Couples rarely come to counselling over one big thing. More often it is the accumulation: conversations that turn into the same argument by a different route, silences that used to be comfortable and no longer are, the sense of living alongside someone rather than with them. By the time most couples look for couples counselling online, they have been quietly unhappy for longer than either of them would say out loud.
I have worked with couples for most of my career — married and unmarried, together thirty years or three, in the same house or on different continents. Online sessions have made this work available to couples that a counselling room never could reach: both of you on one couch, or on two screens in two cities, or two countries.
How online couples sessions actually work
Most couples join from the same room, side by side on one screen — and there is something usefully honest about doing this work at your own kitchen table, in the place where the arguments actually happen. But you don't have to be in the same place. Couples join me from two screens across town when work schedules won't cooperate, and from two countries when a job, a visa or a family obligation has separated them for a season. Long-distance couples and couples who live apart by choice are entirely welcome; your relationship doesn't stop being real because it crosses a border.
Sessions are 90 minutes, usually weekly or fortnightly. I hold the structure firmly enough that neither of you gets steamrolled, and neither of you has to be the one keeping the peace.
How I work with couples
My approach is emotionally focused: underneath most repeating arguments — money, in-laws, parenting, the dishes — is a simpler and harder question, which is are you there for me? We slow the argument down until you can both see the pattern you are caught in, and then we work on the pattern rather than refereeing its latest episode. Both of your perspectives will always be heard, and I remain impartial — I am not in the business of deciding who is right. In all my years of doing this I have never once found that to be the useful question.
Online marriage counselling suits some situations especially well: one sceptical partner will often agree to a video call at home long before they would agree to a counsellor's waiting room.
What couples bring
Communication that has curdled into scorekeeping. Distance after an affair, or after a loss that each of you grieved so differently it pulled you apart. The strain of emigration, where one partner chose the move more than the other. New babies, empty nests, retirement — the hinge points where a relationship must renegotiate itself and sometimes gets stuck. And sometimes the brave, painful work of deciding together whether the relationship continues, and how to part decently if it doesn't.
Fees and practicalities
Couples sessions are £70 / €80 for clients in the UK, Ireland and Europe, and R1,250 in South Africa — 90 minutes, paid by bank transfer. UK and European evenings work easily, since South Africa is at most two hours ahead. We start with a free introductory call, ideally with both of you on it. If you are in Johannesburg and would rather do this work in person, see my page on couples counselling in Johannesburg; if one of you is also considering individual work, my online counselling page explains how that side of my practice runs.