At a glance
The useful question is not whether your relationship is bad enough for therapy, but whether what is wrong between you is still moving.
Waiting is a reasonable thing to do, and for some couples it works.
This sets out which signs matter, which ones pass on their own, and how to tell the difference while you are inside it.
Clinical insights from 22 years in psychotherapy
I’m 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.
- The late arrival. Most of the couples I see could have described their problem accurately years before they contacted me, in almost the same words.
- The permission question. Clients often open by asking whether what they have is serious enough to bring, and that question tends to arrive long after the difficulty did.
- The quiet ones. Clients who tell me they hardly ever argue occupy me more than clients who argue often and come back to each other afterwards.
Clinical notes: My observations are anonymised and compounded from my session notes since 2004.
How bad does it have to get before it counts?
There is no threshold, and the search for one is usually part of what has gone wrong between you.
Couples who come to me rarely arrive because something crossed a line. They arrive because one of them got tired of explaining to themselves why it was fine. The line you are looking for does not exist, and while you look for it you are asking a question about severity when the live question is about direction. Is this the same difficulty you had 18 months ago, or has it hardened into something you now organise your evenings around?
There is a particular discomfort in wanting help and not feeling entitled to it. You can see that other people have worse, feel faintly ashamed of minding so much, and still dread Thursday evening when the two of you will be alone in the flat with nothing to do but be together. Both of those are true at once, and the second one is the information. Minimising is not modesty. It is a way of not having to act.
Which signs actually matter, and which ones just feel bad?
Frequency of trouble tells you much less than whether anything gets repaired afterwards.
Rows, cold spells, bad weeks and dull stretches are ordinary. These are the ones that carry weight, because each of them describes something that has stopped happening rather than something that happened.
- Repair has stopped. You still argue, but nobody comes back afterwards, so each episode is filed rather than finished.
- You have gone quiet on purpose. There is a subject you have both stopped raising, and you each know which one it is.
- Contempt has entered the tone. Anger says this matters to me. Contempt says you are beneath discussing it with.
- You are managing rather than living. You time your sentences, choose your moments and feel relief when your partner goes out.
- Sex has become a subject rather than a part of life. It is now negotiated, avoided or scored, and rarely simply wanted.
- One of you has started imagining a separate life in detail. Not as a threat, but as a quiet, furnished daydream you return to.
- The same grievance appears under every subject. Money, the flat, your families and the washing up all end in the same place.
Read those as a description, not a test. One of them present for a fortnight during a hard month at work is not the same as three of them steady for a year. And some things that feel catastrophic are not signs at all. A move, a baby, a parent’s illness or a new job will flatten most couples for a while, and in couples who have come to Copenhagen from somewhere else that flattening often has the whole weight of the move inside it rather than the relationship. Where that is your situation, relationship problems after moving abroad is closer to what is happening.
Why does waiting feel like the safer choice?
Because dissatisfaction comes and goes, and every good fortnight reads as evidence that you were right not to make a fuss.
This is not a failure of nerve. It is what the experience is actually like from inside. Among the partners in a large Dutch survey who said they had been seriously dissatisfied in their relationship, fewer than 2 in 10 eventually received professional help, on average 3.7 years after the dissatisfaction began, and of those who considered it and did not go, 48.8% gave as their reason that things had got better.1 Those are retrospective reports from heterosexual couples in one country, so the figures describe a pattern rather than measure your relationship. What they match in my practice is the shape of the delay: not denial, but a real improvement that arrives often enough to keep the decision postponed.
So the honest version is that waiting sometimes works and you cannot tell in advance which case you are. What you can notice is whether the good periods are getting shorter, and whether the thing you return to after each one is the same thing or a slightly colder version of it. If it is the same thing, waiting is a reasonable bet. If each return is a little further back than the last, waiting is costing you something you are not counting.
What if one of us wants to go and the other does not?
Reluctance is usually about what the room is expected to decide, not about whether the relationship matters.
When one partner suggests therapy, the other often hears a case being opened. There will be an account given, a judgement reached, and someone will turn out to have been the problem. Refusing is then a way of refusing the verdict rather than the help. Meanwhile the partner who suggested it hears the refusal as a statement about how much they are worth, and the gap widens over a question neither of them has said out loud.
It is worth separating two different reluctances. One is apprehension, which usually eases once it becomes clear that the work is about the pattern between you rather than about assigning fault. The other is a decision already taken privately, where attending would mean appearing to try. Those look alike from the outside and feel nothing alike from the inside, and the difference matters more than almost anything else on this page. If your partner will not come at all, couples therapy on your own is a smaller lever than coming together, and not a useless one.
What can we try first, and when is trying it ourselves not enough?
Stop assessing the relationship and start describing it to each other, which is a different activity and much harder.
- Each name the avoided subject. Separately, write down the thing you have stopped raising. Then say it once, with no argument attached and no answer required that evening.
- Ask about the inside, not the behaviour. Not why did you do that, but what was happening in you when you went quiet.
- Make repair ordinary. Return to the last bad exchange within the day and say what you got wrong, before anything about what they did.
- Protect something unstructured. An hour with no logistics in it, where neither of you is allowed to raise the household.
- Notice the body first. The chest tightens and the breath goes shallow well before the first sharp sentence. That is the moment to stop, not 10 minutes later.
Treat that as something to try rather than a programme with a timetable. Couples differ in how long any of it takes, and a good month does not settle a pattern you have been in for years.
There are situations where this is not enough and should not be attempted on your own. Where contempt is established rather than occasional, the premise of these steps is 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 puts someone further into it. Where one of you has privately decided to leave and is managing the other, honest description is not available yet. And where you cannot tell which of these you are in, that is not a failure of insight. It is the ordinary condition of being inside a relationship, and it is the first thing worth working out slowly with a third person in the room, which is what couples therapy in Copenhagen is for. A free 30-minute call is a reasonable place to put the question.
Questions people ask
Is our problem too small to bring to couples therapy?
No, and couples who come while the difficulty is still describable usually have an easier job than couples who come once it has become the shape of the relationship. Bringing something small is not wasting a session.
Will you tell us whether we should stay together?
No, because that decision is yours and I am not in a position to make it for you. What I can do is make the two of you legible to each other, so that whatever you decide is decided on accurate information.
Do we have to agree on what the problem is before we start?
No, and you very rarely will. Two incompatible accounts of the same relationship is normal material, and it is often the most useful thing in the first session.
How will we know whether the work is doing anything?
The first change is usually that bad exchanges get shorter and repair comes sooner, rather than that trouble stops. If nothing has shifted in how you recover, say so in the room.
Should we see a couples therapist or each see someone separately?
Where the difficulty lives between you, couples work reaches it and individual work usually does not. Where one of you is carrying something of your own that predates the relationship, the two can run alongside each other.
If you are weighing this up, couples therapy and the free 30-minute call are both ways I can help.
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Sources
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.
