Couples therapy when only one of you wants it
I was sitting in the car outside a small terrace in Carlton at 6:42pm on a Thursday, eight minutes early for the first couples therapy session of my marriage. My wife was inside the house already. She'd driven separately because the kids were at her sister's and she'd come from there. I had three minutes to sit in the car park and decide whether I actually believed in this, and the honest answer was no. I was here because she had asked me to come, more than once, over a period of about six months, and I had finally said yes the way you say yes to root canal surgery, on the grounds that not saying yes was probably worse. I did not think the woman inside that terrace was going to fix anything. I thought my wife was wrong about most of the things she thought were wrong with us. I thought I was here to be performatively patient for ninety minutes, then drive home, then have done my duty. I sat in the car. I got out of the car. I went inside.
That was 2022. I tell you this because the experience that followed, of going to therapy when you don't believe in it because the other person believes enough for both of you, is a category of experience men in particular don't talk about, and the unspoken assumptions inside it are mostly wrong. I want to name the assumptions and walk through them.
The honest test
Here is the test I'd put to any man in the position I was in, where she wants therapy and you don't (or, less commonly but real, the reverse). Go for eight sessions. Eight, not three, not unlimited. Eight is roughly two months at fortnightly cadence. Eight is enough to get past the introductory phase and into the actual work. Eight is short enough that you can endure it without feeling trapped.
If, at the end of eight sessions, you still don't believe the work is doing anything, you have the right to stop. You also have the obligation, having stopped, to face squarely what the stopping means. If she wanted therapy, and you went for eight sessions with reasonable goodwill, and it didn't help, the marriage is in serious trouble. Not because therapy is the only path. Because therapy is the path that takes the least pride to walk down, and if the least pride didn't work, the more demanding paths probably won't either. The eight-session test isn't really a test of therapy. It's a test of whether the marriage can absorb a serious, externally facilitated, attempt at repair. If it can't, that's data. The data points one way.
The mistake men in particular make at this point is to refuse the eight sessions and then claim, when the marriage ends, that they were never given a chance. The eight sessions were the chance. Refusing them, then mourning the marriage afterwards, is a posture that won't survive your own honest review at three in the morning two years later. Take the test or concede the marriage is in trouble. Don't pretend there's a third option.
What couples therapy actually is
Couples therapy is not, despite the marketing, a place where the therapist sits in judgment of who is right. The therapist will rarely tell either of you that you are right, even when you obviously are, because being told you are right is not the thing that helps. The thing that helps is being made to listen, properly, to the other person's experience, in a room where the usual exits (changing the subject, walking away, making a joke) have been quietly closed off by a third adult who is paid to keep them closed.
The two main modalities you'll encounter in Australia are Gottman Method and EFT (Emotionally Focused Therapy). Gottman is more behavioural, focused on the small repair attempts in everyday interaction, the ratio of positive to negative, the four horsemen (criticism, contempt, defensiveness, stonewalling) and how to spot them in yourselves. EFT is more emotional, focused on the underlying attachment wounds and the patterns of pursuit and withdrawal that long couples fall into. Most therapists in practice blend the two, even if they nominally trained in one. Don't worry too much about the label. Worry about whether the therapist is good, which you'll know within two sessions.
The format is usually an intake (sometimes individual, sometimes joint), then a series of joint sessions, and occasionally an individual session each. The therapist will, in good practice, set "homework" between sessions, which is usually a small structured exercise (write down three things you appreciated about each other this week; have a twenty-minute conversation about a specific topic with no phones in the room; etc). Doing the homework matters. Skipping the homework and showing up to the session is paying for therapy and not doing therapy.
What couples therapy is not
It is not the therapist taking your side. It is not, more importantly, the therapist taking her side. It is not "fix her". It is NOT "fix him". It is not "tell me which of us is right". It is not, in most cases, the therapist saying anything that you couldn't have said to yourselves, if you'd been able to hear yourselves clearly, which you cannot, which is why you are paying someone to be the third pair of ears.
The biggest misconception, the one that derails the most men in the first three sessions, is the expectation that therapy will be a forum where you finally get to lay out your case. It will not be. The therapist will, gently but firmly, refuse to let either of you build a case. They will keep redirecting from "she did X" to "what was happening in you when she did X". This is intolerable, in the early sessions, if you arrived expecting prosecution. Sit with the intolerable. The tolerance grows. Around session four or five, you will catch yourself answering "what was happening in me when she did X" without being prompted. That moment is the hinge of the work. Before the hinge, therapy is endurance. After the hinge, therapy is useful.
