The Courtship Task: Forcing a Distressed Couple to Date Again

We observe a couple entering the room with a history of accumulated resentment and we recognize that their verbal communication has reached a dead end. They have explained their grievances to each other for years, yet the structure of their interaction remains unchanged. In strategic therapy, we do not believe that insight into the past produces a change in the present. We believe that a change in behavior produces a change in the relationship. When a couple has stopped courting, they have stopped the very behaviors that once defined them as a pair. You do not ask them to remember how they used to feel. You instruct them to do what they used to do. This is the premise of the courtship task. We use this directive to bypass the cycle of accusation and defense.

You must begin by identifying the specific point where the courtship ended. Often, this coincides with a change in the family hierarchy, such as the birth of a child or a promotion at work. I once worked with a couple who had not shared a meal outside of their home in four years. They claimed they were too tired or too busy with their three young children. When I suggested they go to dinner, the wife said she did not want to go because she no longer felt any spark. The husband said he would not take her out if she was going to be miserable the entire time. I told them that their feelings were irrelevant to the task. I instructed the husband to select a specific restaurant and a specific time. I told the wife she was required to wear a dress she had not worn in a year. They were to spend two hours together without mentioning the children or their finances.

We understand that resistance is a natural part of the therapeutic process. When you give a directive like this, you will encounter the objection that the behavior is not spontaneous. Clients often believe that for an act to be meaningful, it must arise from a genuine desire. We know that this is an error in their logic. Behavior precedes emotion. You must explain to the couple that spontaneity is a luxury they cannot currently afford. You might tell them that they are like two actors who must learn their lines before they can give a convincing performance. If they wait until they feel like courting, they will wait until the marriage is over. You are the director in this room. You take responsibility for the change, and they take responsibility for the action.

You must make the task so specific that there is no room for ambiguity. If you tell a couple to be more romantic, they will fail because they have different definitions of romance. One will think it means flowers, while the other thinks it means help with the laundry. Instead, you specify the day, the time, and the physical actions involved. I worked with a man who was particularly resistant to showing affection. He complained that his wife was always demanding things from him. I told him that for the next week, he was to kiss his wife on the cheek every morning at eight o’clock, regardless of how he felt or what she was doing. I told the wife she was to accept the kiss without comment. By making the kiss a requirement of the therapy, I removed it from their power struggle. He was not giving in to her demand: he was following my instruction. She was not winning a battle: she was participating in an experiment.

We use the follow up session to examine the results of the task. If they followed the directive, you look for the subtle changes in their proximity or their tone of voice. If they failed to follow the directive, you use that failure as information about the power balance in the relationship. We do not judge them for failing. We simply observe that the problem is more powerful than they are. You might then assign an even more difficult task, or what Jay Haley called an ordeal. If they cannot spend two hours at dinner, perhaps they must spend four hours sitting in the same room without speaking. Often, the couple will decide that the original task was easier and will perform it just to avoid the more difficult one.

I once worked with a woman who insisted that her husband was incapable of being a gentleman. He insisted that she was impossible to please. I gave them a sequential task. During the first week, he was to open every door for her. This was the only requirement. During the second week, he was to open the doors and she was to say thank you each time. During the third week, they were to go to a movie, and he was to hold her hand for the entire duration of the film. If he let go, he had to pay her twenty dollars. By the third week, they were laughing about the absurdity of the payment. The tension had broken because the behavior had been forced. We look for these moments where the rigid structure of the conflict begins to crumble under the pressure of the prescribed action.

You must remain authoritative when they challenge your directives. A practitioner who wavers will lose the couple’s trust. If they ask why they must do something that seems trivial, you tell them that the trivial behaviors are the foundation of the relationship. We know that courtship is a series of small, repetitive actions that signal interest and commitment. When those actions stop, the signals stop. You are simply restarting the signal system. You are not there to help them understand why they stopped courting. You are there to make them court. This approach requires you to be comfortable with being the expert. You are not a facilitator: you are a strategic interventionist.

In the second phase of the courtship task, you introduce the element of surprise. You might tell the husband to plan an evening that the wife knows nothing about. She is only told what time to be ready and what kind of clothing to wear. This puts the husband in a position of leadership and the wife in a position of being cared for. I remember a couple where the wife had taken over all the decision making because she felt the husband was passive. This had led to a complete loss of sexual interest. By instructing the husband to take total control of a date, we temporarily reversed the hierarchy. He had to make the decisions, and she had to follow his lead. The result was a restoration of the tension that makes a romantic relationship function.

