Emotional Distance Starts Before You Notice. Not Six Years Before.

You have probably read that couples wait an average of six years before getting help.

It is on nearly every therapist's website, including, until recently, a version of this one. It is repeated at conferences. It gets used, gently, to make people feel they have already left it rather late.

It also does not appear to be true.

When researchers actually went and measured it — Doherty and colleagues, writing in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy in 2021, looking at 270 couples entering therapy — the average gap between problems starting and couples walking through a door was 2.68 years. Most began within two. The authors describe the six-year figure bluntly, as "a widely cited but poorly supported idea."

I am starting here because the myth does something unhelpful. It tells you that you are already too late, which is both frightening and, as it turns out, unfounded. The same authors note that therapists have little reason to be pessimistic about couples arriving too late for the work to succeed.

What is true is subtler

Distance does start before anybody names it. That part is real. What is not real is the idea that you sat on it for six years out of negligence.

Most couples I see are not hostile. Some barely argue. They tell me they feel lonely in a way that is embarrassing to describe, because nothing has actually happened. There was no betrayal, no blowup, no single evening you could point to. You are functioning. You are good parents. You go to things together and people think you are fine.

And privately, one or both of you has been quietly wondering how long this can go on.

The reason it takes time to notice is structural. A fight is an event. It has a beginning, a middle, and something to apologise for. Distance is not an event. It is an accumulation of non-events — the thing you decided not to mention, the joke that did not land and was not chased, the evening you both chose your phones and neither minded.

None of those is worth raising. That is exactly what makes them add up.

Where it actually happens

John Gottman's lab spent years watching couples in ordinary conditions and found that the meaningful action is not in the arguments at all. It is in what he called bids — the small approaches people make dozens of times a day. A comment about something out the window. A hand on a shoulder while passing.

In his observational work, couples who were still together years later had turned toward those bids around 86 percent of the time. Those who had separated: around a third.

Nobody experiences that as a decision. You do not remember declining to look up. But your nervous system keeps a tally, and after enough of them it draws a reasonable conclusion: I am not going to be met here, so I will stop reaching.

Both of you conclude that independently. Neither of you mentions it.

Why it accelerates

Once reaching has become risky, the two of you start doing very different things about it, and both make it worse.

One of you protests. Not always loudly — it can look like criticism, or asking the same question in a slightly sharper voice, or bringing up something old because the current thing is too exposing to name.

The other goes quiet, because the protest reads as an accusation and there is no obviously safe answer.

Quiet reads as confirmation to the first. More protest reads as more danger to the second. This is the pursuer-withdrawer cycle, and it is the single most common thing I see. Neither of you built it. Neither of you can see it from the inside, which is the whole problem and also the reason a third person in the room is useful.

The part worth holding onto

The arguments are almost never about their subject. Underneath the one about the dishwasher, or the schedule, or how often you have sex, is a much shorter question that neither of you is asking out loud.

Do I still matter to you? Can I reach you when it counts?

That question is answerable. It is answerable considerably more often than the six-year myth implies, and generally sooner than either of you expects once the loop is visible and slowed down.

What I do

Emotionally Focused Therapy, couples only — the whole practice, not a sideline. Sessions run 100 to 110 minutes, which is the mini-intensive and the only format I offer, at $180. Private pay. In person at my office in Webb City, MO.

More about how I work with couples therapy in Joplin.

I answer my own phone, and I call back within four hours.

Call or text 417-768-9089 · shira@radicalrelationshiptransformation.com