After 20 happy years together, couples are still vulnerable to someone else coming into their lives. How can you keep your relationship strong?

Online marriage counseling meets Sienfeld! “The Marriage Ref” is a TV show produced by Jerry Seinfeld where couples reveal their relationship problems, and a referee steps in to say who wins. Now there’s an online version. And you can be “the marriage ref”. Or you can reveal your own disputes and see which side the world votes for. Want to try it – just go to http://couplesspark.com/.

Hardly surprising then that Tara Parker-Pope, writing last month in the New York Times talks about how several groups are turning to online approaches to end marital strife. Some approaches are based on the idea of an online survey, which measures your marital health, and points out areas where you might need relationship help. Other approaches are more like Imago couples therapy, where couples learn to understand and accept each other more fully.

Many people go into couples therapy with a simple objective. Change my partner!! Please!

Usually they aren’t looking for a younger model, with fewer wrinkles and a smaller waist-line. They just want their couples counselor to deliver them back the same old partner with some tweaks. Then everything would be great!

Now let’s put aside for a moment the idea that the goal of going to see a couples therapist is to change your partner. Imago couples counseling takes a different perspecitve on that which I can talk about in other posts. Today, I just want to talk in general about the idea of changing anyone, or even changing their opinion.

You wouldn’t fight with your marriage counselor would you? It turns out that actually most of us do just that.  It’s a subtle and unconscious fight.  Couples therapists call it resistance.  It’s actually a natural and unavoidable part of the marriage counseling process.  I go and see a stranger, and the plan is to tell [...]

In a time when marriages are experiencing increased stress from financial worries, many divorce firms are reporting that couples are waiting to move forwards with their divorces, because they can’t afford to separate. It used to be that financing a divorce was easy, selling property to free up surplus equity. Now couples might find that one partner is unemployed, their house difficult to sell, and even if they could, they don’t have the funds to establish two homes.

The reason this jumped out of me was because after an exciting two days of tracking a few leading blogs about couples counseling and relationships, and even reading Oprah magazine, I came to the conclusion that an awful lot is being written about very little. Remember I’m over 50 now, so I’m permitted to crustily announce to anyone within earshot, or cyber-shot, that the world is becoming depressingly shallow. And if studying 79 students is enough evidence to pronounce that depth is the traveling companion of bliss, then misery loves company as long as it doesn’t challenge its brain cells too much.

This seems to be the point in my blogging career when I need to admit that I live in the same world as one Jerry Seinfeld, formerly knife sharp observer of human foibles, who has now turned the spectacle of marital conflict into public entertainment which reminds me of the moral murkiness of spending saturday afternoon watching gladiators kill each other in the Colliseum. Seinfeld is fairly clear about the entertainment value of his TV show The Marriage Ref. “This is not a therapy show, it’s a comedy show. After nine years of marriage, I have discovered that the comedic potential of this subject is quite rich.” Couples counseling as comedy. At least they walk away physically unharmed.

Imago’s new “marriage counseling” Avatar doesn’t have a blue face and run around jungles. She lives in your computer screen, and provides penetrating insights into your marriage or relationship.

This is the new face of online relationship help, dreamed

Scott Stanley pointed out that much of the research published recently appears to be reaching completely different conclusions. Just last week I wrote a blog post “Is Marriage bad for Couples Therapists” about British survey that showed how cohabitation with the arch-enemy of long-term relationships, and pointing out the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) didn’t necessarily agree. Then just yesterday the CDC released a report picked by USA today: “Cohabiting has little effect on couple’s success in marriage”.

When I first had marital problems, I hated the idea of seeing a marriage counselor.  Even when my divorce lawyer gave me a card for marriage counseling services I threw it away as soon as possible.  So what was it I had against marriage counselors? In my mind I imagined sitting with my hostile wife [...]