Is Couples Therapy Biased Against Men?

Every so often I get a comment from a guy who says, “Couples therapy is bullshit.”

Photo by Antoni Shkraba Studio

I’ll admit I was skeptical at first. Honestly, the first couple of times, I assumed it was just trolling. After a few more, I figured they were bitter divorced guys, maybe not the most reliable narrators.

But by the time I’d gotten a half-dozen like that, I started to wonder if I was missing something.

Could couples therapy be biased against men?

In grad school, I got a solid education in bias and diversity, and there’s even more emphasis on it now. But then it dawned on me that my belief in the system’s fairness might be a kind of bias itself. Was I blind to it?

So I started replying, asking these guys what their experience had actually been. Setting aside the unserious replies, a familiar story began to emerge:

Their relationship had been strained for a while. His wife brought up therapy: sometimes as a last resort, sometimes with a well-developed list of grievances. He agreed to go, hoping it might help. Then, in the room, the therapist seemed to side with the wife. It felt like a courtroom, and he was losing the case—the last link in a chain that ended the marriage.

That’s when I started to wonder: are these all instances of bad marriages coming to their natural end, or is it possible that the therapy process itself contains structural features that don’t work equally well for everyone?

Some readers may argue that I should be looking for overt anti-male bias among therapists. I’m not ruling that out entirely. In all my years as a psychologist, I’ve never encountered a colleague who expressed hostility toward men as a class. That doesn’t mean it never happens. It just doesn’t strike me as the central issue.

But what I began to wonder was this: could there be forms of bias that aren’t explicitly anti-male, yet still subtly disadvantage some men in couples therapy?

This piece is my attempt to document where those questions led me.

The Invisible Problem

One of the first places those questions led me was to the possibility that couples therapy might privilege certain communication styles over others, often without anyone realizing it.

Women, for example, are usually more practiced at naming emotions. They’ve often spent years in friendships that reward emotional processing and have been socialized to express needs in terms of feelings.

Men generally haven’t had that training. Their feelings tend to show up indirectly, more implied than expressed, or expressed through demands: Stop nagging me. Give me some space.

In some contexts, this is adaptive. Expressing needs directly can feel risky and may register as weakness. So instead of naming emotions, they argue for what’s fair, logical, or principled, embedding their needs in concepts rather than feelings. But in therapy, it’s less effective, because emotional expression matters as much as abstract reasoning.

This is where the potential for bias creeps in. Emotional fluency is often easier to validate in the therapy room than abstract reasoning. You can debate someone’s logic, but it’s harder to challenge their feelings, especially when those feelings are treated as evidence of lived experience.

This is why I push men early in the process to clearly name what they’re feeling. Once they do, it’s harder to dismiss. A direct emotional expression interrupts the momentum of the initial emotional narrative and gives the therapist a clearer emotional signal to engage.

I see this pattern most acutely when another couples therapist asks me to see the male partner for individual work. Often, the ask is something like, “He’s not opening up,” or “He seems angry,” or “He needs to work on himself first.” The implication is that couples work can’t proceed until he adjusts.

But when I meet him, I often find someone whose main issue is that he can’t yet articulate much beyond the hope that his wife might be less angry, unhappy, or depressed. So my goal becomes helping him translate those frustrations into language the therapy room can actually work with.

Of course, when I press him, he might go quiet. So instead of staging an extraction, I offer a tentative guess about what he might be feeling—based on the situation he’s describing, his tone, his body language—and ask whether it resonates. If it doesn’t, I keep reflecting back what I hear until we find the pain point.

Once we’ve named the emotions, we turn to what he needs from the relationship—needs often buried under frustration, logic, or silence, but present all along. Once he can name them, I send him back to couples therapy with a challenge: describe your inner experience and advocate for what you need, even if it feels uncomfortable to say out loud.

This kind of structured facilitation helps him translate a general sense of frustration into specific feelings and needs. When therapists don’t actively provide it, women can appear to be “winning” in the therapy room.

For many men, that feels like bias. If certain communication styles are systematically easier to validate within the modality, that tilt deserves examination.

The Research on Gender and Couples Therapy

Although couples therapy research doesn’t directly demonstrate structural tilt, it does suggest patterns of alignment and misalignment consistent with what many men describe clinically.

For example, studies suggest that men and women often want different things from couples therapy. Men tend to prefer structure, clarity, and solution-focused approaches, whereas women are more likely to seek emotional exploration and relational insight. 1

Those differences can shape how therapists respond, even when we’re aiming for neutrality. Men who are less emotionally expressive may be perceived as resistant, while women with well-developed emotional narratives may be more readily validated. 2

I sometimes wonder whether the popularity of emotionally focused approaches magnifies this effect by asking clients to stay in real-time emotional contact. That can be transformative, but for someone less practiced in naming emotion, it can also feel overwhelming, even alienating.

This kind of mismatch could have real consequences. Across mental health services more broadly, nearly half of men drop out of therapy early, and more than a quarter leave after just one session, most commonly because of a lack of connection with the therapist. 3 If therapy feels misaligned with how someone processes emotion, it makes sense that they might disengage.

Even before the first session, therapy tends to be more inviting to certain kinds of men: those who are emotionally expressive, help-seeking, and introspective. Those who process privately, show care through action, or struggle to name their feelings and needs may be misread or subtly pathologized. 4

If therapists aren’t actively watching for these dynamics, we risk mistaking emotional fluency for depth and inarticulateness for disengagement. Recognizing that risk is the first step toward counteracting these potential biases.

What Keeps Therapy Fair

So how do we make therapy work for both partners when they arrive with very different emotional toolkits?

Good couples therapists do this every day. They resist taking sides, even when one partner’s story feels more coherent or compelling. They slow things down, helping each partner translate their inner world into language the other can understand.

When this kind of attentiveness is built into the process, therapy becomes less about who expresses themselves best and more about helping both partners feel understood.

Where I’ve Landed (For Now)

I started out thinking therapy wasn’t biased against men, probably because that’s how I was trained. I still believe most therapists are thoughtful, ethical people who genuinely want to help both partners. But I’ve also come to see how easy it is for subtle asymmetries to shape the room without anyone intending them to.

I recently raised this question at a Gottman Method training in Portland. Several experienced couples therapists (all women) agreed that subtle asymmetries like this likely show up in their work at times. I suspect they show up in mine periodically as well.

The bottom line is that balance in couples therapy isn’t automatic. It’s something we have to actively cultivate.

So if you’re a man in couples therapy and something feels off, you’re probably not imagining it. Stay engaged: before a session, take a few minutes to think about what matters to you and how you’re feeling about how things are going. And if you’re struggling to put that into words in the session, ask for help. A good therapist will make space and help you articulate it.

And if they don’t, it’s time to find another therapist.

1 Heyman, R. E., Sayers, S., & Bellack, A. S. (2009). Desired change in couples: Gender differences and intra‑couple correspondence. Family Process, 48(4), 515–528.

2 Janusz, B., & Walker, J. (2018). Gender‑related issues in couple therapists’ internal dialogues: A qualitative exploration. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy, 39(3), 328–343.

3 Seidler, Z. E., Rice, S. M., River, J., Dhillon, H. M., Oliffe, J. L., & Fogarty, A. S. (2021). Men’s dropout from mental health services: Results from a survey of Australian men across the life span. American Journal of Men’s Health, 15(3), 1–12.

4 Halford, T. C., Owen, J., Duncan, B. L., Anker, M. G., & Sparks, J. A. (2016). Pre‑therapy relationship adjustment, gender and the alliance in couple therapy. Journal of Family Therapy, 38(1), 18–35