I'm not going to hash out a lot of marriage junk over this forum but my wife has always causing conflict over the most minor of things in the past year. She ignores 9/10 of the loving and supportive things I do for her, but causes an argument if I have an opinion (note: I could still be agreeing with her, but the opinion itself is enough to cause conflict).
Anyway, I'm now looking into if this is normal behaviour, which would be ridiculous if it was, because I can't take it much longer. The home should be a place of peace, at least BEFORE we have kids. Because if it's not then I'm scared about what in the hell the fires are going to be like when/if we do have kids? It doesn't have to be perfect of course but I think a marriage that has peace 60-80% of the time is more than reasonable.
The thing that shocked me is that I found this research of women being the one to improve over time in a marriage, while men get worse with differences of opinion. If so, there could be hope yet:
"Divorce rates, no surprise, go up over time—with 13.9% of couples in the study having busted up at the three-year mark, 29% at year seven and 46.1% at year 16.
But there were unexpected findings too. For one thing, in the early years, it’s husbands who are the more effective arguers, more inclined to use constructive behaviors such as listening and calmly discussing—though they by no means do so all the time. Wives, by contrast, are more likely to shout or withdraw. Over time, however, the husbands tend not to improve on their scores while the wives do."
http://healthland.time.com/2010/09/29/heading-for-divorce-its-not-if-you-fight-its-how-you-fight/