Why couples wait too long to start therapy

Research from the Gottman Institute is sobering: the average couple waits six years from the time problems start before they reach out for help. Six years of small resentments compounding. Six years of slowly forgetting why you chose each other in the first place.

The reasons are understandable. Therapy feels like an admission of failure. It's expensive. Schedules are tight. And there's a quiet hope that things will sort themselves out if we just try a little harder.

But relationships don't typically heal through more effort applied in the same direction. They heal when the pattern itself shifts — and that's hard to see from inside the pattern. That's what a third person in the room is for.

If you're reading this and wondering whether it's 'bad enough' yet, the honest answer is: it doesn't have to be. The couples I see who come in early — before contempt has set in, before someone has one foot out the door — almost always have an easier road back to each other.