It would seem that couples therapy is having a bit of a moment in pop culture. Every dating show, from MAFS and Love is Blind to delicious disasters like The Ultimatum and Open House, comes with a built-in psychotherapist, whose role it is to steer lovebirds through their various difficulties and hopefully to a resolution.
Some psychologists have even become cultural mainstays, such as Dr Orna Guralnik, of BBC’s Couples Therapy, which ran for four years; or Esther Perel, whose podcast Where Should We Begin? has franchised into relationship card games, a chart-topping Substack (Entre Nous), and turned her into a household name.
Once the reserve of relationship Hail Marys for decades-long spouses, in 2026 couples therapy has become practically par for the course among couples of all ages and relationships of all durations. And data proves it works, with the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy reporting that 70% of couples seeing a therapist felt it had positively impacted the relationship.
Of course, sometimes breaking up is the best thing for both people involved, and that doesn’t mean the relationship or the attempts to repair it were a failure — but when it does work, there are usually specific reasons why. “Couples therapy works best when people come with some sense of partnership and shared motivation to understand each other,” says Dr Aoife Drury, a COSRT-accredited psychosexual and relationship therapist. “Even when things feel very difficult, therapy can create a structured space to slow those patterns down and help each partner feel heard. Sometimes that leads to repair and reconnection; other times it helps couples make thoughtful decisions about their future.”
Leanne Yau, an award-winning sex and relationships educator, agrees. “Loving someone is not staying with them no matter the cost. Loving someone is wanting the best for them,” she says. “And sometimes that is recognising that you are not able to provide the happiness they deserve. And so, letting them go is a gesture of love.”
Meanwhile, Drury has noticed over her 20 years of experience that couples don’t always come to therapy to try to save their relationship; sometimes people want guidance to separate more healthily. “One of the things that stays with me from working in this field is how often couples come to therapy already carrying years of unspoken resentment or hurt,” she says. For those couples, the skills they learn in therapy might be in preparation for their next relationship, or to help them reflect on this one.
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While there’s no guaranteed way to tell if a couple will work it out or break up, there are a few signs that couples therapists might notice. And so, naturally, we asked them what these are.
8 couples therapists on the signs a relationship is doomed
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Several counsellors mentioned The Gottman Institute’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The Gottman Institute is a research body that focuses on strategies for building strong relationships. They identified four behaviours, which, when seen together, they say are likely to ‘predict the end of the relationship’.
These are:
- Criticism: criticising your partner’s character rather than telling them how their behaviour affected you
- Contempt: mocking, belittling, ridiculing, or dismissing your partner
- Defensiveness: refusing to hear feedback from your partner
- Stonewalling: refusing to engage in difficult conversations by ignoring them, walking away, acting too busy to talk etc.
“These are all usually visible from the early stages of attending couples therapy, and once a couple is exhibiting these signs, it is very hard to come back from it,” explains Rachel Seymour, a registered sex and relationship therapist. “Although it’s not impossible if both parties are willing to put in the work.”
You’re being unkind to each other
While this features in Gottman’s Four Horsemen, callousness or resentment building up in a relationship, even by itself, can spell trouble, says Helen Mayor, an integrative psychosexual and relationship psychotherapist.
Mayor tells Cosmopolitan UK: “I worked early in my career with a couple where the male partner had an affair at a particularly vulnerable point in the relationship, and yet the wife was clear she wanted to rebuild. It was in the retelling of the story of how they met that I felt their relationship might not survive. Her story was imbued with sentiment; she was reliving the love, the moments, the intimacy, and he reduced it to fact. In individual sessions, he would say he was very ‘self-aware’, in couples therapy, he would say brutal things about his wife, her face would register no change, but her breathing changed. He was callous, uncaring, and had no regard for her humanity. He was out. It was the right answer for them to separate.”
What was clear to Mayor was that he no longer saw her as a partner to love and care for, but as an ‘object in his path’.
You’re not taking responsibility
Cate Mackenzie, a sex and relationships therapist who runs workshops all over the world and was previously a dating coach on The Undateables, says a willingness to take responsibility for one’s own needs and boundaries is key to surviving a difficult period in the relationship.
“It may seem that one person dominates the other and won’t look at change, or the other may seem passive-aggressive and won’t open up,” says Mackenzie.
“Sometimes, some couples split up in the process of couple counselling, but sometimes something happens where they both start to differentiate and do work on themselves and take responsibility for their part in the configuration. What this might mean is that they can begin to take care of their own needs rather than relying on the other, or one might be able to start to be clearer about what they need, and from this point, there can be a new journey of two adults negotiating how they work together.”
You have different relationship styles
It’s not just monogamous couples who seek out professional guidance for their relationship. Yau, who offers coaching and support to people in polyamorous relationships, explains that when working with couples, one of the most common dynamics she sees is where one partner wants to explore non-monogamy and the other person isn’t sure.
