CONSCIOUSLY COUPLED
Every relationship has its issues, so why the taboo? Sophia Bennett lifts the veil on marriage counselling and finds a pre-emptive strike is increasingly par for the course
How gen X and millennials are removing the taboo around relationship counselling.
“I’m going to ask you to sit facing each other and look deeply into each other’s eyes for a whole minute,” our marriage therapist told us, 10 minutes into our first session. “It’s a mindfulness exercise that enhances intimacy and establishes a deeper psychic connection between lovers,” she explained, using many of my least favourite words in a single sentence. Dutifully, my husband and I rearranged our chairs and tamped down the instinct to back out of her sandalwood-scented practice room and make a run for it. Because we had come this far. We had realised after two years in marital S-town that therapy might be the only road out. So while she retied a block-print headscarf that suggested she had a Kwanzaa festival to get to after our 50-minute hour, we locked eyes and waited.
And then her phone dinged. And then again. “Sorry,” she said, fumbling in her basket. “Stay present, loving partners, I’m just going to quickly check this in case it’s my son needing a ride.” Three more dings and we got up, thanked her for her ruinously expensive time and left without a follow-up appointment.
Technically, our first experience with couple counselling had the makings of a killer anecdote – the therapist with message alert issues – except my husband and I had decided not to tell anyone that we had chosen to get help. We were embarrassed. Ashamed, I think, that we couldn’t fix things ourselves and worried that friends would see it as a sign our marriage was on its last legs, instead of what it actually was – a Hail Mary attempt to break patterns of behaviour that we set up before our first anniversary, and chart a different course in our marriage.
“You do better in the gym with a trainer; you don’t figure out how to cook without reading a recipe. Therapy is not something to be embarrassed about,” said actress Kristen Bell in 2015, discussing why she and husband Dax Shepard began working with a therapist early in their relationship. Ever the therapy supporter, she’s also said: “I don’t mind advertising a healthy marriage. I’m trying... like everyone else.”
Commentators called Bell “brave” to “admit” it, but a few years on, it seems more like early evidence of a now-discernible shift in the way marriage counselling is perceived, especially by couples in their twenties and thirties. More and more couples aren’t waiting until “the very last minute when there is a crisis or they are not sure whether they are going to stay,” psychologist Janet Reibstein told
Thetimes in the UK. As society becomes more open to therapy in general, couples are attending “for tune-ups or for direction or for tutorship or at a point when they say, ‘We are at an impasse and not communicating the way we would like to.’”
Back at home, there’s evidence of the same trend. “It’s preemptive,” said Lindy Klim of her decision to see a therapist with her fiancé Adam Ellis. “I didn’t want to get to the point where we needed help,” and in Bali, where the couple live, “there’s no stigma,” Klim said. “Everyone has someone helping them with something.”
“There’s definitely a move away from old attitudes that have existed around therapy,” says Sian Khuman, a psychologist and couple therapist with Relationships Australia. “In older generations and still in certain communities, the idea that you go and talk to someone about your problems means it’s the end of your relationship. But it’s not shameful, or a sign you need a third party to tell you whether you should stay together or not.”
As proof, Khuman cites the sudden popularity of psychotherapist and author Esther Perel, whose books on infidelity and erotic intelligence have been translated into 25 languages, and her two TED Talks viewed a combined 19 million times. But it’s her podcast,
Where should we begin ?, which brings the listener into a real-life session with a struggling couple, that’s captured public attention – although it is not easy listening. Thenewyorker called it “stressful as all hell”, but Perel’s own summation of her work as a “public service” is clearly shared by her fanbase.
During a recent interview with podcast Litup, Perel was asked when in a relationship should a couple engage in the kind of difficult conversations that therapy brings up. Her answer: “Early on and throughout.”
