What about marital counseling?

Thanks to the Divorce Law Journal for this post. See the post Something Worth Fighting For for a much longer excerpt from the New York Times Magazine article from August 12, Can This Marriage Be Saved?. This paragraph caught my eye.

Like the vast majority of therapists in the United States, Coché describes her therapeutic orientation as “eclectic.” What’s most prominent in her approach, however, is the influence of existentialist philosophy, a theoretical framework that assumes people are, above all, driven to find meaning in their lives. She also thinks “systemically,” such that, among other things, she’s attuned to how couples collude to create their own misery, often to insist upon it — because of some unseen comfort the ostensible misery provides. As the late psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell observed in “Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Over Time,” his 2002 book: “When patients complain of dead and lifeless marriages, it is often possible to show them how precious the deadness is to them.”

I am working on reading the whole thing - it is rather long. I do not know how long this will be available for free, so if you are interested then take a look now rather than later.