Two people can enter couples therapy together without entering the same therapy.
One partner may arrive frightened by the possibility of separation and determined to save the relationship. They may be ready to listen differently, communicate more openly or acknowledge mistakes they previously struggled to recognise.
The other partner may agree to attend but remain uncertain whether they want the relationship to continue. They may not be asking, “How can we repair this?” Their quieter question may be, “Is there enough left for me to try?”
From the outside, both people have attended the same appointment. Psychologically, however, they may have come for different purposes.
This distinction matters. Couples therapy usually begins by asking what has gone wrong between two people. Sometimes an earlier question is necessary:
Are you both here for the same reason?
Couples Therapy Cannot Assume a Shared Agenda
A recent study by Tang and colleagues examined what researchers call mixed-agenda couples: couples whose partners differ significantly in their commitment to the relationship or in what they want therapy to accomplish.
The researchers analysed two large datasets. In a general population sample, approximately 10 per cent of couples were classified as mixed-agenda. In a clinical sample of couples attending therapy, the figure was just over 40 per cent.
That second figure is striking, but it must be interpreted carefully. The researchers did not ask every partner directly whether they wanted to remain or leave. The existing datasets did not contain a validated measure designed specifically to identify mixed-agenda couples.
Instead, the clinical study identified patterns of difference or ambivalence in four areas:
- commitment to the relationship;
- hope that the relationship could improve;
- a sense of “we-ness”, or experiencing themselves as a team; and
- pressure to attend therapy.
The finding does not mean that four in every ten couples consist neatly of one person determined to stay and another determined to leave. It suggests that many couples may begin therapy without equal levels of hope, commitment, shared identity or willingness to participate.
Mixed-agenda couples in the clinical sample also reported considerably lower relationship satisfaction than couples classified as aligned. The research therefore supports something couples therapists encounter regularly: attending together is not proof of wanting the same outcome.
The Same Relationship Can Have Two Psychological Realities
Each partner carries an internal experience of the couple: what it has meant, what it has become and whether it still feels alive.
For the partner trying to save the relationship, the couple may remain a living emotional reality. It may feel injured, endangered or neglected, but still capable of recovery. Their language often remains organised around “us”:
How can we get back to one another? What can we change? How can we protect what we have built?
For the uncertain partner, something may already have altered internally. They may have spent months or years feeling disappointed, lonely or emotionally absent. By the time uncertainty is spoken, a private process of separation may already have begun.
Their language may increasingly be organised around the individual self:
What do I need? Can I continue living this way? Who would I be if I left?
This does not mean that one partner cares and the other does not, or that the uncertain partner has already decided. The two people may now inhabit different psychological versions of the relationship.
The first exercise in our accompanying worksheet, What Do I Believe We Are Doing Here?, invites each partner to describe privately what they hope therapy will help them accomplish. Comparing those responses can reveal whether they are beginning from a shared intention or from two very different ones.
The Partner Who Wants to Save the Relationship
When a valued relationship appears to be disappearing, urgency is understandable. The partner who wants to preserve it may suddenly become ready to make changes they had resisted for years. They may listen with new attention, offer reassurance more freely or promise that everything will be different.
Some of this change may be genuine. A crisis can make previously denied realities visible. But urgency can also defend against helplessness and grief. The partner may monitor every gesture for hope: another session becomes a decision to stay; a moment of warmth becomes proof that reconciliation has begun.
The worksheet exercise What Answer Am I Trying to Obtain From My Partner? will help the more hopeful partner notice when an understandable search for reassurance becomes pressure. It asks them to consider what they fear might happen if their partner cannot yet provide an answer.
The aim is not to extinguish hope, but to separate hope from the demand for certainty.
The Partner Who Is No Longer Sure
Uncertainty can be difficult to express when the other person is visibly distressed. The uncertain partner may fear appearing cold or selfish, and that attending therapy will be treated as a promise they have not made.
Their hesitation may be dismissed as avoidance or resistance. Sometimes that may be part of the picture. At other times, hesitation represents an attempt to think honestly after a long period in which their feelings could not be spoken, understood or even fully known.
Ambivalence is not an absence of feeling. It is often the simultaneous presence of incompatible feelings. A person may still love their partner yet feel unable to continue as before. They may imagine leaving with relief one day and with grief the next.
The worksheet exercise What Do I Fear About Staying—and What Do I Fear About Leaving? gives both sides of this conflict room to emerge. Its purpose is not to produce a rapid decision. It is to help the person recognise the emotional forces acting upon that decision.
How Urgency and Withdrawal Reinforce Each Other
Mixed agendas can produce a painful circular movement.
The more one partner senses withdrawal, the more urgently they pursue reassurance and commitment. The more they pursue, the more the uncertain partner feels pressured and withdraws to preserve enough psychological space to think. That withdrawal intensifies the first partner’s fear, and the cycle continues.
Both may misunderstand the other. Pursuit is experienced as control rather than fear; withdrawal as indifference rather than an attempt to manage confusion or pressure.
The question is not simply, “Which of you is behaving badly?” A more useful enquiry is, “What does each person’s response evoke in the other, and how does the resulting cycle make honest thought increasingly difficult?”
When Relationship Repair Begins Too Soon
Many familiar couples-therapy interventions assume that both people have chosen to work towards preserving the relationship. Communication exercises, behavioural agreements and invitations to rebuild intimacy all imply a shared intention to repair.
When that intention has not been established, apparently helpful interventions can become counterproductive.
The uncertain partner may comply through guilt, while the hopeful partner interprets participation as renewed commitment. Therapy then risks producing false reassurance for one and concealed resentment in the other.
The therapist may also be drawn into the conflict. One partner may experience neutrality as insufficient support for the relationship; the other may fear that therapy is designed to persuade them to remain. If the therapist moves too quickly towards repair or separation, one person’s reality may disappear from the room.
What appears to be poor engagement with therapy may therefore be information about the treatment itself. The difficulty may not lie in the couple’s refusal to undertake the work. The therapist may have begun one kind of work before establishing whether that is the work both partners have chosen.
Making Uncertainty Thinkable
There is often intense pressure to produce an answer. The couple may want the therapist to determine whether the relationship can be saved or to confirm one partner’s understanding of what is happening.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, the therapist’s first task is not to remove uncertainty but to help contain it. This does not mean encouraging endless indecision. It means creating enough emotional space for thoughts and feelings to develop without immediately being converted into promises, threats or irreversible conclusions.
Bion described the importance of containing experiences that cannot yet be thought about clearly. Here, fear, guilt, hope and grief can become so intense that one partner demands an answer while the other distances themselves. Both seek relief before either can think.
Winnicott’s work helps us recognise the need for a psychological space in which a person can discover what feels true without answering through compliance. A decision made chiefly to prevent the other person’s distress may not remain sustainable.
The therapist therefore protects a reflective space—not to favour staying or leaving, but to make a more honest decision possible.
Discernment Is Different From Repair
Couples arriving at this crossroads may need to establish which therapeutic task they are undertaking.
Relationship repair
Both partners are willing to explore whether the relationship can be rebuilt. They do not need equal confidence, but each can make a meaningful commitment to trying.
Discernment
At least one partner does not yet know whether they are willing to attempt repair. The immediate work is to understand how the relationship reached this point, what each person has contributed and whether a genuine attempt at change is imaginable.
Thoughtful separation
The decision to end the relationship has been made, but therapy may help the partners process the ending, communicate more safely and protect children or continuing family relationships from unnecessary conflict.
These tasks are not interchangeable. A couple may move from discernment towards repair or separation, but they should not be treated as though they have already made that transition.
The final section of the worksheet, Our Provisional Therapeutic Task, helps partners name which of these forms of work most closely reflects where they are now. The word provisional matters: clarity can develop, and positions can change. What matters initially is that neither person participates under a false assumption about what therapy requires them to promise.
An Honest Beginning to Couples Therapy
Uncertainty does not necessarily mean that a relationship is ending. It means that uncertainty itself may need to become the first subject of therapy.
One partner needs a space in which hope and fear of loss can be understood without urgency becoming coercion. The other needs room to explore ambivalence without being cast as uncaring or required to offer reassurance they cannot sustain.
Before asking a couple to communicate better, become more intimate or repair longstanding injuries, it may be necessary to ask:
What does each of you believe you have come here to do?
The answer may reveal that the couple are ready to rebuild. It may show that they first need help deciding whether to try. It may also make an ending more thinkable and less destructive.
Couples therapy begins responsibly when the therapist does not assume that two people sitting together are moving in the same direction. Sometimes the first therapeutic achievement is not agreement about the future. It is an honest, shared recognition of where each person actually stands.
Request the Interactive Worksheet
The accompanying interactive worksheet, Are We Here for the Same Reason?, offers a structured way for each partner to reflect on commitment, hope, uncertainty, pressure and the purpose they believe therapy should serve.
The worksheet is designed to support thoughtful reflection and can complement work undertaken in couples therapy. To request it, please complete the form with your name and email address. You may also leave an optional comment about what drew you to this subject or what you are finding difficult. After your request is received, a link to the worksheet will be sent to you by email.
Important information for BetterHelp clients
If you are currently working with Ari through BetterHelp, please do not complete this form or enter your name, email address or any other identifying information on the Online Therapy Clinic website. Please ask Ari for the worksheet link through your BetterHelp therapy chat. If you wish to share any of your reflections, use the worksheet’s copy function and paste the text directly into your BetterHelp chat. Your therapeutic communication should remain within BetterHelp.
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Reference
Tang, Y., Anderson, S. R., Johnson, L. N., Harris, S. M., & Kateregga, A. (2026). Portraying mixed-agenda couples: Insights from large-scale data sets. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 52(4), e70165. https://doi.org/10.1111/jmft.70165
Photo credit: cottonbro studio / Pexels
Audio narration produced using ElevenLabs voice technology.