Couples & Relationship Therapy

Couples and partners can get stuck in the same arguments. Someone shuts down, someone pushes harder, and distance grows. Often it's the cycle, not either person. Sometimes conflict fades but closeness does too, replaced by friendship or parallel lives. Struggles can also be internal. Relationship anxiety, codependency, pulling away, or losing yourself are patterns, not flaws. For men this can look more like irritability, withdrawal, or a creeping sense of being trapped. They reflect how you learned to protect yourself and meet your needs. Sexual dynamics, infidelity, narcissistic abuse, and substance use can all become part of the picture. So can compatibility questions, blended families, and different visions for the future. Whatever is making things hard, the goal is to understand it well enough to make real decisions about it.

Many couples eventually fall into polarized roles where one person becomes the emotional pursuer and the other retreats, even when both are lonely and neither person feels fully understood. One partner may push harder for reassurance, conversation, or closeness while the other shuts down, becomes defensive, withdraws, or feels overwhelmed by pressure and conflict. Therapy helps make those moments more understandable instead of just reactive. Often the argument itself is less important than the feeling each person is left carrying afterward: rejected, criticized, ignored, controlled, inadequate, or alone. As couples better understand the cycle they’re caught in, conversations often become less escalated, less repetitive, and more emotionally honest.

Yes. Emotional and sexual intimacy are deeply connected, and difficulties with sex are rarely separate from what's happening in the relationship. Couples may struggle with mismatched desire, emotional disconnection, avoidance, resentment, pressure, rejection, performance anxiety, or intimacy that has started to feel mechanical or distant. Conflict, exhaustion, parenting stress, ADHD, anxiety, and losing space for desire inside the relationship can all play a role. Therapy creates room to talk directly about emotional and sexual needs that are often difficult to discuss. The goal is not forcing closeness but understanding what has happened to it and creating the conditions where connection can become possible again.

Absolutely. You do not need to attend therapy as a couple for relationship work to be meaningful. Individual relationship therapy can help you understand attachment patterns, dating experiences, fear of commitment, relationship anxiety, recurring conflicts, people pleasing, emotional withdrawal, or why certain dynamics keep repeating across relationships. Some people come in while deciding whether to stay, leave, commit, date differently, or rebuild after a breakup or divorce. Others simply want to understand themselves better in relationships and stop feeling stuck in the same patterns. Some men come in because they feel emotionally disconnected in relationships but have never really been given language for what’s happening internally beyond stress, anger, or shutting down. Even when only one person is in therapy, greater awareness often changes how relationships function.

Yes. Deciding whether to have children is one of the most significant and emotionally complex decisions and life transition adults face. It touches identity, relationships, freedom, fear, biology, grief, purpose, and ideas about what adulthood is supposed to look like. Many people feel genuinely unsure and don’t have space to talk about it honestly without pressure or assumptions. Sometimes partners want different things or the uncertainty exists inside one person. Some people are navigating fertility challenges, IVF, adoption, foster care, surrogacy, or grief around paths that may not happen. Others are trying to understand whether they truly want children or have simply absorbed expectations from family, culture, or timelines. And others are childfree by choice and need space to own it. For LGBTQ+ couples and relationships, this decision can also involve navigating donor conception, surrogacy, adoption, or foster care alongside the intersection of queerness and family expectations. Therapy helps create clarity around what you actually want and what fears, pressures, or losses may be shaping the decision.

Dating can become emotionally exhausting, especially when it starts to feel tied to self-worth, timelines, loneliness, or fears about ending up alone. Apps, ghosting, rejection sensitivity, commitment anxiety, and repeated disappointing experiences can slowly reshape how people see themselves and relationships. Sometimes the issue is not finding people. Sometimes it’s difficulty staying emotionally present once closeness becomes real. Patterns around anxiety, avoidance, overthinking, hypervigilance, or emotional unavailability often become more visible through dating. Men can carry a different kind of exhaustion: rejection sensitivity, the pressure to initiate, feeling invisible, the expectation to perform, confidence, and the sense that vulnerability may make dating harder rather than easier. Therapy helps you notice the fears, expectations, and protective habits shaping how you approach dating so the process feels less defeating and less tied to self-worth.

