I didn’t set out to provide therapy to people about their romantic relationships. I had trained as a drug and alcohol counselor starting in 2004. That led to work with other mental health conditions, with families, the criminal justice system and trauma. Romantic relationship problems found me.
I had finished my first year of grad school when I took a part-time job at a private practice in Elizabeth in 2005. One of the first cases I was assigned was a couple who was mandated to therapy by a judge after they got into a fight in his courtroom. When the owner told me about the case, I told her that I had no experience working with couples. “It’ll be fine,” she said, “just get them to fight less and listen to each other more.”
They came into my office. Within 10 minutes, they were yelling and screaming at each other. They said horrible things about each other’s mental capacity, physical attractiveness, ability to parent and sexual performance. I had zero control of the room. Eventually I got them to calm down. The hour seemed like three. I went home exhausted. The next week, I began the session by saying that we needed to talk about what happened last week.
“What happened last week?” he asked.
I looked at her. She shrugged.
“The fight you had in here. The horrible fight,” I stammered.
“Oh that was nothing,” she said.
“Nothing?” I almost stuttered in horror. “What did you do after you left here?”
He looked at her. Then he looked at me. “We went and got burgers. And then went home and had sex.”
I vowed to never work with couples again.
Over the next decade, a lot of clients talked to me about their relationships. They ranged in age from 13 to 79. A surprising amount of the work was about romantic problems, even for the people in drug and alcohol treatment. But it was always just one half of the couple in the room. I had been scarred by my experience in Elizabeth all those years ago. I was comfortable going into prisons, working with Veterans with PTSD and even helping parents whose kids died. During presentations and public speeches I would often say, “I don’t do couples therapy. That’s the ninth level of hell,” and everyone would laugh.
When I rejoined the Army in 2014 as a Behavioral Health Officer, I figured that my work would mostly focus on PTSD and alcohol problems. About half of the people I treated from 2014-2018 were there to talk about their disastrous romantic relationships. Brutal. I was hired by the New York State Police in 2016. I figured I’d mostly be dealing with trauma, alcoholism and chain of command issues. Once again, just about fifty percent of my clients those first few years were there to talk about their marriages. My public speeches changed. After the ninth level of hell line, I would tell the audience that, after all of my degrees and licenses and experience and awards, I was now treating couples in my office in Albany. They would laugh. “I work in the bowels of hell,” I would add, and they’d laugh harder.
It wasn’t because they knew the intricacies of couples therapy, and it was only partly because of the call-back nature of my clinical storytelling. Rather, it was because almost everyone in the audience could recognize the difficulty and fights that come along with romantic relationships. It’s a universal experience. That’s why it feels like half of the pop songs written since 1955 are about romance, cheating, heartbreak and longing.
Whenever someone comes into my office and tells me about their marital problems – in my experience, the top five are: sex, time, money, kids and in-laws – I ask them, “How much time do you spend together outside of the house?”
“What do you mean?” they sometimes ask.
“What do you mean what do I mean?” I then respond. “How often are you and your spouse doing things, without the kids, outside of your house?”
“Does going to Target count?”
“No it doesn’t fucking count,” I respond.
Then they think. And they grimace. And they tell me six months or two years or before their last kid was born.
“You need to do the things you used to do before you moved in together, got married and had kids,” I say. “You need to go out, at least twice a month together.”
“We have no time.”
I tell them that they have time for work, laundry, youth soccer, school plays, family parties and phone scrolling. “If you don’t feed your marriage, it will keep giving you problems. And, it will probably get worse.”
“Who will watch the kids?” they sometimes ask.
“Figure it out,” I sometimes say. “In-laws, friends, babysitters. Figure it out. Or don’t and don’t go out. Keep fighting, verbally or with silence. Let the bitterness grow. Be a negative model for the kids. Get divorced in five or ten or fifteen years and reflect back on what went wrong. And I want you to remember me and that I told you to hang out twice a month and you said no.”
I’m not gentle in these situations. You can blame my Dad or New Jersey or the Army or all of the above; I’m a blunt instrument when it comes to couples who don’t spend time together but are wondering how else they can fix it.
On the flip side, when couples start hanging out again regularly, things usually get better. They remember why they liked each other in the first place. They laugh. Liking each other and laughing together sometimes leads to sex, which has often been really lacking too. And laughter and sex combine into a magic potion that helps marriages.
In the cases where they hang out and don’t like each other, don’t laugh and don’t have sex, well, that’s important data too. And we deal with that. In the way that you think I would, only we get there much quicker than couples do if left to their long, slow slog to a brutal divorce.
But those are the minority cases.
My advice is simple:
- Spend time with your spouse outside the house at least twice a month.
- Target and other errands don’t count.
- Ideally, spend one night a month somewhere else. It could be on the coast or in the city, but, shit, you could just go to a local motel and stay in all night.
- Don’t look at your phone while you are at dinner or the movie or the play or the game or walking around. Don’t keep calling home to check on things.
- Don’t just do it for two months and then quit. Do it every month for the rest of your lives.
Disclosure: A large language model was used for copy editing and editorial feedback in accordance with my AI Use & Writing Standards. The accompanying cartoon was AI-generated. All words, arguments, interpretations, advice and conclusions are my own.