Oh, I hear this one a lot. And I want to start by saying something that might surprise you: it’s completely normal that one person is more reluctant than the other. This is not a sign that your relationship is doomed. It’s actually one of the most common things I see.
Here’s what I know from sitting in this office for 16 years. If I only worked with couples where both people were excited and enthusiastic about showing up, I’d have to be out on a street corner with a sandwich board looking for clients. That’s how rare it is for both people to arrive equally ready.
So your partner not wanting to come? That makes sense. Because here’s what your partner hears when you say “I think we should go to couples therapy.” They hear, on some level, “I’m about to be told I’m the problem.” Their nervous system, millions of years old, registers that as a threat. They’re your primary attachment figure and you’re theirs, and the prospect of sitting in a room where their not-enoughness might be officially confirmed? That’s terrifying. Of course they don’t want to go.
Now, the way you invite them matters enormously. There’s a real difference between inviting your partner to therapy from the position of “you need to fix your behavior” versus “I think it’s our system that’s the problem, not you, not me, us.” If you can genuinely come from that second place—and I mean genuinely, not as a strategy—your partner has a much better chance of actually hearing the invitation.
And here’s the hard question I always ask when someone comes to me with this: have you actually approached it that way? Because everybody who sits across from me arrives with, I’d say, a PhD level understanding of everything their partner does wrong, and about a kindergartener’s understanding of their own contribution to the disconnection. So I’m not pointing a finger at you. I’m just asking you to get curious.
Think of it like this: if someone invited you to a meeting where you suspected you’d be the main topic of criticism, would you be eager to show up? Probably not.
Now, if you’ve genuinely invited your partner, repeatedly, from a place of real openness to looking at yourself too, and they still won’t come, then you have some decisions to make. That’s a real conversation we’d need to have together.
But start there. Start with how you’re asking. And in the meantime, come on your own. Individual work isn’t a consolation prize. It’s real work, and it changes the system whether your partner is in the room or not. When you change, the dance changes. Sometimes that’s enough to get your partner curious about what’s shifting.
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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.
