I recently read a Washington Post article asking long-married couples what has helped their relationships endure.

Their answers weren’t particularly complicated. Learn how to argue. Say thank you. Do ordinary things together. Accept that some disagreements may never be resolved. Have a shared sense of purpose.

I liked the simplicity of it.

But I found myself wondering about something underneath all of those good practices:

What makes us want to keep doing them?

It’s one thing for me to know that I should listen better, express appreciation, become less defensive, or put down my phone and take a walk with someone I love.

It’s another thing to do it when I’m tired. Or disappointed. Or irritated. Or quietly keeping track of everything I’ve done lately and everything the other person hasn’t.

I know how to do that too.

Maybe we need something bigger than happiness

This is one of the reasons I keep coming back to Viktor Frankl. Frankl believed that human beings are sustained by meaning—by having something, or someone, beyond ourselves toward which to give our lives.

I wonder if relationships work something like that.

Of course we want our relationships to make us happy. Happiness is one of the great gifts of loving and being loved.

But happiness comes and goes.

A bad night’s sleep can change how I feel about almost everything. So can a stressful week, a careless comment, a good meal, or a little affection arriving at just the right moment.

Our deepest relationships seem to need something sturdier underneath all those changing feelings.

For me, that something is the conviction that being human in relationship is one of the foundational goods of life.

We need one another.

And not simply because other people make our lives more pleasant.

Relationships are where we experience some of life’s greatest joys—belonging, intimacy, laughter, affection, being known. But they’re also places where we practice courage, patience, generosity, fidelity, forgiveness, humility, and love.

A good relationship doesn’t merely make my life better.

It gives me somewhere to practice becoming the person I most want to be.

Love can be inconvenient

There is, of course, a catch.

Other people are inconvenient.

The people I love have opinions. They have moods. They misunderstand me. They need things when I’m tired. Sometimes they don’t notice what I’ve done for them. Occasionally they seem remarkably uninterested in responding exactly as I had imagined they should.

And, inconveniently, I bring many of the same qualities to their lives.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons relationships matter so much. Loving actual people asks something different of me than simply believing in love.

It asks me to practice it.

That might mean listening when I’d rather defend myself. Offering warmth after a chilly interaction. Being curious when I’m fairly certain I already know what the other person is thinking. Saying thank you for something ordinary. Making the first move toward repair.

None of this means ignoring genuinely harmful behavior or abandoning appropriate boundaries.

I’m thinking about the ordinary, sometimes painful friction involved in sharing a life with another imperfect person.

And I’m wondering whether those moments occasionally present us with a choice:

What matters most to me here?

The quiet temptation to keep score

I wish I could say I always answer that question nobly.

I don’t.

It’s remarkably easy to keep a quiet relational ledger.

I initiated last time.

I’ve been trying.

Why should I have to go first again?

And sometimes the ledger isn’t imaginary. There are seasons in relationships when one person really is giving more than the other. Relationships aren’t perfectly fair.

But I’ve come to wonder whether watching the scoreboard too closely can cause me to surrender something important: my own agency.

If I decide that I’ll be warmer when you’re warmer, generous when you’re generous, or attentive when you’re attentive, I’ve allowed your choices to determine a surprising amount about mine.

Maybe there’s another possibility.

I can ask myself what kind of spouse, partner, parent, friend, or neighbor I want to be—and take one small step in that direction.

Not because it guarantees a particular response.

Because this is who I want to be.

And then something interesting can happen

Sometimes when one person changes their posture, something in the relationship begins to move.

A little warmth produces a little warmth.

Someone becomes less defensive and suddenly the conversation feels safer.

One person becomes curious instead of certain.

Affection is offered without first checking the account balance.

And quite often, generosity evokes generosity.

Maybe the person across from me has been hungry for some of the very same things I’ve been waiting for them to provide.

I love that possibility.

But sometimes something else happens.

I try—and nothing much changes.

Maybe I discover that what I thought was a loving gesture didn’t feel particularly loving to the other person.

That’s interesting too.

Because love isn’t simply about trying harder. It’s about becoming curious enough about another human being to discover who they actually are.

I can spend a lot of energy offering what I think you should appreciate while overlooking what you’ve been trying to tell me matters to you.

Which brings me back to those long-married couples.

Maybe their advice—express gratitude, spend time together, learn how to disagree, cultivate shared purpose—matters not because they’ve discovered the techniques that produce successful marriages.

Maybe these are simply some of the ordinary ways we keep turning toward another person.

Ways of saying:

You matter to me.

We matter to me.

I’m still interested in knowing you.

And perhaps that leaves us with a more interesting question than whether our partner is doing enough—or even whether we’re doing enough.

It’s a question I find both uncomfortable and hopeful:

What is it like to be loved by me?

A recent study in Family Process caught my attention because it put some numbers to something I see regularly in my work with couples.

