Your Car Gets Regular Maintenance. Does Your Relationship?
Nine people came to my free relationship Q&A last week. Every single one admitted they felt stuck in dating or in a relationship at one point or another.
Not one had ever worked with a coach or therapist.
Our bodies get gym memberships, massages, and spa treatments when they bother us. But issues with our hearts and minds and relationships get... endured?
I didn’t think my little Q&A was some statistical fluke, so I went looking for research. Hubbard & Anderson (2022) surveyed 300 individuals who said they were interested in therapy but never sought it. Reasons fell into the following categories: cost of treatment, logistics, the modality of treatment, trustworthiness, relational factors (i.e. one partner not wanting to participate), and a clear therapeutic process. “Additionally, some responses suggested that stigma and concerns around the emotional work involved deterred couples from seeking help.” (Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35315112/)
Williamson et al. (2018) examined 231 ethnically diverse low-income newlywed couples and found cost and uncertainty about where to seek help ranked as the top two barriers, followed by partner unwillingness (for women) and preference for individual counseling (for men). (Source: https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Ffam0000485)
Obviously I’m not going to argue anyone out of their reasons, but allow me to share my perspective.
"My partner won't come."
This one gets treated as a dead end, and I understand why. But relationships are systems, not two solo acts happening in the same room. If one person in a system changes how they show up, the whole dance changes. What do I mean by that? In a two-person marriage, let’s say, there’s a dance of thought - emotion - behavior - reaction that bounces from one to the other. Those often follow well-worn grooves, or “dance steps.” As soon as one person changes their steps, the partner might keep trying their same groove, but they’ll be getting a different result, which will put them onto a new dance floor. Ergo, relationships change when one person changes, whether or not the other partner ever sits in a chair across from a coach. So in case you were waiting for permission, here it is. You can start doing your own work on the relationship. It might be slower, and it's not the version many people have in mind, but it does move things.
"Things aren’t that bad / we don’t need it."
This is the one I find most interesting, because it assumes coaching support is for triage, not maintenance or skill-building to avoid future injury. This might sound flippant, but nobody waits for their car to break down on the highway before ever getting an oil change. We do preventative care on the things we consider precious and expensive to replace, our health, our finances, sometimes our actual cars, and then somehow decide the relationship is the one system that's supposed to just run itself? Maintenance isn't an overreaction or a waste of time and money, it's what you do for something you don't want to let stagnate, or lose.
Don’t just take my word for it, Córdova et. al. (2014) did a “marriage check-up” study with 215 couples in a randomized controlled trial. In other words, some couples were assigned a checkup, while others were put on a waitlist. They found that participants in the checkup group reported significantly higher levels of intimacy, acceptance, and satisfaction compared to the controls. (Source: https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fa0037097)
Cost and logistics.
I'm not going to pretend that cost and logistics aren’t a huge factor. E.g., when I see couples with kids, they might have to get a sitter, or have a session during school hours which means taking time off work. Coaching and therapy cost money and time, full stop. What you might miss as a client is that you have significant influence over how long the process will take. To paraphrase one of my teachers, Pete Pearson, my work is extremely successful under two conditions: when clients let me do my thing, and when clients practice what we worked on between sessions.
Therapies are often open-ended, but coaching has a specific goal in mind. We literally work to get you to learn and practice the necessary skills to get you there, so you can stop paying me. Depending on the issue, this might take several months, yes. But it’s up to you not to use the coaching sessions as an opportunity to vent and rehash the latest fight.
Another question I’d have is where people spend their limited time and money instead. For example, when has scrolling hours of free social media content ever actually moved the needle? General advice is built for an average audience that may have nothing to do with your specific relationship, your specific history, your specific two (or more) nervous systems in the room. Some of my content is pretty general, and I stand by it, because I’ve studied the topic and can back it up, but I always make clear that you’d get more out of a 1:1.
There's also a longer-range argument buried in here, one I first heard Scott Galloway make about the financial side of divorce: splitting a life in two is the most expensive things that can happen to a person's finances in terms of legal costs, lost assets, sometimes lost income for years. Spending money now on getting the relationship right could, in some cases, be the cheaper option long-term. Obviously, there's no guarantee you won’t get divorced, but if you do, it’d likely be less acrimonious. It also reframes "I can't afford this" into a question worth actually running the numbers on, rather than a foregone conclusion.
Basically…
None of this means everyone should rush out and book a session tomorrow (although hey, I still have availability!). But I noticed something in that room last week: nine people, all stuck, all treating their own stuckness as just something to live with. Almost like relationship pain doesn't count as a real problem the way a bad shoulder does. Romanticism really messed us up in that regard.
If you've been putting off getting support for something relational, I'd like to know what's underneath it for you: cost, timing, an unwilling partner, or something else entirely? Drop it in the comments or email me. And if "I don't even know what this would look like" is part of it, that's exactly what a free consult is for, no commitment attached.
