The Courtship Task: Forcing a Distressed Couple to Date Again

A couple arrives with years of accumulated resentment and a verbal communication that has reached a dead end. They have explained their grievances to each other for years, and the structure of their interaction has not changed. Strategic therapy does not assume that insight into the past produces change in the present. It assumes that a change in behavior produces a change in the relationship. When a couple stops courting, they stop the 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, and it bypasses the cycle of accusation and defense entirely.

Behavior precedes emotion

The first objection you will meet is that the behavior is not spontaneous. Clients believe that for an act to mean anything, it must arise from genuine desire. This is an error in their logic. The feeling is an output, not an input.

Tell the couple that spontaneity is a luxury they cannot currently afford. 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. You take responsibility for the change, and they take responsibility for the action.

I worked with a couple who had not shared a meal outside the home in four years, claiming exhaustion and three young children. When I suggested dinner, the wife said she felt no spark and the husband said he would not take her out if she was going to be miserable. I told them their feelings were irrelevant to the task. The husband would select a specific restaurant and time. The wife would wear a dress she had not worn in a year. Two hours, no mention of the children or the finances.

Maximum specificity

If you tell a couple to be more romantic, they will fail, because they hold different definitions of romance. One thinks flowers, the other thinks help with the laundry. Specify the day, the time, the physical actions. Name the forbidden topics. A working instruction sounds like: Wednesday at seven, the husband picks the restaurant, the wife wears a dress she has not worn in a year, two hours, children and finances forbidden, the husband pays the bill before they sit down.

A man resistant to showing affection complained that his wife was always demanding things from him. I instructed him to kiss her on the cheek every morning at eight, regardless of how he felt, and instructed her to accept the kiss without comment. Making the kiss a requirement of the therapy 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 running an experiment.

The forbidden-topic list is often more powerful than a list of things to say. It creates a narrow channel that keeps the couple out of the rocky areas of their history. A husband who describes a dream house to his wife without an argument has built a memory uncontaminated by the old fights, and every completed directive is a brick in a new foundation.

The follow-up is about logistics, not feelings

When the couple returns from the first date, focus entirely on the logistics. Do not ask how they felt or whether they enjoyed it. Ask about feelings and they retreat into criticism and defense: one says the evening felt forced, the other uses that admission to stop trying. Demand a factual report instead. Who spoke first, what was said, how the other responded. You are looking for the sequence that leads to the disaster, because once you find it, you can give a directive that interrupts it. If they always fight when the bill comes, the husband pays before they sit down.

A couple who had not spoken for three weeks were assigned a forty-five-minute walk in a park. At the follow-up the wife began to cry about how lonely she felt during the walk. I interrupted and asked her what color the husband’s shoes were, and asked him to describe the exact path. Forcing them to recount the physical details moved the focus from their internal misery to the external reality that they had cooperated. The quality of the interaction is secondary to the occurrence of the interaction.

The “it felt fake” objection

You will hear that the date did not count because it was not spontaneous. Meet this with clinical authority. Their spontaneous behavior is what brought them to therapy. Their natural inclinations produced the stalemate, so spontaneity is currently the enemy. A forced act of kindness is harder to perform than a spontaneous one, which makes it more valuable, because it requires a deliberate act of will. The “it felt fake” complaint is the clearest sign the intervention is working. It means the couple is acting outside their established dysfunctional roles. If they were comfortable, you would not be doing your job.

The ordeal for failure

When the couple fails to complete the task, you do not explore the reasons and you do not accept excuses about busy schedules or sick children. Accepting an excuse tells the couple their excuses are more powerful than your directives. Instead, make the consequence of not dating more unpleasant than the date.

A couple who forgot to visit the botanical garden were told that for the next week, any missed time together meant waking at three in the morning to polish the silver or clean the bathroom grout for two hours, together, in silence, with no sleep until it was finished. They returned having completed three dates. The ordeal made the botanical garden seem like a relief. When the price of staying the same exceeds the price of changing, the couple chooses to change.

Family interference

In many distressed marriages a child or in-law has been recruited into a coalition to keep the couple from being alone. You see it when a child develops a fever or a behavioral problem the moment the parents prepare to leave. Instruct the parents that the date is a medical necessity for the marriage and cannot be canceled.

A husband’s mother who lived with the couple would feel dizzy or fall every Saturday night. I instructed the husband to hire a professional nurse for those three hours and leave regardless of his mother’s complaints. This forces him to choose his wife over his mother and realigns the hierarchy so the marital bond is the primary relationship in the house. This is not unkindness to the mother. It is a functional perimeter around the couple.

