Why Couples Therapy Fails When One Partner Wants Out

If you’ve been through couples therapy that went nowhere — or if you’re a therapist who has watched it happen from the other side of the room — what I’m about to describe will probably sound familiar.

A couple arrives for their first session. One partner is visibly invested — they researched therapists, made the appointment, filled out the intake forms. They want to work on the marriage. They’re ready.

The other partner is there, but not really there. They agreed to come, maybe after weeks of pressure, maybe to prove they “tried.” They sit slightly farther back in the chair. They give shorter answers. When the therapist asks what they hope to get from therapy, there’s a pause that lasts a beat too long.

By session three or four, the motivated partner is frustrated that things aren’t moving fast enough. The reluctant partner is finding reasons to cancel. By session five or six — if they make it that far — therapy quietly dies. Someone gets busy. Someone gets sick. Someone says it isn’t working.

Research tells us that divorced people report attending an average of just four couples therapy sessions. Four. That is not nearly enough time to address the problems in a long-term marriage. But the number makes perfect sense once you understand what’s actually happening — and what went wrong before the first session even started.

The hidden mismatch

The fundamental problem is not that couples therapy doesn’t work. It does. There is strong evidence for several models of couples therapy — Emotionally Focused Therapy, the Gottman Method, the Developmental Model I use in my own practice — and when both partners are genuinely engaged, these approaches produce meaningful, lasting change.

The problem is the assumption that both partners are genuinely engaged. Every major model of couples therapy is built on a shared premise: both people have agreed, at some basic level, that they want the relationship to improve and are willing to do their part. The therapist’s job is to help them do that work more effectively.

But what happens when one partner hasn’t actually made that agreement? When they’re sitting in the room but internally asking a different question entirely — not “how do we fix this?” but “do I even want to be here?”

What happens is that the therapy was set up to fail before it began.

What the reluctant partner is actually experiencing

The partner who is uncertain about the marriage — the one I call the “leaning-out” partner — is trapped in an impossible bind. They’ve agreed to come to therapy, but they haven’t agreed to commit to the relationship. They may not even have admitted to themselves, let alone to their spouse, that they’re thinking about leaving.

So they sit through sessions that are organized around a goal they haven’t endorsed. The therapist asks them to practice better communication. To express their needs more clearly. To schedule quality time together. And every exercise feels like it’s pulling them deeper into something they’re not sure they want.

Meanwhile, they can’t say the thing that is actually true — I’m not sure I want to save this marriage — because saying it would trigger exactly the crisis they’ve been trying to avoid. So they participate at a surface level, withhold their deepest concerns, and quietly disengage.

The therapist often senses that something is off but may not be able to name it. The sessions feel flat. The homework doesn’t get done. Progress is slow or nonexistent. And eventually, the leaning-out partner has the evidence they were unconsciously looking for: “See? We tried therapy, and it didn’t work.”

But they didn’t try therapy. They went through the motions of therapy while keeping the real question locked away.

What the motivated partner is actually experiencing

The partner who wants to save the marriage — the “leaning-in” partner — is experiencing something entirely different, and it is often devastating.

They pushed for therapy. They believed that if they could just get into the room with a professional, things would start to improve. They arrived with hope, with willingness, with a readiness to look at their own shortcomings.

And then they watched it go nowhere.

The leaning-in partner often interprets the failure of therapy as proof that the marriage really is beyond repair — that they’ve now exhausted every option. What they may not realize is that therapy never had a fair chance, because the person sitting next to them was never fully in it. The deck was stacked from the beginning, but no one named it.

This is one of the cruelest aspects of the pattern: the person who most wanted help ends up concluding that help doesn’t work. And the person who was never fully committed ends up concluding that they gave it a shot.

What the therapist is actually experiencing

Therapists don’t talk about this enough, but working with mixed-agenda couples is one of the most frustrating experiences in clinical practice.

