing loudly, a lack of punctuality, or looking at your phone too much would outweigh cheating on your spouse regarding conflicts. Still, husbands reported that fights about bad habits made up 16.2 percent of total arguments, compared to 17.1 percent for wives.
This is partially because not everyone cheats or struggles with intimacy issues, but everyone has some annoying habit, and likely quite a few. Bad habits are universal, and there are ample opportunities to fight about them, even if those fights are not serious.
What these fights lack in quality, they make up for in quantity, which is why they rank so high in this particular study but should be taken with a grain of salt, Papp notes. Couples can anticipate regular conflict about this, but it’s not serious.
Interestingly, Papp has found in other studies that arguments about habits increase when parents become empty-nesters. “Perhaps your partner’s personal habits become more noticeable when children are not there day-to-day,” she says.
6. Money
Although money was the source of conflict that prompted Papp’s initial study, it ranked right in the middle in the data.
Husbands said about 18.3 percent of their arguments were about spending, salaries, bills, and other money matters versus 19.4 percent of wives. That’s not to say that conflicts about money are not bad.Research shows these conflicts are emotionally loaded ones that last longer and are resolved less frequently.
For men especially, money is tied to power, which can make conflicts about it especially heated. But it’s not technically the topic couples argue most about. It’s more of a key supporting actor in many other marital conflicts like work, leisure, and friends, but it’s not the star.
“Differences about money are universal,” Papp explains. “All couples need to make decisions about spending and saving, and there’s plenty of potentials for two people to bring different earlier experiences, different expectations, and different behaviors related to money.”
5. Work
Work and money are nearly tied in conflict frequency because they’re so closely related. Arguments related to their spouse’s job accounted for 19.3 percent of arguments for husbands and 18.9 percent for wives.
Friction about professional commitments like traveling for work and spending long hours with people of the opposite sex is also tied to conflicts about commitment, trust, and boundaries. Some concerns are not always in their spouse’s heads — there is evidence that people are more likely to cheat on their spouses with coworkers and on business trips.
Since most people have to work at least five days and 40 hours a week, these issues can come up a lot — and as much as certain jobs predict infidelities, such as finance, hospitality, and even social work.
4. Leisure
Something as pleasant as leisure does not sound like it should be a top source of conflict, but these are fights about how free time is spent.
For parents of young children, this leads to the question — what free time? Because that time is so scarce, conflicts about it are more severe. Like any other resource, the fewer people have, the more fiercely they fight over it.
One study found that how couples spend free time with each other can have a much more significant impact on relationship satisfaction than people realize. Quality time together is important, but when couples participated in activities that only one of them enjoys, their relationship suffers.
Researchers also found that wives were more likely to go along with activities they were not interested in than the other way around. Although fights about personality were not as heavily weighed by husbands and wives overall, it seems like personality differences tend to show up in conflicts about leisure and that couples who have fun together stay together.
3. Communication
Having different communication styles, not listening, or not being heard are all frequent and significant sources of conflict.
Part of the reason why communication comprised 21.1 percent of conflicts for husbands and 21.8 percent of conflicts for wives is that men and women are socialized to communicate in very different ways.
While women tend to be more verbal when it comes to expressing their emotions, men are more likely to shut down in response to this. So likely, in fact, those psychologists actually created a term for it: “stonewalling.”
Other research out of the Gottman Institute ranks stonewalling as one of four communication issues that can lead to divorce, including contempt, defensiveness, and criticism of a partner’s personality.
On top of that, couples fight about communication because communication is tied to every other conflict on this list. If you’re fighting about money, it’s very easy to spiral into a fight about how to talk about money and stay there.
2. Chores
While there’s evidence that chores become less of a hotspot for couples once children grow up and move out of the house, for parents of young children, chores represent 25.1 percent of fights for husbands and 24.1 percent of wives.
However, the division of domestic labor has become a much larger source of marital conflict for parents now than in past generations due to the rise of dual-income homes.
As more women have entered the workforce, men have been much more resistant to increasing their share of domestic labor.
Married mothers who are the sole breadwinner do a full hour of housework per day, compared to breadwinner dads who do about 11 minutes per day, research shows that women in cohabitating relationships do more chores regardless of income.
Other evidence indicates that husbands are not intentionally averse to helping. Still, when women gate-keep housework or act like experts about how chores should be done, men tend to see it as a power struggle and are less likely to help.
This can often create a cycle of conflict around chores that rarely get solved because there is laundry to do.
1. Children
Children are the most frequent and significant topic for couples raising them to fight about.
Overall, 36.4 percent of arguments husbands had, and 38.9 percent of arguments wives had were related to how their kids behave, differences in parenting styles, how to discipline them, and other topics related to raising kids.
It’s estimated that parenting disputes contribute to about 20 percent of divorces.
This number is anticipated to go up higher in instances when children are struggling with some sort of mental or physical disability. Couples fight about raising children for the same reason parents talk trash about each other on the playground — there is no one right way to parent.
But for moms and dads, their children are extensions of themselves, and they will protect them from bad child-rearing at all costs, even if that cost is their marriage. And unlike other fights about intimacy and commitment, conflicts about children don’t go away after couples divorce and can get more heated.
Even for empty-nesters, conversations about adult children remain an important factor for relationship happiness in the long term. Ultimately, children are the most significant conflict for parents because they matter most to them.
Once couples have kids, they never stop talking about them.
In those conservations, moms, and dads will find plenty to fight about.
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Lauren Vinopal is a freelance journalist specializing in men's health, child development, sleep, pregnancy, relationships, psychology, and mental health for publications such as MTV News, Vice, and GQ.
This article was originally published at Fatherly. Reprinted with permission from the author.