Our marriage is in crisis. What do we do this week?

How do we know this is a crisis and not just a bad patch?

A crisis usually starts on a particular day. Long unhappiness rarely has a start date at all. Something came out, or was confessed, or was finally said aloud, and the marriage you each thought you had stopped matching the one you are in.

• An affair is discovered or confessed. Whichever way it surfaced, the person who found out now doubts years of memories as well as the present.
• One of you says you want out. The words have been spoken, and neither of you yet knows how seriously to take them.
• Hidden money comes to light. Debt or spending kept secret shakes your trust in the shared life, well beyond the sums involved.
• A fight crosses a line it never crossed before. Something was said or done that frightened you both, and you are wary of each other now.

In each case the ordinary routine of the household stops working, and neither of you can predict tomorrow. A marriage that has been drifting for years is a different problem. It still deserves help, but treating slow sadness as a sudden rupture tends to add panic where patience is needed, and online couples therapy at a steadier pace usually fits it better.

Why does the first week feel worse than what actually happened?

The event may have been over in an hour. Your nervous system is still living inside it. You wake already afraid. You dread your partner walking into the room, and you dread them walking out of it.

When you are this stirred up, sleeping in fragments and with your heart racing, it becomes very hard to keep two truths in mind together. Your partner did something that hurt you, and your partner is still someone you share a life with. Under strain one of those truths crowds out the other, and the truth in front of you at any moment feels like all there is. So an ordinary remark lands as an accusation. You answer the accusation you heard, and your answer gives your partner a genuine one to answer back.

Calm tends to arrive before warmth, not after a winning argument. In my reading of the research, couples recorded during a real disagreement showed a larger share of positive emotion in the short spells when one partner’s body was settling than at other moments¹. That study cannot tell which came first, the settling or the warmth, and a laboratory conversation is not a sleepless night at home. Still, it points away from the instinct most couples follow in the first days, which is to go on talking until someone gives way. In my experience the couples who get through those first weeks best say less, and say it more carefully.

What can an early session do for us?

An early session has a smaller task than ongoing couples therapy: to make the next couple of weeks bearable and to work out what kind of help you actually need. I book it the same way as any other session, by video wherever you both are. How quickly I can offer one depends on my diary that week, and I prefer to tell you that plainly rather than promise a time I may not have.

• One shared account. Enough agreement on what happened that you are both talking about the same event, which is hard when you are both frightened.
• An arrangement for home. Where each of you sleeps, what the children are told, and how evenings will go.
• Separating the decisions. Picking out the few choices that truly belong to this week, and setting aside those that merely feel pressing.
• No ruling on who is to blame. I am not there to judge between you, or to recommend staying or separating.

If your partner refuses to take part, online couples therapy alone is designed for one person working on the relationship they are in.

What if one of us is already halfway out of the door?

Then you are each hoping for something different from the same hour, and it helps to say so at the very start. One of you doubts whether staying is possible. The other wants to save the marriage and hears every pause as a sign that it is lost.

Each stance tends to push the other further. The partner who wants to stay asks for reassurance, which the doubting partner cannot truthfully offer, so they withdraw a little more, and that withdrawal makes the asking more desperate. Learning to communicate better does not settle the question either of you is really carrying. Doubt is also not the same thing as a decision quietly made months ago and now being announced, and the partner who wants to stay cannot be the one to say which it is.

Couples in this position are sometimes called mixed-agenda couples, and there is a brief, focused kind of work designed only to help them get clear about which way to go. In the first 100 couples seen at the clinic that developed it, roughly half chose to begin couples therapy and most of the others chose to divorce². That is one clinic’s record, not a prediction about the two of you, and I read it simply as a reason to ask the direction question honestly before choosing any method.

What can we do at home before we talk to anyone?

Deliberately do less, and make what you do predictable. These are suggestions, not clinical rules.

• Keep eating and sleeping, however badly. Tiredness shapes these weeks far more than most couples expect.
• Postpone anything permanent. Tell relatives nothing yet, and make no move you could not reverse while you are both running on no sleep.
• Talk once a day. Choose a set time and an agreed finish. A conversation that runs past midnight is longer, not truer.
• Write your questions down. Ask a few at a time in daylight, and stop once the question you asked has had an answer.
• Agree a pause phrase. Whoever uses it says when they will come back, for example in half an hour, at nine.
• Always give the time you will return. A pause with no return time feels like abandonment. With one, it can feel closer to care, even when the person stepping away is angry.
• Confide in one person outside the marriage. Choose someone who will not take sides and will keep it to themselves.

Many couples find arrangements like these hold for a couple of weeks before they start to rub. They will not mend anything, and they are not meant to. They create enough steadiness for real work to begin. They are not enough when every attempt to talk floods within minutes however carefully you prepare, when no agreement survives until morning, or when one of you is numbing each evening just to get through it. For some time it may stay unclear if the marriage is in trouble or ending, and forcing that answer in the first week tends to produce the wrong one. If it helps, book a session, or a free 30-minute call first if you would like to ask questions before involving your partner.

Questions people ask

Can we have the session by video if we are in different places?

Yes, all my sessions are by video, and you can join from separate locations if that is what this week requires. Some couples find it easier to speak when they are not sitting side by side.

How quickly can we get a first session?

That depends on my diary in the week you contact me, so it is worth asking rather than guessing. If I cannot offer a time soon enough to be useful, I will tell you straight away.

What happens in a first session after a crisis?

Most of the hour goes on the event itself, the needs each of you has for the next fortnight, and the sort of help that would fit. Nobody is asked to decide the future of the marriage in it.

Should we decide about staying together before booking?

No, and saying honestly that you are unsure helps more than defending a view you do not quite believe. If you each hope for something different from the session, I will help you say that first.

Does one session commit us to a longer course of therapy?

No, a single session stands on its own and commits you to nothing more. What it can do is steady the next few weeks and show you what kind of work, if any, would help.

If something has just broken open between you, online couples therapy lets you both start talking with me by video, wherever you are.

Sources

1. Yuan, McCarthy, Holley and Levenson. Physiological down-regulation and positive emotion in marital interaction. Emotion, 2010.
2. Doherty, Harris and Wilde. Discernment counseling for mixed-agenda couples. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 2016.

How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.