Researchers studied 1,014 Dutch heterosexual couples. Among those who had experienced serious relationship dissatisfaction, 36.4% considered professional relationship help and 19.5% eventually received it. Those who received help did so, on average, 3.7 years after the serious dissatisfaction began.

Why the delay? Interestingly, the most common reason was not cost or embarrassment. Nearly half said that things got better. Another common reason was that their partner did not want to seek help.

The 3.7-year figure sounds about right to me.

There are exceptions. Couples often come in much sooner when there has been a precipitating crisis – infidelity, a dramatic explosive argument or series of arguments, or discovering significant lies or omissions.

Absent something like that, couples can live with relationship difficulties for quite a while. I also wonder whether couples in which one or both partners are more attachment-avoidant tend to wait even longer before seeking help.

“But things got better.”

This part of the study especially interested me because I do not necessarily think that deciding not to seek therapy when things improve is a mistake.

Couples cannot be defined by their problems.

And I think couples instinctively know this.

Relationships have difficult periods. Couples disappoint one another. They argue. Sometimes they find their way through these periods without professional help. That is a good thing.

The problem comes when disappointment or poor behavior becomes a repeated pattern. Eventually, a couple can have difficulty defining themselves in positive terms and begin defining the relationship by its problems.

That creates a powerful negativity bias. It can also produce resentment and increasingly one-sided stories about what has gone wrong: I am trying. You are the problem.

At that point, something more than the latest argument is happening. The couple is developing a negative story about the relationship itself.

What if one person does not want couples therapy?

I see this frequently.

Often the reluctant partner is afraid of being blamed or ganged up on by the therapist. Men in particular may worry that, in a profession dominated by women, the therapist will quickly identify them as the problem – the uncaring, emotionally unskilled husband who needs to be fixed.

That is one reason I try to establish something very early in couples therapy:

The pattern is the problem, not the individuals.

Usually, what looks like two people behaving badly toward one another is also two people trying, unsuccessfully, to protect legitimate needs and values.

One pursues because connection matters. The other withdraws because peace, autonomy, or emotional safety matters. Their attempts to protect those things begin interacting in ways that make it increasingly difficult for either person to get what they actually need.

Seeing the pattern from outside can change the conversation.

Does our relationship have to be “bad enough” for therapy?

No.

I do not think couples therapy needs to be understood primarily as something medical or clinical. You do not need a diagnosis, and your marriage does not need to be on the verge of collapse.

Sometimes couples therapy is simply the wisdom of a third perspective.

When two people have been inside the same pattern for a long time, it can become extraordinarily difficult to see it clearly. A third person can sometimes see what neither partner can see from inside it.

And sometimes that is enough to help a couple begin telling a different story about themselves.

Research credit:This post was prompted by Henk Jan Conradi, Arjen Noordhof, and Jan H. Kamphuis, “Prevalence and predictors of help-seeking steps in a nationally representative Dutch sample of romantic couples,” Family Process 64, no. 1 (2025): e13074.

Read the original research

When Therapy Fails

I wish I could promise couples therapy will work for you. I can’t. I can be honest about the results I see. It’s not a scientific study of my clients, but my sense is that upwards of 70-80% of people use relationship therapy to make their relationship or marriages better. This may be after a just a few sessions or several months of hard work dealing with marital conflict. Of course there are couples that without marriage counseling may have decided to call it quits on their relationship and get a divorce, but in all honesty, I think the majority of those that get a lot out of therapy would stay together or muddle along even without a marriage therapist’s help — but that therapy either accelerates their growth and intimacy or makes it a whole lot easier to work through painful conflict.

What about the 20-30% that either drop out of couples therapy or end their partnership? Did marriage therapy make things worse for them? My opinion: probably not. My experience of couples counseling is that partners tend to act out their typical problems right in the therapy room. I’ve yet to see a brand new big problem created in a marriage therapy session. That is not to say, however, that couples don’t fight, argue, or hurt each other’s feelings in a couple’s therapy session. This happens frequently, but generally speaking, couples will find that I gently point out their missteps and help them make amends. Such “repairs”, in my opinion, are the common fare of marital/relationship life but some people may disagree and, as a result, think therapy isn’t working.

Lastly, there are times when I make mistakes as a therapist. On the occasions that I fail to be insightful, or I forget something, or I rush an individual or couple, or skim over important feelings, some couples may find that too hard to deal with and move on, but my general sense is that in such situations an opportunity to repair my mistake emerges and we are able to repair the momentary breach. Besides that, there are probably times when couples simply don’t click with me and decide to seek help elsewhere.

Nevertheless, if your fear is that therapy will make matters worse, I think the worst thing you will face is probably far less consequential: therapy might just feel like a dud — or you simply discover you or your partner just aren’t feeling enough motivation to press on. But rest assured, if you have the motivation, I’ll be your marriage’s biggest fan.