The pandemic has pushed many couples to a breaking point—and relationship therapists are cashing in.
Can ‘Covid Counseling’ Save Your Relationship?
From the beginning of John* and Ava’s* relationship, John had a problem: he couldn’t get it up, at least not consistently. But they were in love, they were best friends, and they were sure it was something they could work through. They got married in 2016 but after they had a kid, their sex life became more of an issue. “I just kind of just fell into a rut,” Ava says. “It was a combination of the ED issues and my low sex drive after having a baby.” Then came the pandemic. Suddenly they couldn’t ignore a problem that had been in the background of their relationship for years.
Ava and John are just one of millions of couples muddling their way through relationship issues exacerbated by the sudden shift in our way of life triggered by the coronavirus pandemic. Quarantine, differing approaches to virus restrictions, and the ever present threat of our own mortality has made it feel nearly impossible to ignore existing problems in a relationship. You can’t brush aside underlying contempt when your spouse refuses to share childcare responsibilities, nor can you ignore friction between your political views when something as simple as wearing a mask has become a matter of life and death.
In September, Ava picked up the phone and called Diana Wiley, a licensed marriage and family therapist and board-certified sex therapist based in Seattle. Wiley literally wrote the book on sex during COVID, Love In The Time of Coronavirus, in which she instructs couples to use the “forced togetherness” of quarantine “as an opportunity to explore your sexual relationship and rekindle the sparks of passion.” In $150-an-hour sessions, Wiley counseled Ava and John via Zoom, giving them plenty of homework to help them rekindle their sex life.
It’s a boom time to be a couples therapist. Wiley is one of dozens of therapists rebranding their therapy as quarantine-friendly, specifically targeting couples who’ve found themselves in trouble after the past year. “We will get through this coronavirus storm, but will your relationship survive?” warns Couples for Couples Counseling, a California-based practice which offers a $2,200 “Virtual Quarantine Couples Intensive Therapy.” Northampton Couples Therapy touts their intensive sessions, available in the U.S. and internationally, as “a lifeline for couples during quarantine.” Pennsylvania therapist Arlene Rosen, LMFT, is offering virtual couples counseling for those who are “fearful you and your spouse won’t recover if the current situation continues.” Even luxury hotels are capitalizing on pandemic relationship struggles; the Don CeSar hotel in St. Petersburg, Florida offers rooms that run between $350 and $504 per night that come complete with two hours of counseling and offer workshops run by psychologists and life coaches.
Chelsea Fuentes, LMFT, and George Fuentes, RAMFT, founders of the Orange County-based Couples for Couples Counseling, offer these types of therapy “intensives,” which involve a six-hour virtual therapy session followed by two check-ins after one month and again at six months. “Maybe you’ve always wished your partner would be home more, but now that they are, you are beginning to rethink what you wished for,” reads their website. Since July, business has been booming for their Zoom-based therapy, they say. In Massachusetts, Northampton Couples Therapy offers online intensives ranging from three-hour sessions to two-day couples retreats, marketed on their website with a question that nearly every married person would probably answer “yes” to: “Are you experiencing anxiety, heartbreak, or overwhelm in your marriage amplified by the profound stress of COVID-19?”
There’s no doubt that we’re in a mental health crisis—and therapy is more vital to our wellbeing than ever. But the question remains: do such intensive quarantine interventions work to save relationships? “It took you how long to get into the issue with your marriage? It's not going to take two hours to get out of it,” says Candice Beasley, doctor of social work, a clinical assistant professor at Tulane University, and practicing couples counselor. Short-term therapy is better than “doing nothing,” she says, but it’s not a cure-all. “Is that an outlet to alleviate stress that we're having during these times? Absolutely. But will it sustain itself for a long period of time? Maybe not.”
AdvertisementBeasley warns that there are certain cases where these nicely packaged therapy quick-fixes definitely should not be used, like cases of pandemic cheating. “If there was infidelity, then there's a breach in the attachment that absolutely cannot be fixed in an eight-hour block,” she says. “If we were ready to forgive our partners in eight hours, perhaps we wouldn't need therapy.” (The Fuentes don’t enroll these couples in their intensives, they say. They speak to each couple beforehand and in cases of infidelity or domestic violence, recommend a different course of action.)
