Top Marriage Counselling Questions You Should Ask

Most couples arrive at a first session uncertain what to expect. They know something is wrong, they know they need help, and they rarely know what will be asked of them.

At the Energetics Institute,  Richard and Helena Boyd have run a couples practice in Perth since 2005. This page sets out the questions we actually ask, what we are listening for underneath each one, and the questions worth asking a marriage counsellor before you commit to anything. If you want to rehearse before your first appointment, that is a reasonable thing to want, and this is the page for it.

One correction before we start, because it appears on almost every page written on this subject. You will read that couples wait an average of six years before seeking help, usually credited to Gottman Institute research. That figure traces back to an unpublished 1992 masters thesis with fewer than twenty couples in it, and it was never peer reviewed. When researchers finally measured it properly, in a 2021 study of 270 couples entering therapy, the average wait from the onset of serious problems was 2.68 years, and roughly two thirds of couples came within two years. You are probably not as late as the internet has told you.

Questions About Communication Patterns And Breakdowns

Communication is the most common presenting problem in couples work, and the questions are less about words than about what happens to each of you mid conversation.

We usually start with the ones below. Answer them separately in your head before you answer them out loud, because the gap between your two answers is often the useful part.

What does a good conversation between you look like, and when did you last have one. What is the topic you both know not to raise. At what point in a difficult conversation do you stop taking in what your partner is saying. What happens in your body just before you go quiet, or just before your voice changes.

There are two follow ups we almost always add. What do you think your partner hears when you say that, and what would you have to believe about them to say it differently.

That last pair is the one couples find strangest and the one that tends to open things up. Most communication breakdowns are not failures of vocabulary. One partner’s nervous system moves into a defensive state, and from there listening is no longer available, no matter how reasonable the other person is being. Naming the moment that happens gives you something concrete to work with.

For context on why communication comes up so often, the largest Australian study of why marriages end surveyed 650 divorced Australians in 1997 for the Australian Institute of Family Studies. Communication problems were the most cited reason at 27.3 per cent, ahead of drifting apart at 21 per cent and infidelity at 20.1 per cent. It is old data and still the best national picture we have.

Questions About Emotional Connection And Intimacy

These questions get asked later in a first session, once the room feels safe enough for honest answers rather than diplomatic ones.

When did you last feel close to your partner. What does your partner do that makes you feel wanted. What have you stopped telling them, and when did you stop. If sex has changed, what changed first, the sex or the talking. What would you need in order to reach for them.

Underneath all of these sits a single attachment question that most people never say out loud. Are you there for me, and will you come when it matters. Emotional distance in a long relationship is rarely a loss of love. It is usually the accumulated result of reaching out and not being met, enough times that reaching out stopped feeling worth the risk.

What we are listening for is the sequence rather than the complaint. Almost every couple who describes a dead patch can, with a few questions, locate the period it started, and there is usually an event in it that one partner registered as significant and the other never knew about. A miscarriage, a redundancy, a parent’s illness, a night that went badly. The distance is the scar tissue, not the injury.

We ask about physical intimacy directly rather than waiting for you to raise it, because couples almost never raise it unprompted. If that is the part you came about, you will not have to find a way to bring it up.

Questions About Conflict And How You Handle Disagreement

The research is clear that conflict itself is not the problem. What separates couples who do well from couples who do not is what happens after the argument.

The questions we ask here are about the shape of your fights rather than their content. What does an argument between you look like from the outside. Who raises their voice and who goes silent. How does a fight end, and who ends it. How long does it take before you are speaking normally again. What did conflict look like in the house you grew up in.

You may have come across Gottman’s four horsemen, criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling. They are a genuinely useful description of patterns we see every week. We would be careful with the claim that attaches to them, that they predict divorce with over ninety per cent accuracy. When independent researchers tested prediction models of that kind on a fresh sample of 528 people in 2001, rather than the sample the model was built on, accuracy collapsed. Treat the four horsemen as warning signs worth attending to, not as a verdict on your marriage.

The more useful question is about repair. After it goes badly, who moves first, what do they do, and does it work. Couples who recover well are not the ones who argue least. They are the ones who have a reliable way back, even a clumsy one, and who accept it when it is offered.

So we also ask what a genuine apology looks like to each of you, because the answers are frequently incompatible. One person needs the behaviour to change and treats words as cheap. The other needs to hear it said and treats a silent correction as no repair at all. Both have been trying, in the wrong currency, for years.

Questions About Expectations, Roles, And Shared Goals

Plenty of couples are not in conflict about a problem. They are in conflict about two unexamined sets of assumptions that have never been compared.

So we ask what you each expected marriage to look like before you were in one. Who does what in your household now, and who decided that. What does money mean to each of you, safety or freedom or status. Whose career has bent around the other’s, and was that ever discussed. What do you want the next five years to hold, said separately and then compared.

The Relationship Indicators survey run by Relationships Australia in 2024, with just over 3,000 respondents, found 79 per cent had faced relationship pressures in the previous six months, with cost of living at 27 per cent and mental health at 26 per cent leading the list. Most of what strains a marriage arrives from outside it. The question is whether you are facing it as two people or as a pair.

Expectations questions tend to produce the most surprised looks in the room, because couples discover they have been quietly operating on different plans for years without either of them being wrong.

Questions For Different Relationship Stages

The same question means something different depending on how long you have been together, so we adjust.

Before marriage, the useful questions are about the unsaid. Children, money, faith, in laws, and what each of you will do when the other is at their worst. If that is where you are, our pre marital counselling (/pre-marital-counselling/) work is built around exactly those conversations.

