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- Couples say the main reasons they come to therapy are money, sex, and parenting.
- But one therapist says the real reason is that each person is frustrated in their search for validation.
- It’s the therapist’s job to help the couple get to the bottom of the issue and share their feelings.
Everyone knows marriage is hard, but it’s easy to feel like your marriage is really hard — like your partner is the first partner in history to nag or nitpick or leave dishes in the sink and expect you to clean them.
But ask a couples therapist and they’ll tell you: Not so much. No twosome is a snowflake.
“I haven’t really met a couple yet with uncommon struggles,” Michael McNulty told me.
I asked McNulty, a master trainer at the Gottman Institute and the founder of the Chicago Relationship Center, about the most common reasons why couples seek marriage counseling. He was able to rattle them off pretty quickly: problems with money, physical intimacy, and parenting.
When I posed a similar question to Hal Runkel, a marriage and family therapist, and the author of multiple books on parenting and relationships, he listed the same exact three issues. But Runkel also distinguished between the reasons couples say they’ve come to therapy and the real problems that are plaguing their relationship.
“The presenting issue is not usually the real issue,” Runkel told me — and it’s his job to help the couple uncover it.
The real issue? “People are scared that in order to be fully married to this person, they’re going to have to become a different person themselves,” Runkel said. Either they’re afraid that they’ll be rejected by their partner for being themselves — or they already have been rejected.
“What we’re all searching for is this sense of validation,” or someone who knows us and still accepts us, Runkel said.
A new survey of 1,000 engaged, married, and divorced people, from MidAmerica Nazarene University, found that people think couples attend marriage counseling because of problems with children, work, communication, money, infidelity, in-laws, and parenting style, in that order.
But the actual reasons why couples report finding themselves on the proverbial couch are communication, infidelity, money, children, parenting, in-laws, and work, in that order.
The survey also found that 49% of participants had been to marriage counseling before age 30. That includes premarital counseling, which in some religions is required.
Couples often seek counseling during tough life transitions
Both McNulty and Runkel mentioned that couples also seek marriage counseling during life transitions. The key ones are getting married, becoming parents, becoming empty-nesters, and retiring.
When couples become parents, they often struggle to find time and energy for each other, McNulty said. Then, when their children leave the house, they sometimes realize that they’ve invested so much time in parenting that they “forgot how to connect.”
These transition periods — especially the transition to parenting — are also prime breeding grounds for infidelity, McNulty added. Partners may start to become distant from one another, making them vulnerable to other people swooping in. (“Marriages often die more by ice than by fire,” McNulty said.)
Ultimately, the therapist’s role is to make each partner feel understood — both by the therapist and by their partner.
Runkel described his therapeutic process this way: “Discover who you really are and represent that as authentically as possible to your spouse,” and have them do the same. “What they do with that information is then up to them.”
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