God designed marriage so that we could help one another and become as one. Satan introduced complaining so that we could drive one another crazy, change the oneness that God planned for us to an adversarial relationship, and become separated and divorced.

Our personal discomforts, our personal self-consciousness, and our focus on the bad experiences in our history all combine to make us defensive. Once we become defensive, we find it difficult to allow ourselves to experience the joy that the Lord has for us in our relationships. Our defensiveness leads us into adversarial relationships with our spouses and draw us inexorably toward the dissolution of our marriages that we consciously do not want.

If husbands and wives decide to focus on the desires and interests of their spouse rather than just their own interests, and if husbands and wives decide to have more esteem for the desires of their spouses than of their own, like-mindedness between the spouses will develop.