When a flower is wilting, you don’t pluck it up out of the ground, examine the roots, or leave it on the sidewalk. It needs sunlight, water, good soil, fertilizer and care. So with a hurting marriage. You don’t fix it by tearing it up.

I have a theory: Behind virtually every case of marital dissatisfaction lies unrepented sin. Couples don’t fall out of love so much as they fall out of repentance. Sin, wrong attitudes, and personal failures that are not dealt with slowly erode the once lofty promises made in the throes of an earlier (and less polluted) passion.    –Gary Thomas, Sacred Marriage

The reason the headship of the husband is so violently objected to is that it is misunderstood. …the Bible does not say that men and women are unequal. Neither does the Church. There are no second-class citizen in the New Jerusalem. It is husbands and wives that are unequal. It is precisely in marriage (a state, you will recall, not to be continued as such in heaven) that they enter into a relationship of superior to inferior–of head to body. And the difference there is not one of worth, ability or intelligence, but of role. It is functional, not organic. It is based on the exigencies of the Dance, not on a judgment as to talent. In the ballet, in any intricate dance, once dancer leads, the other follows. Not because one is better (he may or may not be), but because that is his part. Our mistake, here as elsewhere, is to think that equality and diversity are irreconcilable. The common notion of equality is based on the image of the march. In a parade, really unequal beings are dressed alike, given guns of identical length, trained to hold them at the same angle, and ordered to keep step with a fixed beat. But it is not the parade that is true to life; it is the dance. There you have real equals assigned unequal roles in order that each may achieve his individual perfection in the whole. Nothing is less personal than a parade; nothing more so than a dance. It is the choice image of fulfillment through function, and it comes very close to the heart of the Trinity. Marriage is a hierarchical game played by coequal persons. Keep that paradox and you move in the freedom of the Dance; alter it, and you grow weary with marching. –Robert Farrar Capon