The general assumption is that marriages should work, yet we never foresee that there are some characters that we have or that our spouses may have, that make the working of the marriage difficult.
The characters that I’ll mention below do not condemn your marriage to failure but they are an indication of how much work needs to be done and the skill set required:

1. Narcissistic People: Narcissists are people with no emotional capacity for empathy. Narcissism, is a character trait that can frustrate your efforts to communicate or to connect with your partner. You need a lot of guidance, wisdom and prayer to make a marriage work with a narcissist.

2. Lazy People: In marriage there are 2 types of lazy people:

a. There are those who are too lazy to actively participate in the marriage.

b. There are those who are too lazy to get up and work.

Either way, being married to a lazy person is difficult as it means you will do all the work.

3. Selfish People: It is difficult to make a marriage work with a person who can never sacrifice for the good of the marriage. But when it comes to what is personal, what is theirs, what involves them, they are willing to pay the price. Selfish people are difficult in marriage because they always think about themselves and marriage is not designed for such characters.

4. Childish People: Marriage is not for children. Childish people are the people who refuse to grow up in a relationship. They throw childish tantrums, are very petty and they cannot live independent of their parents. Navigating the future with such a character requires you to make the decision to parent them throughout the relationship.

5. Complainers: These are the most emotionally tiring or draining people to be married to. They are like a bottomless pit. They can never be satisfied. Life is always unfair to them. To make a relationship work with a complainer, don’t take their complaining to heart. Reconcile with what you can do, and what you cannot do.

6. War-Lords: These are people who are conflict oriented by nature. They will use silent treatment, cold war, abusive language, anything that it would take to get them to a point of conflict. To make a marriage work with a war-lord, you must understand their internal conflict then you can navigate to their external conflict.

7. Male & Female Chauvinists: For a marriage to work, there ought to be mutual respect for the genders involved. A difficult marriage is a marriage to a person who tries to impose gender superiority. They will never allow the marriage to have respect. They will always be fighting to put the other person down.

8. Secretive People: This covers more than half of most marriages. Marriage was designed to be open, without any secrets and secrecy is an enemy to intimacy. Therefore, it is difficult to have a thriving marriage with a secretive person because they are difficult to trust and you just can’t connect with them.

9. Pathological Liars: Lying in itself is an annoying thing and dealing with a pathological liar is frustrating because they are more loyal to lying than they are to the relationship. Pathological liars lie even when the evidence advises that speaking the truth would be better. They are annoying because they mock your intelligence and at times complicate what naturally would have been simple.

10. Religious Fanatics: It is good to be spiritual and it is good to believe in God, but being married to a religious fanatic, that is, a person who spiritualists every single issue. They spend 99% of their time ignoring their relationship and hiding in religious activities. They are self-righteous and very judgemental