There are a lot of common pieces of advice out there regarding relationships. This includes various bits of folk wisdom on marriage. However, just because a piece of marriage advice is commonly bandied about in public doesn’t mean it is accurate or a good thing for couples to follow. Some pieces of marriage folk wisdom may be outright wrong for a couple.

In a recent Huffington Post article, therapists debunked seven common pieces of marriage advice, explaining why following them could potentially harm rather than help a marriage. These possibly not-so-helpful pieces of advice touched on a variety of different things including: cheating, honesty, not going to bed angry, what to do when differences of opinion arise, the difficulty level of relationships and the kids.

Why does common marriage advice sometimes end up so far off the mark? Well, for one, marriages are complex things and can involve all manner of different situations. Folk wisdom often doesn’t take this complexity into account. Also, every marriage is different. So advice that might be good for one marriage could be problematic for another.

This underscores how careful couples should be when it comes to what marriage advice they end up following.

An individual should also be careful when it comes to common divorce advice. As with marriages, society has a lot of common opinions about what is best in a divorce. However, also like marriages, each divorce is unique and has its own complexities, and following the wrong advice when dealing with these complexities could cause a person to stray far from the path that would be best for them. So, when thinking of following a given common piece of divorce “wisdom,” a divorcing individual should consider running the advice by a skilled divorce attorney to check to see if it would in fact make sense given their particular divorce circumstances.