Couples Therapy needs to evolve

As we closed out 2025, I keep finding myself saying it just has to get better.

Well, because 2025 was a doozy of a year.

I thought I was relieved to see 2020 go. Turns out 2025 entered the chat, pulled up a chair, and took many of us on a ride we did not consent to. And yet—here we are.

If I’m being honest, this year has held more disappointment than almost any other season of my life. Disappointment in elected officials. In media. In the way people post without pausing, reflecting, or fact-checking. And, perhaps most painfully, disappointment in some of the good men in my life.

I want to name this carefully. I surround myself with people of integrity and love at their core. Which is exactly why the silence has hurt. When those who benefit from the system stay quiet while harm is happening, it reinforces something I’ve been saying for years:

If men are not fully—ten toes down—committed to equality (yes, that’s all feminism is), then trust erodes.

I know the men I love believe I am their equal. And still, the silence has landed in ways I don’t think they fully understand.

This is why I spend so much time in my work naming patriarchy—not as an abstract concept, but as something that quietly infiltrates marriages, relationships, and our inner lives. When it goes unexamined, it leaves women feeling alone, unseen, and eventually, done. It also leaves men disconnected from themselves, their partners, and their own emotional lives.

Patriarchy survives because power is rarely surrendered willingly. And often, beneath that resistance is fear—fear that equality means loss, or that empathy means weakness. But what I see, again and again in the therapy room, is something else entirely.

Men are tired too.

Many of them are exhausted by the expectations patriarchy placed on them—provide, perform, don’t feel, don’t fail. And when they realize that doing “everything they were supposed to do” still doesn’t bring fulfillment, the grief is real. I have watched grown men cry as they begin to see that patriarchy didn’t protect them—it disconnected them from their own humanity.

Here’s where my own reckoning has been this year.

I work within a research-backed model that I deeply respect. And yet, it was created through a male lens. Even the best models, when applied without a gender-aware, power-aware framework, can unintentionally ask women to do more of the emotional labor they are already carrying.

Women tend to already ask the questions. Track the emotional climate. Try again. Stay patient. Offer more understanding. Have more sex in hopes that it will create more partnership. Meanwhile, men—socialized not to develop these skills—are often met with lowered expectations and endless grace.

The result? Women who have been asking, begging, crying… and eventually going quiet from exhaustion. Not because they stopped caring—but because caring alone isn’t sustainable.

I hear a lot right now about a “male loneliness epidemic.” And I want to say this with compassion and clarity: women have been lonely inside relationships for a very long time.

Many women are opting out of marriage not because they don’t want partnership—but because they refuse to be partnered to someone who cannot meet them emotionally, relationally, or spiritually. Their friendships are rich. Their support systems are strong. Their inner lives are full. And they are no longer willing to shrink or self-abandon to keep a relationship intact.

I am tired of participating in systems that harm women and men.

So as we move into 2026, my work is evolving.

I will continue supporting couples who are ready to shift out of patriarchal dynamics and into truly equal, partnered marriages—where power, care, emotional labor, and growth are shared.

And I am also intentionally expanding my work with individuals.

Women navigating divorce, transition, grief, identity shifts, or reclamation.
Men who are ready to deconstruct what they were taught and reconnect with who they actually are.
Individuals who know something needs to change, even if they can’t fully name it yet.

If you are feeling the quiet knowing that your relationship needs a different structure…
If you are standing at the edge of a life transition and don’t want to do it alone…
If you are done abandoning yourself to make something “work”…

I am here. This is the work I am committed to.

Thank you for being part of this community. Thank you for staying in the discomfort, the questioning, and the truth-telling. And thank you for walking into 2026 with intention.

With honesty and hope,
Beth Wylie, LMFT