In systemic work I treat the relationship itself as the client, not one of you as the problem and the other as the reasonable one, and a surprising amount of the work is just getting to the real question underneath the one you brought. Big decisions tend to sit on top of older, quieter fears that are easier to argue about than to say out loud.
The forks that bring couples in are usually some version of these:
- whether to have children, and when, and how much that has changed since you first talked about it
- adoption, surrogacy, or co-parenting, and what each of you pictures when you imagine becoming a family
- moving cities or countries, or building a life together somewhere neither of you is from
- a career change that looks like one person's decision but lands on both of you
- opening the relationship up, closing it back down, or rewriting the terms you started with
- and sometimes, honestly, whether to stay together at all
Two people who love each other can want genuinely different things, and neither one is wrong for it. That's most of what I see in this room, and it's far more workable than people fear when they first sit down.
Whether and when to have children
There was a time people simply assumed this would happen to them. Now it gets planned, negotiated, and for a lot of couples under real financial pressure, reconsidered more than once. You might have agreed about kids the year you met and find yourselves standing somewhere completely different by your mid-thirties. I don't read that as a crack in the relationship. It usually means the agreement you made years ago needs to be said again, out loud, with both of you honest about where you actually stand now instead of where you once promised you would.
Adoption, surrogacy, and co-parenting
For many gay couples this is simply how a family gets built, and the conversation is less about whether than about which path and what it asks of each of you. It is every bit as alive for straight couples facing infertility, where it can carry a grief that doesn't always have language: one partner ready to adopt, the other still aching for a biological child, a whole sense of self bound up in being able to conceive. Co-parenting arrangements add their own questions about who is family and how you define it. None of this fits into a tidy yes or no, and none of it should end with one person quietly going along to keep the peace.
Moving cities or countries
Here is the pattern I see most often. Two people agree to move, full of plans, and then the move lands beautifully for one of them and the other slowly comes apart. One partner is thriving in the new city while the other is homesick, underemployed, and starting to resent that they're the one who's struggling. The work isn't to decide who was right about moving. It's to figure out how you hold each other through that gap without one person's needs simply steamrolling the other's. For expat couples there's often more piled on top of that: distance from aging parents, a first time living together, two people learning the same unfamiliar place at once.
Career changes that land on both of you
A job is rarely just one person's job once you're a couple. Sometimes a move works out well for both of you and there's nothing much to untangle. More often one partner gives something up so the other can chase something, and from the inside that sacrifice can feel a lot less noble than it looked when you agreed to it over dinner. We get specific about the give and take, who carried what and when, and we build a way of talking about it that doesn't leave the partner shouldering the heavier load doing it silently and alone.
Monogamy, opening up, and changing the terms
Few relationships run their whole length on the exact terms they started with. Feelings move. One of you starts wanting something different in a particular corner of the relationship while everything else holds perfectly steady. One unhappy area out of ten does not mean the whole thing is broken, though it does ask for a real conversation rather than a long silence: what the new agreement actually is, whether both of you can live with it and not just say you can, and what each of you is being asked to give up to get there. Whether you're talking about opening things up, finding your way back to monogamy, or just renegotiating the fine print you never really discussed, this is the kind of decision therapy holds well.
Deciding whether to stay together
Sometimes the truest question on the table is whether to keep going at all. That's its own kind of work, and choosing to look at it clearly is a healthy thing to do, especially when there are children involved, a long marriage behind you, or two people who would genuinely like to part on decent terms if it comes to that. We look hard and without flinching at whether the relationship can be repaired as a couple. If it can, that's what we work on. If it can't, we work out how to end it as cleanly and kindly as two people can manage, which now and then turns out to be the most loving thing a couple ever decides together.
My usual shape for this is around ten sessions and then an honest reassessment, where we look at what's actually shifted and decide together whether to keep going. I won't steer you toward staying, leaving, having kids, or moving. The decision is yours. My job is to make sure you reach it with everything on the table and both of you actually in the conversation. Book a free 20-minute call.