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Your marriage
The small things that hold a marriage
Four behaviours that corrode a marriage, one skill that repairs it, and an honest account of how good the evidence for any of this really is.
Before anything else. If any of these is true for you, this course is not the right one and you should not use what it teaches. You are afraid of your spouse. You change what you say to avoid a reaction. You have been hurt physically, even once. You are not allowed to see people, hold money, or go out alone. Your phone or your movements are checked. You have been threatened. Sex happens when you do not want it. Nothing is scored here and nobody is being told what is happening to them. But repair skills are not safe where one person is controlling the other, because technique in that situation becomes another tool for the person doing the harm. Go to the course called When home is not safe instead.
Six short lessons on a marriage that has got harder than it used to be. It separates the argument you are having from the pattern you are having it in, names the four behaviours that observational research keeps finding in couples who come apart, and says openly where those famous claims have held up and where they have not. One skill is taught, the repair attempt, because it is brief, behavioural and available to one person acting alone. The last lesson covers the small everyday things, the in-laws, and what to do when a course is not enough.
Who this is for
Two people who both want this to work, in a marriage where neither is afraid of the other. It assumes no clinical background and no training in the sacred sciences. It can be read by one person on their own.
What this is not
This is not the right course for anyone who is afraid of their spouse, controlled by them, or hurt by them. See the safety note. It is not couple therapy and it is not a substitute for it. It does not process anything that has happened to you, does not ask you to raise a difficult history with your spouse as an exercise, and gives no protocol for affairs or for sexual difficulties. It gives no fatwa. It cannot tell you whether your marriage should continue.
The lessons
6- What is actually going wrongThe row is not the problem. The shape of the row is the problem.
- The four things that corrode itCriticism, defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling, with the evidence stated honestly.
- Mercy is not a mood, and sabr is not silenceWho gets told to be patient in a marriage, and what the texts actually put on each of you.
- Repair, the only skill in this courseWhat a repair attempt is, what makes one land, and why it is worth more than being right.
- The small things, and the in-lawsTuesday afternoon decides how Friday night goes. And then the other family.
- When this course is not enoughWhat therapy actually achieves, where the evidence is thin, and the honest thing about endings.
It is written and sourced and it has not yet been read by a scholar and a clinician. Read it as a draft, and if something in it is wrong please write to admin@inshirah.org so it can be corrected.
What this course is built on
- Qur'an 2:187, 2:229, 2:231, 2:263, 4:19, 4:35, 4:128, 4:130, 30:21, 49:12. Translation throughout: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004. 4:19 is used twice, once for the standard it sets and once to correct the use of its second clause as an instruction to tolerate anything. 4:35 is presented with the explicit limit that it does not apply where there is fear or control. 64:14 is not used, because its scope is a matter for the scholar reviewer.
- Sahih al-Bukhari 676, 5991, 7257; Sahih Muslim 2328, 2592, 2593, 2594; Jami' at-Tirmidhi 3895. Only reports graded sound or good are used, and each carries its grading and grader on its own entry. The reports on prostration, on a husband's pleasure and on a wife's refusal are held back pending a written scholarly treatment and are not quoted here. The narration commonly cited as Sahih Muslim 1469, that a believing man should not hate a believing woman, is not used because its sub letter could not be confirmed. Marriage is half of your deen, and the narration about divorce being the most disliked permitted thing, are not used because no reference and grading were confirmed for either.
- Al-Ghazali, Ihya Ulum al-Din, Kitab Adab al-Nikah, on the etiquette of marriage. Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Zad al-Ma'ad, on the Prophet's conduct with his wives. Named by work and chapter only. Edition and page await a reviewer, and no passage is quoted. What qiwamah means is treated as a matter for the scholar reviewer and no ruling is asserted here.