You know, this is something I think about a lot, because progress in couples work is genuinely hard to measure, and a lot of couples get discouraged because they’re looking for the wrong signs.
Here’s what I’d say to you, sitting here across from me.
Progress in couples therapy is not about fighting less. I know that sounds counterintuitive. But fighting less can just mean you’ve both gone quiet. You’ve both retreated to your corners. That’s not progress. That’s a ceasefire, and a ceasefire is not peace.
What I actually track is something more like this: Can you both start to see each other’s hurt underneath the behavior? That’s the real indicator. Because what I know, from watching couples again and again, is that every bit of anger, every “stop interrupting me,” every collapse into tears and walking away, it all makes sense when you understand the wound underneath it. The person who looks like an asshole is not an asshole. The person who looks annoying is not annoying. They are both hurting, and they are both doing the only thing they know how to do with that hurt.
So I’m watching for the moment when both people can hold that at the same time. Not just “I understand my partner is hurting.” But genuinely, truly, “We are both hurting, and we are both doing things that guarantee the other person stays hurt.” That is a huge moment. I call it the threshold of revelation. When a couple hits that, something shifts.
The first marker is whether you’ve moved from blaming the other person to being curious about the system you’re both creating together. There are three places you can focus in a relationship. What is happening inside me, what am I doing that keeps this cycle going, and what are we co-creating together. The trap is the fourth thing, the easy one, which is obsessing over what the other person is doing wrong. Progress is when you stop gorging yourself on that fourth thing.
The second marker is whether there are moments, even small ones, where you choose connection over being right. That is what I’d call Proof of Work of Love. It’s the visible, felt evidence that you did the hard thing. You showed up through the pain instead of retreating from it.
And the third marker, honestly the biggest one, is whether you can start to feel like you’re on the same team against the cycle, rather than opponents protecting yourselves from each other. That’s what I’m always working toward. I call it Sovereign Us. It’s when the relationship itself becomes the thing you’re both protecting, rather than each of you just protecting your own wound.
Progress is not linear. It can look like a really hard session that cracked something open. It can look like a fight that ended differently than all the fights before it. Those moments matter enormously. They are the data points I care about.
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Figs is a licensed marriage and family therapist with 16+ years of experience working with couples. He’s the co-founder of Empathi, host of the “Come Here to Me” podcast, and author of an upcoming book on relationships and the systems that shape how we love.
Read more: What to Expect in Your First Couples Therapy Session
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