Reversing the hierarchy

Once the couple can follow precise instructions, introduce surprise. The husband plans a Saturday and keeps the destination secret. The wife’s only task is to be ready at one and to ask no questions, with the date canceled and replaced by a tedious chore in separate rooms if she asks. This places the husband in leadership and the wife in receptivity, which restores the tension a romantic relationship runs on.

I use this when the wife has taken a parental role and the husband has become a passive child. A couple where the wife made all the decisions because she found the husband passive had lost all sexual interest. By instructing the husband to take total control of a date, the hierarchy temporarily reversed, he made the decisions and she followed, and the tension came back.

The pretend technique

When a client claims they cannot feel affection, instruct them to pretend. One partner acts as if intensely interested in the other for fifteen minutes every morning, performing the actions a loving person performs, making coffee, offering a compliment, a brief touch, without telling the spouse it is pretend.

A husband convinced his wife hated him had stopped looking at her entirely. I told the wife to pick one evening to pretend she was still in love with him, and told him only that she would be pretending at some point that week, not when. He spent the week watching her every move, trying to tell whether she was acting or sincere, and noticed five positive behaviors he had been ignoring. It does not matter whether the behavior was real. The husband looking for positive signs changed his experience of the relationship.

Staying the director

If the couple tries to negotiate the terms of the date, refuse. If they want a movie instead of a restaurant because it involves less talking, say no. They want to avoid talking because talking leads to conflict, and the restaurant forces them to manage the tension of being together without a screen. Give them a permitted topic, like a hypothetical vacation, and forbid the children and the budget.

You will know the intervention is working when the couple stops looking to you for permission and starts forming a secret alliance against your authority. When they complain together about your rigid demands or your insistence on specific attire, they are practicing cooperation. Encourage it by becoming more demanding. A couple who enjoyed a date but found the no-children rule hard are told that because it was hard, they now owe two dates where child-talk costs a twenty-dollar fine to a charity the other chooses.

A wife once complained that my dress code was outdated, and I told her that her fashion opinion was irrelevant but her compliance was mandatory, instructing her to wear a shade of blue her husband had once mentioned liking. She spent the next session telling me how controlling I was while her husband nodded beside her. For the first time in two years they were on the same side of an issue, united against me. Directed friction pulls the couple into a tighter orbit with each other.

Prescribing the relapse

Couples often try to revert to circular arguing just as they are getting better, testing your resolve. Do not analyze their fear of change. Prescribe the relapse. Tell them they have become too functional too quickly and that improving at this rate is dangerous, then command a three-hour argument on Thursday night in the kitchen, every old grievance, on a timer. When a couple is forced to argue on schedule, the argument becomes a chore. One husband fell asleep halfway through the prescribed fight because staying angry on a timer was too much work.

Reading the room and ending

The primary data point is physical distance. In the first session the couple sits at opposite ends of the sofa. By the final sessions their shoulders nearly touch. One couple began holding hands specifically to annoy me, knowing I was focused on behavioral tasks, and I accepted the defiance as a victory, because the hand-holding told me they no longer needed my directives to be close.

You do not let the couple decide when they are finished, because that hands back the power to mismanage the hierarchy before it has stabilized. You wait until a partner takes initiative without prompting. A husband who previously refused to plan anything announced he had booked a hotel for the following weekend without my instruction, reporting it as fact rather than asking approval. At that point the internal hierarchy had corrected itself.

The same signal appears when the couple reports they are too busy with their own social lives to complete your tasks. This is the only resistance you accept as health. Set a final ordeal that requires long-term cooperation, like planning a dinner party for six with no disagreement about the menu, cancellation and an extra session owed if they argue. One couple hosted the party and sent me a photograph of the empty table afterward.

Do not become the couple’s friend. You are there to be effective, not liked. If they leave thinking you were a bit harsh while realizing they share a bed again, you have done the job. Once the structure is sound, remove the scaffolding abruptly. Tell them you are bored with their success and that other miserable couples need your time. When a husband tried to thank me for saving his marriage, I told him I had only given him annoying instructions he was smart enough to follow, and redirected the credit to his ability to obey a directive. If the couple believes you saved them, they return at the next disagreement. If they believe they survived you, they 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 is brief. Review the rules of courtship, remind them that the moment they stop dating the hierarchy collapses, and offer a clinical observation rather than a warm farewell. I once told a couple they were now functional enough to be boring, the highest compliment I could give. As they left, the husband put his arm around his wife’s waist to lead her through the door. Watch for these small automatic movements of protection and leadership. When the husband leads the wife out of the office, the hierarchy is restored.