Nobody hands you a manual for this part. You get taught, extensively, how to choose a spouse — but almost
nobody sits you down and explains what happens when two entire families, with two entire sets of
expectations, get folded into one household. In fifteen years of counselling — and in a culture where family is
not a weekend obligation but a daily, ongoing presence — I have watched more marriages strain under this than
almost anything else on the list.
The expectation nobody said out loud
Most couples walk into marriage assuming the hard part will be each other. What actually catches them off
guard is everyone else — the mother who calls three times a day, the father who expects to be consulted before
any major decision, the aunties with strong and frequent opinions about how the household should be run.
None of this is necessarily wrong. Extended family involvement can be a genuine gift, a safety net most Western
models of marriage don’t offer. But it becomes a problem the moment it starts making decisions for the
marriage instead of supporting it.
I sat with a wife whose husband would agree to hand over money to his family before she’d even heard the
request — not out of secrecy, just habit. From his side, he was honouring his parents the way he’d been raised
to. From hers, she was watching decisions get made about their shared income without her in the room. Neither
of them was the villain. They had simply never had the conversation about where “honouring your family” ends
and “we decide together” begins.
The couple has to become a unit before it can hold anyone else
Genesis 2:24 is specific about the order of operations: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother,
and shall cleave unto his wife.” Leaving comes before cleaving. Not because family stops mattering — Scripture
is emphatic elsewhere about honouring parents — but because a new household cannot function as one unit if
it is still, functionally, an extension of the old one. Leaving here isn’t about geography or affection. It’s about
where final loyalty and final decision-making sit once you’re married.
This is the piece I see couples miss most often. They assume “leaving” means distance or disrespect, so they
avoid it entirely, and the marriage ends up structurally unable to make its own decisions — every choice quietly
needing outside approval first. A marriage that never leaves never fully becomes its own unit. It stays a branch
of two other households instead of becoming a new one.
Where boundaries actually need to be drawn
The boundary is almost never “less love for your family.” It’s “decisions about our household get made by us,
together, first.” That includes finances, parenting choices, and how much unannounced involvement is welcome
in your daily life. A couple can absolutely choose to be deeply, warmly involved with both families — many of
the strongest marriages I know are — but that involvement should be something the couple decides together,
not something that happens to them by default because nobody ever named a limit.
The hardest version of this is when the pressure comes from a spouse’s own parent, and saying no risks looking
like disrespect or ingratitude, especially in families where that hierarchy runs deep. In those cases, the message
needs to come from the spouse whose family it is — not the in-law spouse relaying it — delivered with honour,
but delivered clearly. “We’ve decided” carries weight that “she doesn’t want to” never will, and it protects both
the marriage and the relationship with the parent.
What this looks like practically
Agree, privately and specifically, on what decisions require the two of you to talk first — money above a certain
amount, where holidays are spent, how discipline works with the kids — before those decisions get tested in
real time by a well-meaning relative. Practice the sentence “let me discuss that with my spouse and get back to
you” as a normal, respectful, non-negotiable habit, not an insult to the person asking.
And check regularly whether either of you is quietly managing family pressure alone instead of bringing it to the
marriage. The goal was never fewer family relationships. It was one household that gets to decide, together,
how those relationships are held.
The line I want you to keep
Honouring your family and protecting your marriage are not opposites — but when they collide, the marriage
has to be the one making the decision, together, or it was never fully its own household to begin with.
There’s a full chapter on this in the book, including the conversation Kunle and I had to have early on that I wish
someone had warned us about first.
Sacred, but Fully Known launches October 3rd. Subscribe below for more of this, every week.
— Funke
Sacred, but Fully Known: A Faith-Rooted Guide to Intimacy in Marriage launches October 3rd, 2026. Subscribe
above to follow the story, and to be first in line on launch day.
