Sex vs. Communication: What If You Have Different Goals for Couples Therapy?

You're struggling with your sex life, you're desperately missing your partner, and every time you try to talk about it, they change the subject, get irritated, or simply stay silent. Eventually, you stop bringing it up, even though the wanting hasn't gone away. In that silence, your mind starts filling in the gaps with assumptions you haven't checked for accuracy, leaving you wondering whether you're incompatible, whether your partner still loves you, or whether this is the beginning of the e...

You bring up something small with your partner. Maybe it’s the trash that still hasn’t gone out, something they shared in front of friends, or a moment where you felt dismissed. You’re trying to talk about one specific thing, and suddenly you’re hearing, “I can’t do anything right.” When your partner gets defensive like this, the conversation can quickly shift away from what you were actually trying to address. Sometimes the way something is brought up does matter. Leading with “you always” o...

You can be talking to your partner about the same relationship and interpret the conversation completely differently. I learned that recently when I told my partner, Dallas, I was feeling disconnected and found out he heard that very differently than I intended it. Neither of us knew there was a misunderstanding until we actually talked about what that word meant to each of us. While I spend my days talking about sex and relationships as a couples therapist, Dallas didn’t grow up talking abou...

You found porn on your partner’s phone, and now you’re wondering if watching porn is cheating or if you’re overreacting. Or maybe you’re the one whose partner found it, and you genuinely don’t understand why something you never considered cheating suddenly feels like betrayal to them. Either way, you can end up arguing about a question neither of you ever actually said out loud. That’s why couples can so easily talk past each other when it comes to porn. One person is focused on the fact that...

You can still love your partner, function well together, and somehow end up feeling more like roommates than romantic partners. Maybe you do everything together and have trouble functioning as two separate people. Or maybe you’ve become so independent that you divide the responsibilities, stay out of each other’s way, and rarely talk about what’s actually happening beneath the surface. These relationships can look completely different from the outside, but both can lose the balance between cl...