By Oluwafunke Allen
One spouse wants help. The other says, flatly, “I’m not doing that.” This is one of the most common phone calls I get — usually from a wife, occasionally from a husband, always with the same undertone of feeling stuck between two bad options: force an appointment nobody wants, or do nothing and watch the marriage keep drifting. Neither is actually your only option. There’s real work available to you alone, and it’s not the consolation prize it feels like.
You cannot argue someone into a waiting room
I’ve watched people try everything — the pamphlet left on the kitchen counter, the ultimatum, the tearful 11pm appeal, the enlisting of a pastor to “talk sense into him.” Occasionally it works. Mostly it just adds counselling itself to the list of things you now fight about. A man who experiences an invitation to counselling as an accusation will resist it harder the more urgently it’s pressed, because urgency reads to him as blame. So the first thing I tell a reluctant-spouse caller is: stop spending your remaining credibility trying to move someone who has decided not to move yet. Redirect that energy somewhere it will actually produce something.
The work you do alone is not the lesser version
There’s a quiet shame in going to counselling by yourself — a sense that you’re doing the homework for a class your spouse refuses to attend. I want to correct that directly. Individual work changes the one thing you actually have full authority over: your own patterns. A wife I sat with for months, alone, came in convinced she was there to “fix” her husband by proxy. What she actually discovered was her own contribution to their stuck cycle — how her anxiety made her chase him for reassurance the moment he went quiet, which made him withdraw further, which made her chase harder. Nobody handed her that insight. She built it, alone, in a room without him. It was not lesser work. It was the work that was actually available to her.
Change your half of the dance
Every recurring marital conflict is a dance with two dancers, even when only one of them is willing to look at the choreography. If you change your steps — consistently, not as a manipulation tactic but as genuine growth — the dance itself has to change, because your spouse’s old moves were built in response to your old moves. The wife above stopped chasing. She let silence sit instead of filling it with anxious questions. Within a few months, her husband started initiating conversation on his own, something he’d never done when being pursued. Nobody told him to. The system just couldn’t run its old pattern anymore, so it found a new one. This isn’t a guaranteed formula — some spouses stay stuck regardless of what you change on your end, and I won’t promise you otherwise. But changing your own half is never wasted, because at minimum you stop being an active participant in a pattern that was hurting you too.
What “winning without a word” actually means
1 Peter 3:1 tells wives with unbelieving or resistant husbands that they may be “won by the conversation of the wives,” without a word — meaning by conduct, not lecture. I want to be precise about what that verse is not saying. It is not telling you to shrink yourself, absorb everything silently, or perform a cheerful marriage you don’t feel. It’s describing something more active than that: a consistent, visible integrity that isn’t contingent on your spouse’s cooperation. Let your changed patterns be loud enough to notice and quiet enough not to preach. That combination is far harder to resist than any argument you could make with your mouth.
The line I want you to keep
You cannot drag your spouse into a room they’ve decided not to enter. You can absolutely become someone whose changed pattern makes the old argument between you harder to keep having. Chapter Eleven of the book, “Finding Words for What Has No Words,” has a section specifically for the spouse doing this work alone — because that’s a harder, lonelier road than the one where you both walk in together, and it deserves its own map.
