7 Ways to Pray for Your Spouse When You Are Angry
Marriage comes with many ups and downs. If you are in a relationship with another person for long enough, they will do something to make you mad. It could be as simple as not putting clothes away properly, or as contentious as hurtful words or careless actions. We marry a person, not an idea. People are messy, broken, difficult, selfish, short-sighted, lazy, forgetful, unclear, and so much more. Love draws us together, but life reveals our failures and offers endless opportunities to forgive and grow.
Anger does not equate failure. Frustration is just part of this package. What we have to go after if we want to thrive together are the skills and tools required to process these emotions and all the other ones as a team. Prayer is just one of the most effective tools we can utilize when anger rises in our homes. Praying during life’s storms is us taking a moment to surrender to the Lord, invite in his healing, and ask for the wisdom we need to navigate conflict.
Praying When You're Angry Isn’t Easy
If we want prayer to become our default when tensions are high, we are going to have to practice and decide to do this well before the frustrating moment presents itself. In the heat of the moment, the last thing we want to do is quiet our mind and body so we can approach the Lord in prayer. Our instinct when things get heated is to defend ourselves. Justice becomes our primary objective when feelings are hurt.
Anger often blocks us from having empathy for our spouse, keeps us from approaching them with tenderness, and prevents us from offering them compassion. Our minds run away from us quickly, and words can spill out before we are really able to assess the situation with wisdom and grace. We must remember prayer does not excuse the sin or hurt, but it just brings God into it. Reconciliation only truly happens in our lives when God is involved. He is the only one with the power to heal our brokenness and set right our wrongs.
Prepare Your Heart Before You Pray
If we want to be successful in our endeavour to bring God into our conflict, we have to make a plan on how to get ourselves to our knees. The Psalms offer us beautiful examples of how we can approach God with our raw and real emotions. We can offer him our pain and questions. We can lament the hurt we are experiencing. And we can boldly ask God to grant us the wisdom and grace required to reconcile and remain unified as a couple. Here are some ways we can actually pray for our spouse when we face these moments:
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1. Pray for Your Own Heart First
1. Pray for Your Own Heart First
Matthew 7:3-5 says, “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”
Before we can ask God to change the hearts or actions of others, we must ask him to change us first. We must ask God to reveal to us how our pride, bitterness, or unforgiveness is at work in the situation. We must ask God to give us humble hearts, allowing us to seek unity over rightness in our relationships. We need the Holy Spirit to search our motives and speak to our hearts, revealing the posture we must take to love our spouse well.
2. Pray for Clarity, Not Just Relief
Conflict is not always a bad thing. It’s often an opportunity to learn and grow together as a couple. In these moments, we need God to show us the real root of the conflict. We need God’s help for repentance to happen in our homes. Repentance is just changing our posture or our behavior to align with God’s best for our lives. To know what God’s best is, we need his guidance. We have to pray for understanding, not just emotional escape. It’s very easy to find unhealthy ways to sidestep our true emotions when what we really need is a better understanding of each other's feelings. Ask God for wisdom on how to respond, not just a path towards feeling better.
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3. Pray Blessings Over Your Spouse
3. Pray Blessings Over Your Spouse
Song of Solomon 6:3 states, “I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine: he feedeth among the lilies.”
Your spouse is yours on their best day and on their very worst day. You are one flesh, so even when you are livid with them, you need to pray that God blesses them. Their blessing is your blessing too! God desires your spouse to thrive, even when they are in the wrong, so we are being obedient to God’s will when we declare good things over our spouse. We must ask God for their spiritual growth and protection, for Him to meet their needs, and to strengthen them.
4. Pray for Empathy and Compassion
1 Peter 3:8 tells us, “Finally, all of you, have unity of mind, sympathy, brotherly love, a tender heart, and a humble mind.”
We need God’s help to see our spouse properly. Hurt, unmet expectations, selfishness, hurriedness, and resentment can blur our view of our spouse. Someone we love can so quickly become someone we hate or characterize without any grace. We all need grace to remain in a relationship. We alone are never able to meet the expectations of the people around us. Ask God to help you see your spouse through his eyes, to help you understand their stress, wounds, and fears. Invite God through prayer to replace your resentment with compassion.
5. Pray for Healing
5. Pray for Healing
1 Peter 2:24 declares, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.”
Our emotional wounds often run deep and take more than our own strength to heal from. Marriage is a lifetime commitment, and even when we have the best spouse, they still may do things over your life together that hurt your heart deeply. At times, we hurt the ones we love even when actions are taken with the best intentions.
Other times, lines are crossed that violate the covenant we’ve made, and we need God’s wisdom and grace to find a way forward. Pray that God would heal these emotional wounds in both of you and teach you both how to live together in peace and unity. Ask for God’s restoration of trust and safety in your marriage.
Remember what we plant in our marriage grows. When hurt has happened, we have to plant new seeds that lead to trust restored, and we have to allow time for new things to grow between you.
6. Pray for God’s Will Over Your Own
Marriage is an invitation to die to ourselves. We let go of our own will and surrender to God’s way for our lives. His way invites us to walk in love. This love is sacrificial, slow to anger, and quick to forgive. Ephesians 5:2 says, “and walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” God’s will never wants you to live with abuse. It embraces healthy boundaries. His will is wise and safe. When we approach God, we have to ask for the strength to be obedient to God’s call even when it’s uncomfortable. Ask God to help us align our marriages with his purposes.
7. Pray for Spiritual Protection Over Your Marriage
Matthew 19:4–6 instructs, “He answered, 'Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”
Marriage is at the center of God’s plan for the family, which makes it an easy target for the enemy of our souls. We have to pray that God protect us from division, bitterness, and lies that seek to tear us apart. Being too busy, distracted, and unintentional with our relationships can lead to distance and miscommunication. Ask God to help us assume the best about our spouse so we can live in unity. We need God to cover our relationship with God’s peace and truth.
Related:
5 Ways Going to Bed Angry Can Actually Help Your Marriage
3 Ways to Respect Your Spouse When Upset
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Originally published February 11, 2026.