Between five and fifteen years in, usually with young children, the questions turn practical and slightly uncomfortable. When were you last alone together without logistics. What have you each given up. Who is more tired, and does the other one know.

Between five and fifteen years, we also ask the question couples find hardest to answer in front of each other. If nothing changed, could you do another ten years of this. The answers are usually not as far apart as either partner fears.

Later, after twenty or more years, the questions are about identity. Who are you to each other now the structure has changed, and what did you build the relationship around that is no longer there. Australian Bureau of Statistics figures released in July 2026 put the median time from marriage to separation at 9.4 years and to divorce at 13.4 years, with 49,158 divorces granted in 2025. The pressure points are real and they are also survivable.

How To Prepare For Your First Session

The most useful preparation is not building a case. It is working out what you would say if nobody was keeping score.

Before you come, think about what you want to be different rather than who you want held responsible. Decide what you are willing to hear. Agree with your partner on one thing you both want out of the process, even if it is only clarity about whether to continue.

It also helps to know the mechanics. A first couples session commonly runs longer than a standard appointment, and it is normal in Australian practice for each partner to be seen individually at some point in the early phase. Ours run for around fifty five minutes, in Inglewood or online across Western Australia, with no referral required. If you want the full picture of the process, we cover it in what happens in couples counselling.

Two practical points people rarely think to ask about. Marriage counselling is not claimable on Medicare, because relationship and couples therapy are explicitly excluded from the mental health items, so anyone offering you a rebate for couples work has misunderstood the rules. And in Australia, counsellor and psychotherapist are not protected titles, so credentials are worth asking about rather than assuming.

If one of you is reluctant, say so at booking rather than managing it quietly. It is one of the most common situations we see, and it changes what a first session should do. Where one partner is genuinely undecided about staying, there is a short protocol called discernment counselling designed for exactly that position. In the original series of 100 cases, about half of couples went on to attempt therapy properly and the rest reached a clearer decision. It has not been tested in a randomised trial, so we describe it as a structured way to make the decision rather than a treatment, but it is far better than dragging an unwilling partner through work they have not agreed to.

On timing, one study of 125 couples found improvement was not steady. It rose across the first four sessions and then levelled off between five and eight. That is worth knowing so you neither give up in week three nor expect a decade to resolve in a month.

What This Looks Like In Practice

These are composite examples drawn from our couples work, with identifying details changed.

A couple in their forties, sixteen years married, came in describing a communication problem. One partner had been withdrawing for years without recognising it as withdrawal. He experienced it as keeping the peace. She experienced it as being left. Neither description was wrong, and neither had ever been said.

A couple in their early thirties had not argued in five years, which they offered as evidence the marriage was fine. The absence of conflict turned out to be the presenting problem. Both had learned separately that raising anything was expensive.

A couple in their fifties arrived after the youngest child left home. The expectations questions did the work. They had organised twenty years around a shared project and had never discussed what came after it. Neither was unhappy with the other. Both were quietly grieving a job that had ended.

What these three have in common is worth naming. In each case the problem the couple brought was not the problem the questions found, and in each case the real material had been sitting in the room for years without a structure that made it sayable.

Frequently Asked Questions

The questions we are asked most often before a first appointment, answered plainly.

What Should We Ask A Marriage Counsellor Before We Start?

Ask what training they have specifically in couples work, since general counselling training does not cover it. Ask what they do when one partner is more committed to the process than the other. Ask how confidentiality works if you are seen individually, because policies differ and it matters. Ask what the first few sessions will involve and how you will know whether it is working. If a counsellor is uncomfortable answering any of that, it is useful information.

How Are Premarital Counselling Questions Different From Marriage Counselling?

Premarital work is largely prospective. The questions are about what you each assume will happen, and the goal is to find the assumptions that do not match while the stakes are low. Marriage counselling questions are retrospective as well as forward looking, because there is now a history of injuries and patterns to account for. The topics overlap heavily, money, children, sex, family. The difference is that one set is about what might happen and the other is about what already has.

Can We Ask Our Own Questions In Therapy?

Yes, and the questions you bring are usually more revealing than ours. Couples often arrive with one question they have avoided asking each other for years. Raising it in a room with a third person present is precisely what the room is for. Tell us at the start if there is something specific you want to get to, so we do not spend the session somewhere else.

How Do Marriage Counselling Questions Help With Rebuilding Trust?

Questions rebuild trust by making the invisible visible. Most trust damage is maintained by things neither partner will say directly, and structured questions give both people a legitimate route into them. That applies to ordinary erosion and to larger breaches, though after infidelity the work has its own sequence, which we set out in therapy after an affair.

Book Your First Couples Therapy Session

The questions on this page are not a test, and there are no correct answers to prepare. Their value is that they surface what each of you has been carrying privately, which is almost always the material the relationship has been running on without either of you being able to name it.

We will be straight with you about what the evidence supports, since most pages on this subject are not. Pooling 33 randomised trials across roughly 2,700 people, couples therapy produces a moderate improvement in relationship satisfaction that is still present six months later. In the better followed samples, somewhere near half of couples have recovered by the end of therapy and around a fifth are unchanged. A real minority get worse or separate anyway, and the honest reason most sites omit that is that it does not sell. It is also not the point. Plenty of couples come to us to find out whether to continue, and a clear answer either way is a good outcome.

What predicts the result is less about how bad things currently are than about whether both of you are willing to answer honestly. Starting from a low point is not a poor prognosis.

We see couples at our Inglewood rooms and online across Western Australia, evenings and Saturday mornings included, with no referral needed. Call us on 1300 956 227, book a session , or read more about our couples counselling (/couples-and our therapy costs.