We observe that couples often use their children as a shield against intimacy. You will hear them say that they cannot leave the children with a babysitter or that the children’s schedules are too busy. You must treat these as excuses that maintain the status quo. You might instruct the couple to find a teenager in the neighborhood to watch the children for one hour while the parents sit on the porch and talk about anything except the children. If they cannot manage one hour, the problem is not the children: the problem is their fear of being alone together. Your task is to force them to face that fear through action. We use the technical precision of the directive to cut through the thick fog of their shared excuses.

Every instruction you give must be followed by a clear explanation of what you will be watching for. You tell the couple that you are looking to see if they can follow a simple instruction together. This makes the task a test of their cooperation. If they return and report that the date was a disaster, you ask for the details. You want to know who spoke first, what was said, and how the other responded. You are looking for the sequences of behavior that lead to the disaster. Once you identify the sequence, you can give a new directive that interrupts it. If they always fight when the bill comes, you tell the husband to pay before they even sit down. We change the sequence to change the outcome.

I once assigned a couple the task of going to a zoo. I told them they were to find the most bored animal and discuss why that animal was bored. This was an indirect way of having them talk about their own boredom without making it an accusation. They spent three hours talking about a lion. By the time they left, they were talking about their own lives with a new perspective. We use these metaphors and tasks to reorganize the couple’s perception of their situation. The goal is always the same: to move them from a state of static conflict to a state of dynamic interaction. When the couple begins to act as if they are in love, the structure of their relationship begins to reflect that action. A man who holds a door for his wife is, in that moment, a man who cares for her.

You must be prepared for the moment when the couple tries to turn the task into a new weapon. They might come back and say that they did the task but the other person did it wrong. You must anticipate this. You tell them in advance that the task will be difficult and that they will probably both make mistakes. This reframes the mistakes as part of the process rather than a failure of the partner. We use this type of pre-emption to protect the directive from the couple’s habit of conflict. You are not just giving a task: you are protecting the possibility of change.

The final stage of the courtship task is the transition to self directed dating. Once the couple has successfully completed several of your prescribed dates, you ask them to design their own. You still require them to report the details to you. This maintains your position in the hierarchy as the one who oversees the change until the new patterns are firmly established. We know that without this oversight, couples often slide back into their old routines. You are the anchor that keeps them in the new behavior until it becomes their new reality. A couple who has learned to court again is a couple who has reclaimed the territory of their relationship from the wasteland of their previous conflict.

The practitioner who fully masters the courtship task understands that the most effective intervention is often the most direct one. You do not need to explore the depths of their childhood to help them go to a movie together. You only need to be clear, firm, and strategically precise in your instructions. We use the power of the directive to create a new experience for the couple, and that experience becomes the catalyst for the change they seek. A husband who watches his wife dress for a date he has planned is already in a different relationship than the one who sat on the couch in quietness only an hour before. We define the success of the marriage by the presence of these active, shared rituals.

When the couple returns to your office after that first assigned date, you must focus entirely on the logistics of the event. You do not ask how they felt during the dinner or whether they enjoyed the movie. We know that if you ask about feelings, they will retreat into their familiar pattern of criticism and defense. One partner will say the evening felt forced, and the other will use that admission as an excuse to stop trying. You must prevent this by demanding a factual report of the evening. I once sat with a couple who had not spoken for three weeks before I assigned them a forty-five minute walk in a local park. When they sat down for the follow-up, the wife immediately began to cry about how lonely she felt during the walk. I interrupted her. I asked her exactly what color the husband’s shoes were. I asked the husband to describe the specific path they took. By forcing them to recount the physical details, I moved the focus from their internal misery to the external reality of their cooperation. We use this technique to solidify the fact that the task was completed. The quality of the interaction is secondary to the occurrence of the interaction.

You will often hear the objection that the date did not count because it was not spontaneous. You must meet this objection with clinical authority. You tell them that their spontaneous behavior is exactly what brought them to therapy. Their natural inclinations have led to a stalemate, so spontaneity is currently their enemy. I tell my clients that a forced act of kindness is more difficult to perform than a spontaneous one, and therefore it is more valuable. It requires a deliberate choice of the will. We view the “it felt fake” argument as a sign that the intervention is working. It means the couple is acting outside of their established, dysfunctional roles. If they were comfortable, you would not be doing your job. You must remain unimpressed by their complaints of awkwardness. You are not there to make them feel comfortable in the short term. You are there to change the sequence of their interactions.

