The 12 reasons why most married couples quarrel

Helping couples anticipate and manage conflict in more productive ways is key to maintaining healthy relationships in general.

As important as money is in our lives and culture, according to a study led by Lauren Papp, assistant dean of research at the Madison-Wisconsin School of Human Ecology, it is not as common an area for the rivalry between spouses. The same goes for sex life, about which couples certainly argue, but this problem is relatively easy to solve.

To find the most common topics that married couples quarrel about, Papp and her colleagues gave 100 husbands and 100 wives to privately follow quarrels in diaries for 15 days.

Here is a list of the most common quarrels among married couples with children, from the rarest to the most common:

12. Personality

Disputes over their spouse’s personality accounted for only 5.5 percent of disputes reported by husbands and 8.6 percent of disputes reported by wives. This is only confirmed by other research that suggests that personality is not as important a factor when it comes to choosing a partner as people think.

Of course, people will not go out, get married and have children with people they find unbearable, and differences in personalities that appear in other conflicts and are not in the spotlight.

11. Friends

If you hate your spouse's friends, he hates your friends or you just hate what they do together, these fights are a bit harder for spouses. Quarrels over friends accounted for 7.1 percent of marital conflicts with husbands and 8.1 percent with women.

Although these quarrels were not solely about money, the results show that expenses are more likely to arise in quarrels over friendships for women but not for husbands. This may reflect a more traditional division of labor in marriage in which men see themselves as breadwinners in charge of how their spouses spend money when they go out.

10. Intimacy

Quarrels over sex and attachment are important for happiness in a relationship, but couples find it hard to fall because they don’t resolve them in a constructive way. Arguments about intimacy accounted for 7.9 percent of total conflicts for husbands and 8.5 percent of conflicts for women.

Papp and her colleagues speculate that conflicts over intimacy rarely come immediately on the agenda, unlike discussions about work, money, and children. Probably partners who are not overly impulsive can put off these topics until they decide how they feel and discuss them thoughtfully. Of course, there are exceptions.

9. Commitment

Commitment and intimacy work similarly in the sense that quarrels over trust and loyalty are significant, but occur less frequently than conflicts over work, money, and children. And when those conflicts happen, there is usually a way to resolve them.

Husbands argued over commitment in only 8.2 percent of cases, and wives in 9.1 percent of cases. It's hard to get statistics on how many couples stay together after cheating because adulterers are rarely honest with scientists - one informal study estimates that somewhere around 15 percent of couples survive infidelity.

Yet, a growing body of evidence suggests that attitudes toward cheating are becoming more or less black and white and that many people in a happy marriage are cheating for reasons unrelated to their satisfaction in the relationship. 

8. Relatives

A quarrel over relatives is like a quarrel over a friend, but it is more intense because people do not choose their family. But while this relationship is toxic, few are willing to end it altogether. That’s why discussions about the extended family make up about 10.7 percent of quarrels with husbands and 11.9 percent with women.

Whether it’s an overbearing mother-in-law, grandfather, grandmother, or unemployed brother, these quarrels involve a third person contributing to the conflict, making them even more challenging. However, the significance of these quarrels actually boils down to the boundaries that couples have set with their families.

7. Habits

Surprisingly, loud chewing, constant being late, or looking at the phone too much would outweigh the deception when it comes to the reasons for the conflict, but husbands reported that quarrels over bad habits make up 16.2 percent of the total debate, compared to 17.1 percent among women. 

Bad habits are universal and there are many possibilities for quarrels around them, even if those quarrels are not so serious. What these quarrels lack is quality, so it is compensated by quantity, which is why they are so highly ranked in this study.

6. Money

Although money as a source of conflict prompted this study, in the data obtained it is right in the middle. Husbands said about 18.3 percent of their arguments were about spending, wages, bills, and other monetary issues compared to 19.4 percent of women. But that doesn’t mean that conflicts over money aren’t bad.

Research shows that these types of conflicts burden couples emotionally because they last longer and are less likely to be resolved. Especially for men, money is tied to power, which is why conflicts around it can be especially fierce. But technically it’s not the topic that couples argue about the most. 

- All couples have to make decisions about spending and saving and there is a great chance that two people will bring different previous experiences, different expectations and different behaviors related to money - Papp explains.

5. Business

Business and money are almost similar in terms of the frequency of conflicts because they are very closely related. Arguments about their spouse’s job accounted for 19.3 percent of quarrels for husbands and 18.9 percent for wives.

Disputes over professional commitments such as travel to work and spending time with people of the opposite sex are also linked to conflicts over commitment, trust, and boundaries.

But some worries aren’t always just in the minds of their spouses - there’s evidence that people are more likely to cheat on their spouses with colleagues at work and on business trips.

4. Free time

Free time does not sound like something that should be the main source of conflict, but it is actually a quarrel about how free time is spent.

For parents of young children, this raises the question - what free time? Well, precisely because there is so little time, conflicts around him often arise. As with any other resource, the fewer people have it, the harder they fight for it.

One study found that the way couples spend their free time with each other can have a much more significant impact on relationship satisfaction than people think. Quality time spent together is important, but when couples participated in activities that only one of them enjoyed, the couple’s relationship suffered.

The researchers also found that women were more likely to consent to activities that did not interest them than the other way around. Although husbands and wives, in general, have not tended so much to quarrel over personality, it seems that differences in personality usually occur in conflicts over leisure time and that couples having fun together stay together for long periods of time.

3. Communication

Different styles of communication and non-listening are frequent and significant sources of conflict. Part of the reason why communication accounted for 21.1 percent of conflicts for husbands and 21.8 percent of conflicts for women is that men and women are socialized to communicate in very different ways.

While women are more likely to be more verbal when it comes to expressing their emotions, men are more likely to be more closed when it comes to emotions.

In addition, couples quarrel over communication because communication is related to every other conflict on this list. For example, if you are arguing about money, it is very easy to argue about how you communicate about money because everyone has a different approach.

2. Housework

Although there is evidence that housework becomes less of a cause for quarrels after children grow up and move out of the home, for parents of young children, housework represents 25.1 percent of quarrels among husbands and 24.1 percent among women.

However, the division of labor in the home has become a much larger source of marital conflict for parents now than in previous generations due to the rise in dual-income homes. Namely, as more and more women entered the labor force, men refused to increase their contribution to household chores.

Married mothers do one hour of housework a day, compared to fathers who do housework about 11 minutes a day, research shows, and study after study shows that women in extramarital affairs do more work regardless of income.

Other evidence suggests that husbands are not intentionally reluctant to help, but when women run household chores or act as experts on how household chores should be done, men view it as a power struggle and are less likely to help.

1. Children

Children are by far the most common and significant topic of quarrel in couples raising them together. Overall, 36.4 percent of the quarrels that husbands had and 38.9 percent of the quarrels that wives had were related to how their children behave, differences in parenting styles, how to discipline them, and other topics related to parenting.

Parental disputes are estimated to contribute about 20 percent of divorces, and that number will increase in cases where children have some form of mental or physical disability.

Couples are arguing over raising children because there is no one right way to raise a child. But for moms and dads, their children are an extension of themselves and will protect them from poor parenting at all costs, even if that price is their marriage.

And unlike other quarrels over intimacy and commitment, conflicts over children do not go away after divorce and can then become even more intense.

Ultimately, children are the most common reason for parents to have conflict because they are the most important to them.