Yes. ADHD can significantly affect relationships in ways that are often misunderstood by both partners. Difficulties with attention, emotional regulation, forgetfulness, overwhelm, impulsivity, task initiation, or follow-through can create resentment, imbalance, loneliness, or parent-child dynamics inside relationships. Many couples find themselves stuck between one person feeling chronically criticized and the other feeling chronically unsupported. ADHD also affects emotional intensity, conflict cycles, intimacy, mental load distribution, and nervous system regulation. Therapy helps couples better understand these patterns without reducing either partner to a diagnosis or a blame role. The goal is creating a relationship dynamic that feels more collaborative, compassionate, and sustainable for both people.

Premarital counseling is an investment in each other and a chance to build the foundation for everything that comes next. It creates space for the conversations that matter most, ones that are easy to keep meaning to have but may not happen on their own. Wedding anxiety is common, especially for men who don't have a lot of room to name it. When everyone around you is celebrating, doubt or nerves can feel like something's wrong with you or the relationship. Usually it isn't. This is just a place to say it out loud and figure out what it actually is. We'll explore what actually shapes long-term relationships: Money, debt, and how you each approach finances Roles, division of labor, and the mental load no one talks about until it becomes resentment Family of origin, in-laws, blended families, and the loyalties and patterns each of you brings in Conflict styles and how you repair Whether you want children and how you'd raise them Religion, spirituality, and culture, especially where you differ Life vision, where you want to live, what your careers mean to you, and what a good life actually looks like Emotional intimacy and sexual needs Anxiety about taking the next big step in your relationship We'll also leave space for whatever's specific to you Couples who do this work tend to know each other more deeply, and that foundation pays off in ways that are hard to fully anticipate in advance. That's true whether it's a first marriage or a remarriage.

Yes. Infidelity can deeply fracture trust, emotional safety, and a shared sense of reality inside a relationship. The aftermath often includes grief, rage, hypervigilance, shame, confusion, obsessive thinking, and uncertainty about whether the relationship can or should continue. Therapy helps slow the crisis down enough to understand both the impact of the betrayal and the larger relational context surrounding it. Some couples decide to rebuild. Others decide to separate. Both outcomes deserve thoughtful and honest exploration rather than reacting purely from shock or fear. Repair is possible, but rebuilding trust usually requires more than reassurance. It requires understanding, accountability, emotional honesty, and meaningful change inside the relationship itself.

These are resources I find genuinely useful and often recommend to clients. Books on Relationships and Attachment Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love by Sue Johnson (2008) gets to the emotional underpinning of relationship dynamics in a way that's accessible and deeply recognizable. The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work by John Gottman and Nan Silver (2015) covers what predicts relationship success and failure and gives couples practical tools. Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find and Keep Love by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller (2012) is an introduction to adult attachment styles and how they play out in romantic relationships. Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Non-Monogamy by Jessica Fern (2020) extends attachment theory into non-monogamous relationships. Books on Intimacy and Sexuality Come Together: The Science and Art of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections by Emily Nagoski (2025) is about intimacy and sexuality in long-term relationships, including how to have difficult conversations about sex and desire. Come As You Are by Emily Nagoski (2021) takes a beginner's mindset approach to understanding your own body and desires, particularly useful when something in your sexual experience has shifted and you're trying to understand why. Books on Specific Situations Parenthood: The Baby Decision: How to Make the Most Important Choice of Your Life by Merle Bombardieri (2016) is a structured, unbiased guide through the parenthood decision, covering ambivalence, couple disagreement, the childfree choice, fertility, adoption, and LGBTQ+ paths to parenthood. Men and Intimacy: The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks (2004) examines how patriarchy limits men's capacity for love and connection. ADHD and Distraction: Married to Distraction by Edward Hallowell and Sue Hallowell (2011) is for couples struggling with the distraction, busyness, and disconnection of modern life making it hard to restore intimacy and communication. Articles Attachment Styles and Their Role in Relationships from The Attachment Project (2025) is an overview of the four attachment styles and how they show up in adult relationships. Ethical non-monogamy therapy: Emotional challenges in non-monogamous and polyamorous relationships by Megan Goldberg (2026) explores the emotional complexity of ENM and polyamorous relationships, including jealousy, shifting agreements, and the conversations that keep not quite happening. The Mutual Benefits of Accepting Influence in Relationships from the Gottman Institute (2024) explains the importance of being open to your partner's perspective without giving up your own. Why am I not attracted to my partner anymore? by Megan Goldberg (2026) explores why attraction fades in long-term relationships, what it usually signals underneath, and how to think about it before assuming the relationship is over. Interactive The Fair Play Deck by Eve Rodsky (2020) is a card deck for couples to use together to evaluate and rebalance how responsibilities are shared. Useful for couples where division of labor has become a source of friction.