If the couple fails to complete the task, you must introduce an ordeal. We do not explore the reasons for the failure, and we do not accept excuses about busy schedules or sick children. If you accept an excuse, you are telling the couple that their excuses are more powerful than your directives. Instead, you make the consequences of failing to date more unpleasant than the date itself. I worked with a man and woman who “forgot” to go to the botanical garden as I had instructed. For the next week, I told them that if they missed their scheduled time together, they had to wake up at three in the morning and polish the silver or clean the grout in the bathroom for two hours. They had to do this together, in silence, and they could not go back to sleep until the task was finished. When they returned the following week, they had completed three dates. The prospect of the ordeal had made the botanical garden seem like a relief. You use the ordeal to shift the cost of resistance. When the price of staying the same becomes higher than the price of changing, the couple will choose to change.

We must also be alert to the interference of the wider family hierarchy. In many distressed marriages, a child or an in-law has been recruited into a coalition to prevent the couple from being alone together. You will see this when a child suddenly develops a fever or a behavioral problem the moment the parents prepare to leave the house. You must instruct the parents that the date is a medical necessity for the marriage and cannot be canceled. I once supervised a case where the husband’s mother lived with the couple and would consistently “fall” or feel dizzy on Saturday nights. I instructed the husband to hire a professional nurse for those three hours and to leave the house regardless of his mother’s complaints. By doing this, you are forcing the husband to choose his wife over his mother. You are realigning the hierarchy so the marital bond is the primary relationship in the house. This is not about being unkind to the mother. This is about establishing a functional perimeter around the couple.

Once the couple has proven they can follow your precise instructions for a date, you can introduce more complex tasks that involve mystery and surprise. You might tell the husband to plan a Saturday afternoon but keep the destination a secret from the wife. You tell the wife that her only task is to be ready at one o’clock and to refrain from asking questions. This places the husband in a position of leadership and the wife in a position of receptivity. I often use this when the wife has taken on a parental role and the husband has become a rebellious or passive child. By forcing him to plan and her to follow, you are reversing a dysfunctional power dynamic. You must specify that if she asks a question about the destination, the date is immediately canceled and they must both spend the afternoon performing a tedious chore in separate rooms. We use the threat of the chore to maintain the structure of the task.

In the second phase of courtship, you can assign “the pretend technique.” You tell one partner to act as if they are intensely interested in the other for a period of two hours. The other partner is told that their spouse will be pretending, but they do not know when the two-hour window will occur. This creates a state of heightened observation. The partner who is not pretending begins to look for signs of affection and interest. I once had a husband who was so convinced his wife hated him that he stopped looking at her entirely. I told the wife to pick one evening to pretend she was still in love with him. The husband spent the entire week watching her every move, trying to figure out if she was acting or if she was being sincere. By the time they returned to my office, he had noticed five different positive behaviors that he had previously been ignoring. We use this to break the cycle of negative selective attention. It does not matter if the behavior was “real.” The fact that the husband was looking for positive signs changed his experience of the relationship.

You must always remain the director of these scenes. If the couple tries to negotiate the terms of the date, you must refuse. If they want to go to a movie instead of a restaurant because it involves less talking, you tell them no. We understand that they want to avoid talking because talking leads to conflict. You must insist on the restaurant because it forces them to manage the tension of being together without a screen to distract them. You give them a specific topic they are allowed to discuss, such as their plans for a hypothetical vacation, and you forbid them from talking about the children or the household budget. I have found that giving a couple a “forbidden list” of topics is often more effective than giving them a list of things to say. It creates a narrow channel for their communication, which prevents them from drifting into the rocky areas of their history. You are building a new set of memories that are not contaminated by the old arguments. A husband who successfully describes a dream house to his wife without an argument has achieved a significant clinical victory. Every completed directive is a brick in a new foundation. The practitioner who allows a couple to fail a task without a consequence is a practitioner who has lost control of the case. The structure of the therapy must be as firm as the structure of the date itself. The marital unit recovers when the partners recognize that the practitioner’s directives are the only way out of their current misery. Success in the courtship task is measured by the couple’s ability to follow an order they do not like for a result they have not yet seen. The practitioner observes the change in the couple’s physical proximity as the primary indicator of a shifting hierarchy.

You will notice a specific change in the couple’s behavior toward you as the intervention nears its conclusion. They no longer look to you for permission to speak, nor do they look to you to referee their disputes. Instead, they begin to form a secret alliance against your authority. We consider this the hallmark of a successful strategic intervention. When a husband and wife begin to complain together about your rigid demands or your insistence on specific attire, they are practicing a new form of cooperation. You must encourage this by becoming even more demanding. If the couple reports that they enjoyed their last date but found your instruction to avoid talking about the children to be difficult, you do not sympathize. You tell them that because they found it difficult, they must now go on two dates where child-related talk is punishable by a twenty dollar fine paid to a charity the other person chooses.

