I love this question because couples deserve an honest answer, not the usual therapist dodge of “it depends” that leaves you nowhere.
When couples sit across from me for the first time, I tell them this: my job is to get you to a place where you don’t need me anymore. In an ideal world, that’s somewhere around 10 to 12 sessions, maybe even fewer if you’re both really showing up to do the work.
You keep wondering how much time your marriage has left.
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But here’s what stretches it out. The more trauma living between you two, the slower we have to go. And I’m using trauma pretty specifically here. It’s when something painful from your past crashes into your present and knocks you sideways. The more of that happening in your relationship, the more carefully we need to move through it.
It’s honestly a cruel irony. The couples who need help most urgently are often the ones who need the most time to do it safely. You can’t rush someone through their deepest wounds just because their marriage is falling apart.
Think of it like physical therapy after a serious injury. Sure, everyone wants to run again, but if you push too hard too fast, you’ll just re-injure yourself and end up worse than when you started.
The goal I’m always moving toward is co-regulation. That means your connection becomes the thing that actually feeds and nourishes you when life gets brutal. And life will get brutal, that’s guaranteed. When you can turn toward each other instead of away during those moments, you genuinely don’t need me anymore.
You keep wondering how much time your marriage has left.
Do you know you can get personalized answers to all your questions from the same wisdom that wrote this article, right now?
Ask anything about your own situation and get an answer immediately. Keep asking, think it through, work out what to do next.
No credit card required. Your first 10 messages are free.
Ask Figlet about how long therapy takes.
Some couples get there fast because they’ve just lost their way and need help finding the path back to each other. Others are dealing with years of accumulated hurt, betrayal, or individual trauma that’s bleeding into the relationship. Those couples aren’t broken, they just need more time to heal.
Here’s something I’ll say clearly though: no couples therapy is better than bad couples therapy. I’ve seen too many relationships damaged by therapists who take sides, rush toward forgiveness, or try to fix things with techniques instead of actually understanding what’s happening between two people.
So the length matters less than finding someone who knows what they’re doing and can hold both of you through the mess without making it worse.
The real question isn’t how long it takes. It’s whether you’re both willing to show up authentically to the hardest conversations you’ll probably ever have. Because that’s where the real work happens, and that’s what determines whether we’re talking weeks or months.
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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.
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