Growing up, I spent a lot of time at one of my friends’ houses, so I was often exposed to her parents’ marriage.

While it seemed like a healthy relationship by most people’s standards, I remember watching the rules of their marriage shift unexpectedly like the stairways in Harry Potter. Except, instead of magic, it was her mom’s mood that controlled where the stairs would turn next.

One day, my friend’s dad, we’ll call him Tom, could speak to his wife, Gina, rather directly. He could ask her for help finding his missing keys or tell her what a teammate had said to one of their kids at baseball practice without her getting frustrated with him for not talking to the coach about it.

However, on other days, if Gina was busy or stressed, Tom had to use kid gloves when choosing what he shared with his wife and how he shared it if he wanted to avoid the cold shoulder or a shouting match. Worse still, Gina didn’t follow her own rules during these moments. She was blunt, irritable, and sometimes even unkind with Tom.

I’ve thought a lot about Tom’s and Gina’s dynamic since becoming a marriage therapist, especially since I see a similar situation with many of my clients now. The real question is simple.

Who makes the rules in a marriage?

Who gets to decide how we talk to each other, how we talk about each other, or what we do or don’t share with each other? Who decides what the rules of an argument are that we both have to follow, even when we’re stressed, burnt out, hungry, tired, or annoyed?

For couples without a good answer to this question, this scenario may sound familiar:

Every day is a new opportunity for you and your spouse to battle over whose rules for the marriage take precedence. Whoever is the squeakier wheel that day gets the grease until the other wheel gets pissed off and stops cooperating entirely.

Marriage needs rules because people need rules.

From infancy through adulthood, we thrive on having at least some semblance of routine with clear rules and consequences for breaking those rules. Rules actually make us happier, as long as they’re fair, because they takes some of the unpredictability out of life.

If you think about life or marriage as a game, you can only win if you know the rules, and you can’t know the rules if there are none.

Or, better yet, imagine trying to win, or even just play fairly, at a game where everyone gets to make up their own rules.

It’d be absolute chaos, and everyone would lose.

Unfortunately, most people enter marriage with this strategy.

We assume that our spouse’s idea of how we should treat each other must be similar to our own, mostly because we think our ideas of fairness and morality are more universal than they actually are.

Then, problems arise when you two have different rules, or even if you have similar rules but choose not to follow them when you’re having a bad day. Then, you’re likely to get angry with your spouse for trying to hold you accountable to a rule you never explicitly agreed to follow.

If you two don’t establish a shared standard for how you’re going to treat each other, when either of you try to enforce what you thought was the unspoken standard, you’ll likely be painted as a tyrant rather than a teammate.

So, what’s the solution?

Rule #4 Find your marriage’s authority.

Your rules need to come from an external source, an impartial third party, let’s say. I’m not talking about another person or group of people. For many reasons, it doesn’t work to default to the opinions of a friend, relative, therapist, or religious teacher to decide how you live in your marriage. For starters, they’re just as flawed as you, so why would their in-the-moment opinions be better than yours?

Not to mention, they have no real skin in the game. It isn’t their marriage you’re trying to save.

This authority needs to approach what you consider perfection. You can call it your end goal for marriage, your north star, your ultimate guide, God, whatever you want. It just needs to represent your vision of the perfect relationship with your spouse.

Most people have an idea of the person they want to become, or at least they did when they were young. Maybe you had a hero growing up who you wanted to become. We need that sort of vision for our marriages, too. Otherwise, we have only our feelings to rely on to guess if we’re headed in the right direction.

And, nothing is more fickle than feelings!

More on how to discover this authority for yourself in a couple minutes.

Once you choose that authority, you can start setting some rules you both agree would satisfy your shared vision for your marriage.

My husband and I call these “unspoken rules of engagement”, or the rules we understand internally at a deep level as representing what we believe our marriage should look like. If you find the right person, your rules will align because your views of marriage (your authority) will be similar.

However, you can only know if you have the same authority figure, and thus the same rules, if you speak those unspoken rules out loud.

What are the benefits of having an external authority?

There are many benefits, but here are just a few of the top ones:

#1 You know when you’re headed in the right (or wrong) direction because you’ve fixed your eyes on a goal post that doesn’t move so that every action you take can be measured against whether it moves you closer to or further from that goal post.

#2 It’s easier to apologize for violating rules you both agreed to that come from an exterior source rather than rules your spouse made up and is expecting you to adopt, sometimes on a whim.

#3 The rules are consistent, no matter your or your spouse’s mood, the circumstances, or anything else that could change from day to day.

How to find your marriage’s authority

If you’re religious or spiritual, this one might be a little more straightforward. You and your spouse may view your idea of a Higher Power as your authority figure, and you may even have a built-in rulebook accompanying your faith that lays out what a good marriage looks like.

If that’s the case, your next step should be to have deeper discussions about your beliefs and how you can translate these beliefs into your everyday words and actions. You may even benefit from seeking out guidance from other couples or leaders in your faith community (to better define your authority on marriage, not to become that authority).

For my non-religious couples, you may need to do a bit more leg work up front. But, that’s okay. This challenge will always be more valuable than it is difficult.

Think of how much less stressful your relationship could be if neither you nor your spouse have to play referee anymore, if you were both working toward the same vision of your marriage and were bought into the same set of rules.

Pretty awesome, right?

Check out the challenge below to get started on discovering your authority.

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Today’s Challenge

• Spend at least 15 minutes writing about what you imagine an ideal marriage looks like.
• Once you’ve written that description, think about where your vision of marriage comes from. What has influenced your views? When and how did you come to form this vision of marriage?
• Discuss these ideas with your spouse. Ideally, you two spent time writing down your own ideas separately so you can compare them.
• Once you two come to an agreement on what this vision looks like, give it a name. Some examples could be your Transcendent, Authority, Ultimate Guide, God, Vision, or Aim.
• Now, write down a few rules your authority has for marriage. Keep the list as short as possible while still being effective.
• Write down your description of your authority with its rules for marriage, and post it somewhere you can both see it every day.

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Wishing you hope, 

Cameron

Marriage therapist & founder of HITCHED

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Marriage is hard. It’s also worth the fight. HITCHED can help you fight as a team for the relationship you’ve always wanted. To get access to your own personalized, evidence-based guide to lifelong marriage, check out HITCHED here. One of my favorite tools on the platform will help you and your spouse identify a shared authority or vision for your family and set up the rules for your marriage based on that shared vision.