I once worked with a couple where the wife complained that my dress code for their date was outdated. I told her that her opinion on the fashion was irrelevant, but her compliance was mandatory. I instructed her to wear a specific shade of blue that her husband had once mentioned he liked, even though she claimed to hate it. She spent the entire next session telling me how controlling I was. While she spoke, her husband sat next to her and nodded in agreement. For the first time in two years, they were on the same side of an issue. They were united against me. We use this directed friction to pull the couple into a tighter orbit with one another.

You must remain the director until the moment you decide to dissolve the therapeutic relationship. We never allow the couple to decide when they are finished. If you allow them to choose the end date, you give them back the power to mismanage their hierarchy before it has stabilized. You wait until you see the husband taking initiative without being prompted by your tasks. I observed this in a case where a husband, who previously refused to plan anything, suddenly announced that he had booked a hotel room for the following weekend without my instruction. He did not ask for my approval: he simply reported it as a fact. At that point, I knew the internal hierarchy had corrected itself.

We often encounter a phenomenon where the couple attempts to revert to their old patterns of circular arguing just as they are getting better. This is a test of your resolve. You do not analyze their fear of change. You prescribe the relapse. You tell them that they have become too functional too quickly and that it is dangerous to improve at this rate. You command them to have a three hour argument on Thursday night. They must sit in the kitchen and bring up every old grievance they can remember. I have found that when you force a couple to argue on a schedule, the argument becomes a chore. One husband told me he fell asleep halfway through the prescribed fight because it was too much work to stay angry on a timer.

The pretend technique is a vital tool during this late phase. You use it when a client claims they cannot feel affection for their partner. You instruct the client to pretend they are a person who is deeply in love for exactly fifteen minutes every morning. They must perform the actions that a loving person would perform: making coffee, offering a compliment, or a brief physical touch. They are not to tell their spouse they are pretending. I instructed a wife to pretend she was interested in her husband’s hobby of restoring old watches. She had to ask three specific questions about the internal gears. Because he did not know she was pretending, he responded with genuine enthusiasm. The response of the spouse makes the pretense unnecessary over time.

We focus on the physical arrangement of the couple in your office as the primary data point. You should see a narrowing of the physical distance between them. In the first session, they likely sat on opposite ends of the sofa. By the final sessions, they should be sitting close enough that their shoulders might touch. I once had a couple who started holding hands specifically to annoy me because they knew I was focusing on their behavioral tasks. I accepted their defiance as a clinical victory. Their hand holding was a message to me that they no longer needed my directives to be close. You acknowledge these moments by becoming even more focused on trivial details, which forces them to cling to each other for support.

When the couple begins to report that they are too busy with their own social lives to complete your tasks, you are approaching termination. This is the only form of resistance we accept as a sign of health. You must then challenge them to prove they can maintain their relationship without your interference. You set a final ordeal. This ordeal should be a task that requires long term planning and cooperation. I told a couple they had to plan and execute a dinner party for six people without having a single disagreement about the menu or the guest list. If they argued, they had to cancel the party and pay me for an extra session. They hosted the party and sent me a photograph of the empty table afterward.

You must avoid the trap of becoming a friend to the couple. We are not there to be liked: we are there to be effective. If the couple leaves therapy thinking you were a bit too harsh but realizing they are now sleeping in the same bed again, you have done your job. Your authority is the temporary scaffolding that holds them up while they rebuild their own structure. Once the structure is sound, you remove the scaffolding abruptly. You do not fade away. You tell them that you are bored with their success and that there are more miserable couples who need your time. This bluntness prevents them from becoming dependent on your guidance.

I recall a husband who tried to thank me for saving his marriage. I told him I had done nothing but give him annoying instructions that he was smart enough to follow. I redirected the credit back to his ability to obey a directive. We do this to ensure the power remains within the marital unit. If they believe you saved them, they will come back the next time they have a minor disagreement. If they believe they survived you, they will stay together to prove they do not need you. You are the common enemy they had to overcome to find each other again.

The final session should be brief and functional. You review the rules of courtship one last time. You remind them that the moment they stop dating is the moment the hierarchy will collapse. You do not offer a warm farewell. You offer a final clinical observation about their progress. I once told a couple that they were now functional enough to be boring, which was the highest compliment I could give them. As they walked out of the room, the husband put his arm around his wife’s waist to lead her through the door. We watch for these small, automatic movements of protection and leadership. When the husband leads the wife out of the office, the hierarchy is restored.