“I’m definitely seeing a lot of younger couples coming in,” says Sydney-based psychologist Rachael Walden. “Whether they have made the decision to move in together or they want to get married but feel nervous because they’re already experiencing gridlock around some issues, they’re now seeking to work those out and nip them in the bud, which to me indicates a growing understanding and respect of marriage.”
For long-term couples, the protracted first stage of therapy is usually spent unravelling historical resentments and “repairing old ruptures,” as Walden describes it, “but with a newer couple, those issues haven’t become entrenched and there won’t be so much repair work to begin with.” But at the same time, she says, “male brains only finish maturing around 26 years of age and females at around 25, so couples who commence a committed relationship when in their early- or mid-twenties may be less aware of their own relational patterns.”
On top of which, there can be immense challenge in managing the transition from limerence – the early, lust-fuelled, handsy, “I want to watch you sleep” stage of love that generally lasts six months to two years – to something functional and resilient. “To begin with, it’s rose-coloured glasses and the rush of oxytocin,” agrees Khuman. “You don’t see many couples in therapy in the limerence phase, but there is always a defining moment when that wears off and you have to decide: will I be with them? And that’s when they may decide they need help.”
In a broader social sense, perhaps it’s unsurprising that gen X and millennial couples are more open to the idea of enlisting a professional early on, and not just because their level of emotional fluency is greater than in previous generations. The ’70s and ’80s saw an unprecedented upswing in divorce rates as the taboo around it broke down. “Many of us had childhoods shaped by divorce and we know the impact of that,” says Melbourne-based counsellor Jo Gniel. “We’ve had to live through it and so, of course, there would be more willingness to invest and ask what do I need to do to look after my relationship?”
After all, we all know the statistics. That one in three Australian marriages fails and 70 per cent of couples will experience infidelity. Of the relationships that do survive, only 30 per cent could be classified as healthy and functional, according to research by the American psychologist Ty Tashiro. The vast majority devolve into bitterness and dysfunction over time. “More and more there is an expectation that you are going to have to work on it,” agrees Khuman. “That you do have to focus and put the effort in.”
In addition, our perception of what exactly marriage is for has dramatically evolved in a single generation. No longer is the institution regarded as an economic unit to support the raising of children, as it was for much of human history. Now, as Perel told The
Atlantic, “We still want everything the traditional family was meant to provide... but now we also want our partner to love us, to desire us, to be interested in us. We should be best friends and trusted confidants, and passionate lovers to boot.”
“For the first time, I could see how marriages end,” says Dr Kate Bradley*, a 42-year-old English teacher who had been married for five years when the relationship began to falter under the pressure of becoming parents. “Even though I think we are both emotionally literate people, it felt bigger than something we could handle on our own. I just felt really fallible for the first time and I knew that if we didn’t find new ways of talking to each other, we wouldn’t be together in 10 years.”
At her instigation, the couple spent four months working with a counsellor who specialised in family systems therapy, which traces patterns of behaviour back to the family a person grows up in as a means of understanding adult triggers. “Through talking with him, we were able to see that in a sense we were both responding to the most basic childhood fears – annihilation or abandonment,” Bradley says. “We were fighting those ghosts rather than each other and what we learnt from our therapist were ways of loving each other in those moments of existential terror. It was so healing for us, and even though we chose not to tell anyone to begin with, particularly our parents, because we did feel there was a stigma around it, now it’s like I can’t be bothered to hide it anymore. I’ll always volunteer it and, inadvertently, the effect of that has been that friends have come to us for support. Maybe it encourages them that it’s normal and we all go through it. Because marriage is just fucking hard work.”
Most of us, deep down, do enter a relationship expecting it to fulfil our needs. And most of us will at some point wonder if maybe it’s just mixing your issues with their issues and shaking the jar. “I’ll always congratulate a couple who have made that call and admitted that maybe they can’t do it on their own,” says Walden. “There are so many more enjoyable things you could be doing at 7pm than coming into work on yourselves.” And even for couples who have old-school left it until catastrophe occurs, “the fact that you’re both there shows that it matters to you.”