Despite the spike in coronavirus couples intensives hitting the market, many couples are opting for more traditional weekly therapy sessions via Zoom. John and Ava, for example, are doing bi-monthly sessions with Wiley, seeking help for their relationship issues that preceded the pandemic but are now magnified by 24/7 intimacy. “With our two-and-a-half-year-old daughter home since March and both of us working from home, it’s definitely heightened tension throughout the year,” John said. “A homework assignment that Dr. Wiley gave us is to just kiss and hug more,” Ava said. “We don't leave the house to go to work. So we're not kissing and hugging goodbye.”
Kerry Lusignan, a licensed mental health counselor and the founder of Northampton Couples Therapy, treats couples facing similar issues. “COVID is just a big domestic cesspool,” she said. “It's not sexy to know what somebody's doing 24/7. Novelty gets us going. And then you add to that children, and you're homeschooling the kids and then you’re exhausted. It's a mess.” She thinks COVID has caused people to rethink their relationships because they are also contemplating their mortality. “Couples start to think, ‘What the hell are we really doing if we could die tomorrow?’ And it's like, ‘Wait, I'm not gonna do 20 more years with you,’” she says.
Ultimately, therapists say that the “don’t sweat the small stuff” mantra that sustains many healthy relationships is crumbling in the face of the pandemic. With COVID, the small stuff is no longer small: Choosing to eat outdoors instead of indoors could be the difference between life and death; squirting your palm with Purell after opening a door could save you from hospitalization; taking off your mask for a few minutes during a Trader Joe’s run for babka could turn you into a super spreader. It’s no wonder that over a third of couples in a recent study said they’d felt increasing stress in their marriage, or that a Kinsey Institute study found that frequency of sex is down. Divorce rates spiked early in the pandemic, but many have stuck it out, sometimes because they have literally nowhere else to go.
Women with children, like Ava, have arguably borne the brunt of the pandemic domestic shake-up. On top of the extra child-rearing duties that often fall on them, they’re also playing epidemiological hall monitor. “Women in cisgendered heterosexual couples are tending to be the ones who are like, ‘Hey, these are the CDC protocols. I want to follow these,’” says Lusignan.
The normalization of virtual sessions has made therapy significantly more accessible (though there’s still a glaring affordability issue for many). It’s also helped give therapists a new perspective on their clients. “It's kind of given us a new window into their lives because we're actually going into their home, essentially. So there is a more realistic view of what is really happening,” says Chelsea Fuentes. That’s not always comfortable; she’s seen partners throw phones and storm out during Zoom sessions. “In our office that happens rarely,” she says. Lusignan once had a client kick the laptop off the table mid-session.
For some, couples therapy during the pandemic has helped provide clarity that their relationship is over. Kurt* a 43-year-old man who I met in an online forum devoted to people in low-sex relationships, said he had spent 21 years in a low-sex relationship, sometimes going for six months without sex. And when they did manage to have sex, it felt like “duty” sex, he said. The added stresses of the pandemic finally drove him and his wife into therapy. Counseling helped reveal their differing attitudes towards sex. “She kept saying it was X reason [we weren’t having sex], and once that was taken care of it then became Y reason and then Z reason. All the while saying sex was important to her until the first couples session when she said it was never important,” he says. Couples counseling didn’t fix his relationship, but it did give him clarity. He plans on filing for divorce later this year.
But the experience for Ava and John was positive. “We've had more sex from the time that we've been working with Dr. Wiley than we probably did since our daughter's birth,” Ava said, averaging about once a week. “It probably doesn't sound like very much to most people,” she said, “but that is probably all I have the energy for.”
*Names have been changed for privacy.
Hallie Lieberman is a sex historian and journalist. She’s the author of Buzz: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy and is currently working on a book about gigolos.
This story originally appeared on: Glamour - Author:Hallie Lieberman
