Having seen countless divorces through family, friends, acquaintances, and coworkers, just about every single one had an iteration involving marriage counseling. My question is… why? How can a business with such an awful success rate still have so many people willing to waste away their money for something that clearly doesn’t work? With as long as it has been around, you would think there would be something such as a verified playbook of conflicts within relationships and what actually would work. Not a single person of the many that I know who went through the endeavor stated it made things any better. As a matter of fact, often times it made things worse. Either it was a new third party authority over the relationship casting judgment over one of the parties as “at fault” or the spouse who was not being painted in the best light wanted a new counselor until one agreed with them (from stories I’ve heard, this often was women doing this). My view is that the party wanting out wants it to look as though they are attempting to save the marriage and this gives them a platform to curate such an image. Otherwise, we’d see countless couples who went into counseling hating each other, ready to divorce come out the other side blissful and a renewed sex life.

This brings me to choreplay. One of the main grievances leveled by women ready for divorce is that they feel as though they are doing everything in the house. Or, more commonly, if the man helped out more it might resolve a dead bedroom situation. How this advice still is given is beyond me, but if it worked then (again) there would be clear cut examples of men speaking out saying how it fixed such problems in their marriage. In just about every experience I’ve heard from, and even reading on here, this actually does the exact opposite. I’ll cover why.

Warren Farrell’s book Women Can’t Hear What Men Don’t Say talks about the misperception many women have about the household duties they are responsible for. They overstate the quantity and time spent on duties in the home, whereas men tend to understate theirs. Many men in the position of doing more around the house actually tends to make their wives MORE distraught. Here is a story to go with it. A friend of mine was divorced a few years ago and one major item brought up during counseling was household duties. She stated it was like he was “another child” and that it made her resent him. My friend, who was confused about this, actually listed out the duties they did at home, number of times, etc. It showed a 70-30 split in HIS favor even despite him working more hours. His wife became incredibly pissed off stating he was “weaponizing the work she does at home against her.” Funny right? His plan was to bring it to the counselor, but she stated if he did she would file immediately afterward. Safe to say, they didn’t make it.

This brings me to the “equal partnership” talk. I think this dooms marriages and relationships. No one is equal. We all have things we excel at and things we lack. It’s better to have a complementary plan ahead of time as to what you both should be responsible for prior to getting married (who’d have thought?) and stick to it. This should also account for income being brought in by each person as well as if one person works from home, for example. Most people inherently know this, but either by intentional obfuscation or ignorance, don’t put it into practice?

Thoughts? Anyone have marriage counseling turn their marriage into bliss after being on the verge of divorce? I’d love to hear stories.