“Maybe they both are non-monogamous, but they want to do non-monogamy in different ways,” she explains. “That’s no one’s fault, and it’s not necessarily something you can work through. You’re different people, you want different things, and you deserve to find people who want the same things that you do.”
You’re becoming numb to conflict
For sex and relationship therapist Karli Kucko, a lack of drive to repair after conflict can be a worrying sign. “When I see clients go from really heated arguments to one person shutting down and saying things like, ‘Whatever. I don’t care. Whatever they want. It’s fine.’ That’s a red flag that we have gone too far into the disconnect,” she explains.
She says that it can be difficult to get a couple back on board with the fight for healing if they’ve become burnt out from the effort that it takes to repair. “So they just shut down. Whatever the reason, they’ve lost the drive to make it work, and they become numb. That is definitely a red flag that separating may be the path forward, because if one person is willing to try and the other is not, you’re not going to create the healing necessary for a loving, committed relationship.”
But for the couples who do want to try to work things out, Drury says a willingness to engage is a good sign. “What I often look for is whether there is still curiosity. Sometimes people also assume frequent arguments mean a relationship is failing, but what therapists often see is that partners stop caring enough to engage at all. When both partners have emotionally checked out and see the other only through a lens of blame, repair becomes much harder,” says Drury.
You’re no longer able to empathise
For Kucko, a sign of trouble is when a couple is no longer able to empathise with or respect the other person’s perspective due to the pain they’ve caused. She sees this as being different to conflict numbness, as couples in this situation are still invested in confronting and repairing their differences. “There’s still fight left, but the only fight you have is to try to get your own point across instead of trying to understand the other person,” she says.
“That’s a problem when you cannot put your own hurt on pause to understand and try to empathise with why the other person feels hurt. We’re at a standoff, and we’re not going to get anywhere.”
You’ve got emotional burnout
Another red flag for Kucko is when intimacy feels more draining than restorative. “When my suggestions for bridging the gap to intimacy feel more draining and effortful than they provide any amount of hope for the future, that may be a sign you don’t have the resources to build the relationship you deserve with this person, regardless of your compatibility,” she explains.
“On paper, they may be very compatible: their beliefs are compatible, their temperaments are compatible, their friends are compatible. There can be all of the reasons why the relationship should be able to work,” Kucko continues. But in reality, she notes, their separate experiences may have created too much of a gap between them. “I see couples sometimes who are still giving everything they can because they remember a time when they were compatible and when things were easy, and so they are trying, trying, trying, and it is a miserable process. If you feel more relieved by the idea of ending this daily slog than you [feel excited] for what the future will hold, that is a big indicator that the relationship should end.”
Over on r/AskATherapist one therapist writes: “I only have one sign that tells me when a relationship is for sure over, and it’s burnout. If a client comes in and can emotionlessly say, ‘I don’t care what you do or who you do it with anymore,’ […] It’s when there is a complete emotional checkout.”
They continued: “It tells me that too much has happened, one or both of them have tried too hard for too long without getting what they need, and they no longer want to engage or take emotional risks. That’s when it’s done.”
You’re longer in alignment
Courtney Boyer, a relationships expert and author, says that couples no longer being aligned on their goals or wants can be a sign of trouble. She gives the example of a cohabiting couple, where one person decides they want more adventure from life, but the other is happy with the way things are. “One person has outgrown the life that they built, and the other person is trying to protect it,” she says. This might lead to tension or resentment building in the relationship.
“It’s really important to remember that not all relationships are meant to last forever. So typically, when couples come to therapy or hire a professional, the goal is to repair the relationship, but I think that it’d be more helpful if the goal were to determine if the two individuals are sharing the same goals,” Boyer continues. “Maybe they’re not in alignment anymore because they’ve outgrown each other, or they’re just no longer compatible, and I think it’s important to normalise that.”
“Sometimes relationships are only meant to carry us from one chapter or phase to the next,” she concludes. “They’re not meant to keep going. They bring us to wherever we’re supposed to be. They help us learn whatever lesson it is that we’re supposed to learn, and then we carry on.”
Lois Shearing is Cosmoplitan's Former Senior Sex and Relationship Writer. They have been writing about sex, sexuality, gender, politics, and relationships for almost ten years. Their writing on these topics has appeared in Mashable, The Independent, Metro, The Advocate, and Byline Times, among others. In 2021, they published their first book, Bi the Way with JKP. They are currently working on two other books, set to be published in 2024. In a previous life, they worked as a content marketer and content writer for various tech start-ups. They continue to be interested in the tech sector and its impact on our lives, relationships, and work, with particular regard to the ways AI will shape our relationships in the future. Outside of work, they are deeply passionate about queer community organising, and run the only support resource for bisexual survivors of sexual violence in the UK: the Bi Survivors Network. You can find them on Instagram and X.
