17/02/2026
Couples often speak to each other in ways they’d never use with a friend. A husband snaps when dinner runs late. A wife rolls her eyes at a story she’s heard before. One of them forgets to say thank you for something that took effort. If they behaved that way with a friend, the friendship would thin out or end. Yet in marriage, people act as if the bond can absorb carelessness without cost.
That’s the problem Jo Coudert called out in Advice From a Failure, published in 1965. Coudert was an American writer and journalist who wrote with candour about marriage, divorce, and disappointment at a time when women were often expected to present domestic life as tidy and triumphant. She had divorced and remarried, and she wrote from experience rather than theory. The book’s title already carries irony. She wrote as someone who had lived through friction and regret and who understood how small habits can corrode love.
Her point is direct. People assume marriage is sturdy enough to survive behaviour that would end a friendship. They assume the vow, the shared mortgage, the children, or the years already invested will protect them from the damage of impatience and contempt. That assumption breeds complacency. Complacency turns into neglect. Neglect turns into resentment.
Friendship usually depends on choice. If a friend criticises you harshly, ignores your feelings, or speaks to you with contempt, you step back. You return calls less often. You protect your time. Marriage, by contrast, often carries an expectation of permanence. That expectation can make people lazy with their manners. They vent anger without restraint because they believe the other person has nowhere to go. They stop saying please and thank you because they think gratitude is implied. They express irritation more quickly than curiosity.
Psychologically, this comes from familiarity. Familiarity lowers vigilance. It also lowers effort. When we’re trying to win a friend, we manage our tone. We listen. We apologise. Once we believe someone is secured, we relax those disciplines. What feels like comfort can slide into entitlement. Entitlement breeds impatience. Impatience shows up as sharp words, eye rolls, silence that punishes.
Research backs up Coudert’s instinct. The psychologist John Gottman, who has studied couples for decades, found that contempt predicts divorce more reliably than almost anything else. Contempt shows up in sarcasm, mockery, and small humiliations delivered in ordinary moments. If those gestures would offend a friend, they’ll injure a spouse too. The difference is that a spouse absorbs them daily.
Culturally, marriage has often been treated as an institution strong enough to endure strain without constant tending. In the mid-twentieth century, when Coudert wrote, divorce still carried heavy stigma, especially for women. That stigma may have encouraged some couples to endure unhappiness, which in turn may have encouraged discourtesy. If leaving feels impossible, there’s less incentive to behave well. Betty Friedan would later describe the quiet anger and suffocation many women felt in marriages that looked stable from the outside. That anger didn’t arise only from large injustices. It grew from repeated dismissals, from being taken for granted, from being spoken to without respect.
The emotional states involved are ordinary and recognisable. There’s boredom, which can turn into irritability. There’s stress from work or parenting, which leaks out at the nearest person. There’s pride, which resists apology. There’s fear of vulnerability, which hides behind sarcasm. None of these are exotic flaws. They’re common human traits. Marriage simply gives them more opportunities to surface.
Coudert’s question asks for humility. Why do we think the person who shares our bed needs less courtesy than the person who meets us for coffee once a week? Why do we ration our best selves for the outside world and bring our worst moods home? The answer often lies in security. We believe the marriage will hold. Yet security can erode when it’s tested too often. A spouse who feels dismissed or belittled doesn’t forget. They withdraw emotionally. They protect themselves. Over time, the distance feels natural.
Treating a spouse with the same respect we offer a friend doesn’t require grand gestures. It requires restraint in anger, gratitude for routine tasks, and curiosity about the other person’s inner life. It asks for the discipline to apologise quickly and mean it. These are simple acts, but they demand attention. Marriage isn’t impervious to discourtesy. It’s shaped by it. If anything, the closeness of marriage makes discourtesy cut deeper, because the person who wounds us knows us well.
Jo Coudert wrote from failure, but her observation carries hope. If small acts of contempt can weaken a marriage, small acts of respect can strengthen it. The bond doesn’t survive on vows alone. It survives on daily behaviour that says, in tone and action, that the other person still matters.
© Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserved
