UPDATE 8/8/07. One of the individuals named in the NYT story quoted below has contacted me and asked that I delete their names. This person says that the NYT reporter mischaracterized the situation terribly, so the person is trying to reduce the embarrassment and fallout from it and wants this post to stop coming up when people Google the names. That’s the reason for the bracketed substitutions.
This story from the NYT (reprinted in the Strib) about unmarried couples seeking "couples therapy" struck me as kind of creepy.
[WOMAN’S NAME] and [MAN’S NAME] met two years ago while teaching at a high school in Amherst, N.H. They planned to move in together at the start of the school year. But two weeks before the move [MAN’S NAME], 28, dropped a bomb. He didn’t want to go ahead with it. In fact he didn’t know if he wanted to be with [WOMAN’S NAME] at all….
Finally [MAN’S NAME] decided he wanted to stay together and to marry. [WOMAN’S NAME] put forth conditions: He had to write a letter of apology to her parents; he had to cut down on his "frat-boy activities," and he had to agree to go to couples therapy. He agreed.
The article never mentions what [he] did to [her] parents that required an apology.
At first I thought that it was [he] and [she] who were so creepy, rather than the idea of couples therapy itself.
But wait. It would be a mistake to equate this with what is known as "premarital counseling"—which is designed to guide a couple through the discussions that should take place during an engagement, in order to prepare them adequately for marriage.
For unwed couples encountering problems and who have decided, at least for the moment, not to break up, therapy serves as a sort of vetting system for the relationship, a role once taken by parents or religion. Today, couples seek a therapist not just to manage a crisis — for volatile arguments, when infidelity has occurred, when one person wants a commitment but the other is reluctant — but often, experts say, as validation: a second opinion on whether the relationship has legs.
I wonder if it really means "I have now realized that marrying you would be a mistake. I should find out if you are likely to change, before I have to admit that we need to sell our house and divide up our stuff."
I thought this statement was alarming, though:
Psychotherapy techniques for young, unmarried couples are no different from those for marital therapy.
In other words, marriage therapists approach married couples with the same ideas, techniques, suggestions, attitudes that they would approach young, unmarried couples?
There’s no difference in the eyes of therapists between "we’re married" and "we split the rent?" The level of commitment is assumed to be the same?
At least the therapists that the NYT writer, Zoe Wolff, bothered to interview and quote. If I were a dedicated pro-marriage therapist—and there are many out there—I’d be pretty annoyed that nobody bothered to get a quote from a therapist with the opinion that married couples are essentially different from couples who are not married.
From the practical point of view of the therapist, the answer to a very important question changes: In what circumstances is it ethical for a therapist to recommend that the couple separate?
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