By Oluwafunke Allen
I want to say something that might sound strange coming from a counsellor: I don’t think every couple needs me. Plenty of disagreements really do get worked out over dinner, or in the car, or in one honest conversation before bed. What I’m talking about today is different — it’s the couple who’s been “working it out themselves” for three years on the exact same issue, and calling the standoff a resolution because they’ve both stopped raising it.
Love was never the missing ingredient
Here’s the assumption I hear underneath that phrase almost every time: if we just love each other enough, try hard enough, pray enough, we’ll figure this out on our own. It sounds noble. It’s also usually wrong, and it’s wrong for a specific reason — love and effort were never the ingredient missing from the equation. A couple I sat with years into their marriage loved each other visibly, generously, in ways that were obvious the moment they walked into my office. What they didn’t have was a method for getting underneath their recurring fight about her mother’s involvement in their household. They had the will. They lacked the tool. Wanting to solve a problem and knowing how to solve it are two entirely different skills, and marriage doesn’t hand you the second one automatically just because you have plenty of the first.
Why the same two people can’t always see their own pattern
There’s a structural reason “just the two of us” often stalls on an entrenched issue: you’re both standing inside the pattern, which makes it nearly impossible to see its shape from the inside. Each of you has a clear, coherent story about why the fight keeps happening, and each story quietly blames the other person’s character rather than the mechanics of the interaction itself. An outside person — not invested in either of you being right, only in what’s actually happening between you — can often name the pattern in one session that the two of you have circled for years. That’s not a failure of your intelligence or your commitment to each other. It’s just what happens when you’re too close to a thing to measure it accurately.
What “working it out” alone actually produces, over time
Usually not resolution — a truce. The topic goes quiet, but the underlying disagreement is still fully intact, just no longer spoken aloud because both of you have learned, through trial and painful error, that raising it doesn’t go anywhere good. That’s not peace. That’s exhaustion wearing peace’s clothes. And it tends to leak sideways — into short tempers about unrelated things, into a low-grade distance neither of you can quite name, because the actual issue never got resolved, only silenced.
Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 makes the case plainly: “Two are better than one… for if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth, for he hath not another to help him up… and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.” Notice the progression — two are good, but the passage itself reaches for a third strand to make the cord truly strong. That third strand, in a stuck marriage, is often exactly what a counsellor provides: not a replacement for the two of you, but the reinforcement that keeps the whole thing from fraying under repeated pressure.
Proverbs 15:22 says it even more directly: “Without counsel purposes are disappointed: but in the multitude of counsellors they are established.” Your purposes as a couple — the actual future you’re both trying to build — can quietly disappoint you not because you didn’t want it badly enough, but because you tried to establish it without enough counsel behind it.
How to tell you’ve hit this exact wall
Ask yourselves honestly: is this the third, fourth, fifth time you’ve had a version of this same conversation, with the same positions, the same ending? Has “working it out” actually meant resolving it, or has it meant tabling it until it resurfaces? If you can’t remember the last time this particular issue felt genuinely settled rather than just quiet, you’re not looking at a couple who needs more love or more effort. You’re looking at a couple who’s reached the edge of what two people, however devoted, can untangle without a third, skilled perspective in the room.
The line I want you to keep
Needing outside help with a stuck pattern is not a verdict on how much you love each other. It’s simply an honest read of what two people, however devoted, can untangle alone — and when to bring in the strand that makes the cord hold. I unpack this exact wall — and why smart, loving couples hit it — in the book.