It is also not, despite a common fear, a place where you will be ambushed with revelations she's been saving up. A good therapist won't allow either of you to dump a list of grievances on the other in a session. The therapist will throttle the pace. The throttling is the value. You can handle one hard truth per session if it's framed properly. You cannot handle eleven, and the therapist's job is to make sure no one tries.
The cost in Australia, named honestly
I'll give you the actual numbers because nobody else will. As of 2025, in Australian metro areas, couples therapy with a competent practitioner runs between $200 and $300 per session. Some practitioners go higher. Sessions are typically sixty to ninety minutes, fortnightly, sometimes weekly in the early phase. A reasonable course of treatment is eight to twenty sessions over six to twelve months. Total cost: $2,000 to $6,000.
Medicare rebates, in most cases, do not cover couples therapy. The Mental Health Care Plan rebates apply to individual therapy with a registered psychologist, not to couples work, even when the couples therapist is a registered psychologist. There are small numbers of practitioners who can structure things so that one or both of you get partial individual rebates within a couples-work frame, but these are rare, and the rebate doesn't change the fundamental shape of the cost. Some private health funds offer small rebates on couples counselling under their extras cover. The rebate is usually a few hundred dollars per year, capped, which barely dents the total.
Compare this to the cost of divorce. A contested divorce with a moderately complex property settlement, in Australia, will cost somewhere in the range of $30,000 to $80,000 in legal fees alone, before counting the financial loss of dividing the home. Couples therapy at $4,000 over a year is, in pure numbers, the cheapest possible attempt at saving the relationship. This isn't an argument that the cost should make you go. It's an argument that the cost shouldn't be what stops you, because the comparison case is an order of magnitude worse.
The early-warning win
There is a version of couples therapy that nobody talks about, which is the version where you go before there's a crisis. Once a year, six sessions, as a tune-up, the way you'd see a physiotherapist. You bring the small drifts you've noticed. You leave with three small adjustments. The marriage, six months later, is two notches better than it was.
Almost nobody does this. Therapy carries a stigma, even now, of being the last resort, the thing you do when the marriage is dying. The result is that almost everyone who walks into couples therapy is doing so when the marriage is in critical condition, which is the worst time to start a process that takes months to work. The people who go early, in good seasons, get the most out of the process. The people who wait until they're at the door of separation are, in many cases, beyond what the process can do in time.
If you are reading this and your marriage is fine, consider the tune-up version. If you are reading this and your marriage is in trouble, the question is no longer "should we do this", it's "are we doing this in time". The eight-session test is the floor.
The body metaphor
Couples therapy is the physiotherapist coming to a body that's been compensating around an injury for a decade. The injury was small once. The compensation became the bigger problem. The hip went because the knee was guarded. The shoulder went because the hip was tilted. By the time you arrive in the clinic, the original injury is barely the issue. The issue is the entire postural pattern that the body built around the original injury.
The therapist's job is not to attack the original injury directly. The job is to gently load the surrounding tissue so that the compensation stops being required. This is slow. This is uncomfortable. You will feel, in some sessions, worse than you did before, because muscles that have been quietly atrophying are being asked to fire again, and they don't like it. By session six, if the work is going to work, you'll catch yourself standing slightly differently. By session twelve, the new posture will start to feel like the default. The injury is still there. The marriage is still scarred. But the scaffolding around the injury has changed, and that is what makes daily life possible again.
Going alone, briefly
A note for the case where she absolutely won't come, or where you absolutely won't, and the whole frame collapses. Go alone. Find an individual therapist (Mental Health Care Plan rebate applies, capped at ten sessions per calendar year) and use the sessions to work on your half of the dynamic. This is not couples therapy in disguise. It's a different exercise. You won't fix the marriage from the individual chair. You will, however, get clearer on what's yours, what's hers, and what the marriage is. Many men come out of six months of individual work with enough clarity that the next conversation with their wife is dramatically different, and the marriage either repairs or ends with much less collateral damage. Either outcome is better than the slow drift.
If you do nothing, the marriage will continue to do what marriages in trouble do, which is degrade slowly, quietly, in the kitchen at 10pm on a Tuesday. The therapy room is uncomfortable. The kitchen at 10pm on a Tuesday for the rest of your life is worse.
Try the eight. Then decide.