What Did You Expect?

Published in 2010, What Did You Expect? is Paul David Tripp's book-length answer to a pattern he had watched repeat for decades in the counseling room: couples arriving in crisis not because something unusual had happened to them, but because something entirely ordinary had. Tripp came to the subject from the biblical counseling movement centered at the Christian Counseling and Educational Foundation, where the working conviction is that behavior problems are heart problems and that Scripture speaks to them directly. He also came to it from his own marriage, and the book opens by recounting the period when his wife Luella told him plainly that she had lost respect for him and that their marriage was in serious trouble. The book is written by someone who had to be confronted, not by someone reporting from a safe distance.

Tripp's central move is to take the title question away from the disappointed spouse and hand it back as a diagnosis. Marriage, he argues, is always a relationship between two sinners, and there is no version of it that escapes this. The disillusionment couples feel is not evidence that they married the wrong person; it is evidence that they entered marriage with a set of expectations no human being could satisfy. From this he presses a second claim: horizontal conflict has vertical roots. Arguments about money, sex, in-laws, and housework are surface expressions of a deeper disorder in what the heart is worshiping and serving. Tripp is correspondingly uninterested in communication technique. His counsel is that marriages are not made or broken in dramatic moments but in the accumulated small ones, and that the only durable path forward is to replace expectation with commitment — beginning with a shared, habitual practice of confession and forgiveness, and extending to commitments to ongoing change, to trust, to love as action rather than feeling, to handling difference with grace, and to actively protecting the marriage. Grace, in his account, is not only pardon for the past but power for the present.

The book has endured because it addresses the ordinary marriage rather than the exceptional one, and because it refuses to sell a method. It remains a standard text in Reformed and evangelical premarital and marital counseling.

Who should read this: couples in ordinary, workable difficulty — disappointed, stuck, quietly resentful — and pastors or counselors who want a theologically serious alternative to skills-based marriage material. It is not for anyone in an abusive or coercive marriage, where the instruction to examine one's own sin first can be turned into a weapon; those readers need safety and advocacy before they need this. Readers who find sustained emphasis on personal sinfulness discouraging rather than clarifying should look elsewhere.