At a glance
Severity is the wrong measure. The question worth asking is whether the trouble between you is still in motion or has settled into furniture.
Holding off is a defensible choice, and for some couples it is the right one.
What follows is which indicators carry weight, which ones resolve by themselves, and how to tell them apart while you are living inside the situation.
Clinical insights from 22 years in psychotherapy
I am Mark Colclough, MA, psychotherapist in Copenhagen. Qualified at the Psychosynthesis Education Trust and the University of East London. 22 years of full-time, face-to-face clinical practice.
- Almost everyone arrives late. The couples I meet could have given me the same account, in roughly the same sentences, 2 or 3 years before they got in touch.
- They ask for permission first. The opening line is often a question about whether this counts as serious, and that question turns up long after the trouble did.
- Quiet worries me more than loud. A couple who tell me they hardly ever fight hold my attention more than a couple who fight and find each other again afterwards.
Clinical notes: My observations are anonymised and compounded from my session notes since 2004.
How bad does it have to be first?
No threshold exists, and hunting for one is usually part of the problem rather than a way of sizing it up.
Couples almost never get in touch because something crossed a line. They get in touch because one of them ran out of patience with the private argument for why it was fine. While you search for a line that is not there, you are measuring severity, when the live question is about direction. Is this the same difficulty you had 2 years ago, or has it set into something you now plan your evenings around?
There is a specific misery in wanting help and feeling you have not earned it. You can know other people have it worse, be faintly embarrassed that this bothers you so much, and still feel your stomach drop at the thought of Thursday night with nothing to do but be in the flat together. Both of those are true, and the second one is the data. Talking yourself down is not humility. It is a way of postponing a decision.
Which indicators carry weight?
How often things go wrong matters far less than whether anything gets mended afterwards.
Fights, cold stretches, flat months and bad weeks are ordinary life. The items below weigh more, because every one of them names something that has stopped occurring rather than something that occurred.
- Nothing gets mended. The arguments continue, nobody circles back afterwards, and each one is shelved rather than closed.
- There is a deliberate silence. A subject you have both quietly retired, and you each know exactly which one.
- Contempt has got into the voice. Anger means this matters to me. Contempt means you are not worth the discussion.
- You are handling each other rather than living together. Timing your sentences, picking moments, feeling lighter when they go out.
- Sex has turned into a topic. Negotiated, dodged or tallied, and seldom just wanted.
- One of you pictures a separate life in detail. Not brandished as a threat, but returned to like a furnished room.
- Every subject arrives at the same grievance. Money, the flat, your families and the dishwasher all terminate in one place.
Take that as a description, not a scoring system. One item present for a fortnight during a punishing month at work is not the same as 3 of them holding steady for a year. Some things that feel like catastrophes are not indicators at all. A move, a baby, a parent falling ill or a new job will flatten most couples for a while, and where you have relocated to a new country the flattening often carries the whole weight of the move rather than the relationship.
Why does holding off feel safer?
Unhappiness fluctuates, and every decent fortnight reads as proof that making a fuss would have been an overreaction.
That is not cowardice. It is an accurate report of how the experience runs from inside. In a large Dutch survey, among partners who said they had been seriously dissatisfied with their relationship, fewer than 2 in 10 eventually got professional help, and they did so on average 3.7 years after the dissatisfaction started. Of the people who thought about it and did not go, 48.8 percent said the reason was that things had improved.1 These are retrospective accounts from heterosexual couples in a single country, so the numbers sketch a pattern rather than measure your relationship. What they match in my practice is the shape of the delay: not denial, but genuine improvement arriving often enough to keep the decision on hold.
The honest position is that waiting does sometimes work, and you cannot tell in advance which case yours is. What you can watch is whether the good runs are getting shorter, and whether the thing you come back to afterwards is the same thing or a slightly colder version of it. Same thing, and waiting is a fair bet. Each return a little further back than the last, and waiting is charging you something you have not been counting.
What if only one of us wants to go?
Reluctance is usually about what the room is expected to rule on, not about how much the relationship means.
Suggest therapy and the other person frequently hears a case being filed. Evidence will be presented, a finding will be reached, and one of you will emerge as the fault. Saying no is then a refusal of the verdict rather than of the help. Meanwhile whoever suggested it reads the refusal as a statement about their own worth, and the distance widens over a question nobody has spoken aloud.
2 kinds of reluctance are worth telling apart. The first is apprehension, which usually eases once it is clear the work concerns the pattern between you rather than the allocation of blame. The second is a decision already made in private, where turning up would mean performing an effort. From outside they look the same and from inside they feel nothing alike, and that difference matters more than almost anything else here.
What can we try ourselves first?
Stop evaluating the relationship and start describing it to each other, which is a different and considerably harder activity.
- Each of you name the retired subject. Write it down separately. Then say it once, with no argument attached and no answer expected that night.
- Ask about the interior, not the behaviour. Not why did you do that, but what was going on in you when you went quiet.
- Make mending routine. Go back to the last bad exchange within the day and lead with your own part, before anything about theirs.
- Ringfence an hour with no admin in it. Neither of you is allowed to raise the household during it.
- Catch the body first. The chest tightens and the breath shortens well ahead of the first sharp sentence. That is the moment to stop, not 10 minutes afterwards.
Treat that as something to attempt rather than a programme with a schedule. Couples vary in how long any of it takes, and one good month does not settle a pattern you have lived in for years.
Some situations are beyond this and should not be attempted alone. Where contempt is the standing weather rather than an occasional storm, the premise of those steps has already gone. Where one of you is frightened during arguments rather than angry, or where one partner is being controlled, the difficulty is not a communication problem, and treating it as one pushes somebody further into it. Where one of you has privately decided to leave and is managing the other, honest description is not yet available. And if you cannot work out which of those applies to you, that is not a failure of insight. It is the normal condition of being inside a relationship, and it is the first thing worth untangling slowly with a third person present.
If you want to put the question somewhere, sessions run by video wherever the 2 of you are, and a free 30-minute call is a sensible place to start. My work with couples is described on the online couples therapy page.
Questions people ask
Is our problem too small to bring?
No, and couples who come while the trouble can still be put into words generally have an easier job than couples who come once it has become the shape of the relationship. Bringing something small does not waste a session.
Will you tell us whether to stay together?
No, because the decision is yours and I am not placed to make it. What I can do is make the 2 of you legible to each other, so whatever you decide rests on accurate information.
Must we agree on the problem beforehand?
No, and you almost never will. 2 incompatible accounts of one relationship are ordinary material, and often the most useful thing in a first session.
Does this work over video?
It does, including when the 2 of you are in different countries, which is now a regular part of my practice. What it needs is an uninterrupted hour and a connection that holds.
Couples therapist, or one each?
Where the difficulty lives between you, couples work reaches it and individual work usually does not. Where one of you carries something of your own that predates the relationship, the 2 can run alongside each other.
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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.