You can feel the imbalance in the room. One person is leaning forward and the other is pulling away. You try to engage the reluctant partner, and they give you just enough to keep the session going but never enough to create real momentum. You try to slow down the eager partner, whose intensity is inadvertently pushing their spouse further toward the door. You feel like you’re working harder than both of them combined, and the progress you’re making is evaporating between sessions.

Many therapists in this situation do what they were trained to do: push forward with the treatment plan, hoping that engagement will build over time. Some try to address the ambivalence directly, but without a framework for doing so, the conversation can easily become an ultimatum — “are you in or out?” — that the leaning-out partner isn’t ready to answer.

And so the therapist, too, ends up feeling like the therapy failed. But it didn’t fail because the approach was wrong or because they lacked skill. It failed because the couple was being treated for a problem they didn’t actually have. Their problem wasn’t poor communication or emotional distance. Their problem was that they were divided on whether to try at all.

The structural issue no one names

Here is the thing I wish more people understood, including more therapists: traditional couples therapy is not the right intervention for a couple where one partner is questioning whether to stay.

This is not a criticism of couples therapy. It’s a recognition that different clinical situations require different approaches. You wouldn’t prescribe physical therapy for someone who hasn’t yet decided whether to have the surgery. You’d address the decision first, and then, if they choose surgery, begin the rehabilitation.

Discernment Counseling exists to address the decision. It was designed specifically for couples where the leaning-out partner has not yet committed to the relationship or to therapy, and where the leaning-in partner is desperate for a chance to work on things. Instead of pretending both people are motivated and hoping for the best, it meets each person exactly where they are.

The leaning-out partner gets something they haven’t had in couples therapy: space to be honest about their ambivalence without being pressured to commit. The leaning-in partner gets something they haven’t had either: a genuine understanding of what their partner has been experiencing, and a chance to examine their own contributions to the problems without the defensive posture that couple sessions tend to produce.

And the process itself — brief, structured, one to five sessions — matches the reality of where the couple is. When someone is unsure whether they want to be in a marriage, asking them to commit to months of weekly therapy is asking for exactly the kind of half-hearted effort that leads to failure. Asking them to commit to one session at a time, with a clear and honest agenda, is asking for something they can actually give.

What happens after clarity

When couples complete Discernment Counseling, roughly half choose to enter couples therapy with a genuine commitment — both partners, fully in, with divorce off the table for six months and a clear understanding of what each person needs to work on. This is a fundamentally different starting point than what most couples therapists encounter. These couples have done the hard work of deciding, together, that the marriage is worth fighting for. The therapy that follows is almost unrecognizably different from the stalled, reluctant version that came before.

The other half choose to move toward divorce — but they do so with understanding rather than confusion, and often with far less bitterness. They know what happened. They know their own role in it. They can look their children in the eye and say they took the decision seriously.

Either of these outcomes is vastly better than the alternative: four sessions of directionless therapy followed by a quiet, unresolved drift toward an ending that neither person fully chose.

If this sounds like your situation

If you’ve been through couples therapy that stalled, or if you’re avoiding therapy because you suspect your partner isn’t really willing, or if you’re the partner who agreed to go but knows in your heart that you’re not fully committed — what you’re experiencing has a name, and there is a process designed specifically for it.

Discernment Counseling doesn’t ask you to commit to the marriage before you’re ready. It asks you to commit to honesty — with yourself, with your partner, and with someone who can help you see the situation clearly. That is a much smaller ask, and it is often the beginning of everything that follows.

I welcome a confidential conversation about whether this might be the right next step. You can reach me at (212) 327-3624 or contact@drherwitz.com.

Dr. Johanna Herwitz is a clinical psychologist on the Upper East Side of Manhattan specializing in Discernment Counseling for mixed-agenda couples, couples therapy using the Developmental Model, and individual therapy. She works with therapists and attorneys throughout New York City as a referral resource for couples in crisis where traditional therapy has stalled or is unlikely to succeed.