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What street interviews reveal about myths and fears that keep couples from seeking help.
On August 6, 2026, PIX11 reporter Ben Aaron stopped New Yorkers on the street and asked a simple question: What do you actually think about couples therapy? The segment, part of the outlet's New York Living series, produced answers ranging from cautious curiosity to flat dismissal, a small but telling sample of how the public still frames a service most clinicians consider preventive care rather than crisis intervention.
For MFTs and students entering the field, those unscripted reactions matter more than another satisfaction survey. They expose the exact language, assumptions, and hesitations that show up in an intake call before a client ever describes a real conflict.
What follows translates that street-level data, paired with current research, into working knowledge: which myths recur, where generational and cultural fault lines sit, how media narratives reinforce stigma, and what that means for an MFT private practice startup built on referrals and trust.
Couples therapy is having a strange moment in American public life: it's more visible than ever, yet half of partnered adults still say they'd never set foot in a session. That contradiction, more than any single statistic, is what shapes how the general public actually talks about the work MFTs do.
A recent PIX11 segment, Ben on the Street: Couples Therapy, sent reporter Ben Aaron through New York City asking passersby about relationships and whether they'd ever try counseling with a partner. The answers range from enthusiastic endorsements to nervous laughter to flat refusals, and that spread is the point. Street interviews aren't scientific, but they mirror what national surveys are finding: opinions on couples therapy are fragmenting by age, gender, and prior exposure.
The polling underneath those sidewalk answers tells a layered story:
What non-users believe about therapy looks very different from what clients report. Among coupled adults surveyed in 2024, 25% think couples therapy is only for relationships in crisis, 30% believe attending signals the relationship is failing,2 and 11% of partnered adults in the 2025 BetterHelp data equate it with admitting incompatibility.4 Meanwhile, 65% of adults in a 2025 YouGov poll agree that therapy improves relationships,6 and 27% say a partner being in therapy actually makes them more attractive.5
Clinicians draw on the therapy approaches used by MFTs to frame couples work as maintenance: communication skills, repair after conflict, adjustment during transitions. The public frames it as an emergency room. That gap, more than cost or scheduling, is the perception problem MFTs are working against, and it's the one that responds most directly to how therapists talk about their practice publicly.
Street interviews like the PIX11 segment featuring Ben Aaron reveal how deeply rooted certain misconceptions about couples therapy remain. Below are five of the most persistent myths, along with what clinical evidence actually shows and how each belief can delay or prevent couples from ever booking that first appointment.
| Common Myth | What Research and Clinical Experience Show | How It Blocks a First Session |
|---|---|---|
| Therapy is only for relationships that are failing or on the verge of divorce | Couples who enter therapy early, before resentment hardens, consistently report better outcomes. Many MFTs work with healthy couples on enrichment goals, not just crisis intervention. Therapy can function as preventive care, much like an annual physical. | Partners wait until conflict has become entrenched, often arriving years after problems began. By that point, motivation is lower and repair takes longer, making the process feel harder than it needed to be. |
| The therapist will take sides or blame one partner | Licensed marriage and family therapists are trained to maintain therapeutic neutrality. The goal is to understand relational patterns, not to assign fault. Techniques such as emotionally focused therapy deliberately shift the focus from individual blame to shared dynamics. | One or both partners resist scheduling because they fear being singled out as 'the problem.' This power struggle over who is at fault can stall the decision to seek help indefinitely. |
| Needing therapy means we are bad at communicating | Communication difficulties are one of the most common reasons couples seek therapy, but struggling to communicate under stress is a normal human experience, not a character flaw. Therapy teaches specific skills that most people were never formally taught. | Shame about perceived inadequacy keeps couples from admitting they could use guidance. They may try to 'fix it themselves' repeatedly, burning through goodwill before ever contacting a therapist. |
| Couples therapy is too expensive or time consuming | Many therapists offer sliding scale fees, and an increasing number of insurance plans now cover couples sessions. Research shows that even short term, structured interventions (sometimes as few as eight to twelve sessions) can produce lasting improvement. | Cost and time concerns give couples a practical sounding reason to postpone, even when affordable options exist. The assumption that therapy requires years of weekly visits discourages people from exploring what is actually available in their area. |
| Therapy will make things worse by reopening old wounds | Skilled MFTs use structured approaches designed to process difficult emotions safely. Reopening painful topics within a guided framework typically reduces, rather than increases, long term distress. Avoidance, by contrast, tends to let unresolved issues grow. | Fear of emotional pain leads partners to adopt an 'if it's not broken, don't fix it' stance, even when the relationship clearly is struggling. This avoidance can persist until one partner reaches a breaking point. |
Generational divides in therapy acceptance are not just anecdotal. Survey data from 2024 reveals a clear gradient: younger adults in committed relationships are more likely to have attended couples therapy than their older counterparts. This shift reflects broader cultural changes, including social media normalization of mental health conversations, earlier exposure to therapy culture through school counseling and online content, and evolving relationship norms that frame therapy as maintenance rather than crisis intervention. Gen Z and Millennials increasingly view couples therapy the way previous generations viewed annual physicals: a routine investment in long-term health. Meanwhile, nearly half of Baby Boomers still describe therapy as a last resort, and 75% reported in a 2025 survey that they would never consider couples counseling at all. For MFTs, understanding these generational fault lines is essential for tailoring outreach, adjusting messaging, and meeting each demographic where it stands.
For many couples, the hardest barrier to therapy is not the copay or the calendar. It is the fear that sitting in a therapist's office means admitting failure, exposing private pain, or being judged by someone who does not understand their culture or relationship.
In one premarital study of married couples, wives were more likely than husbands to say they would consider therapy: 51% compared with 40%.1 Intent to seek therapy showed a smaller gap, 41% for wives and 35% for husbands. In that same sample, only 27% of married couples had actually received therapy. Yet when asked about talking to a "professional counselor," men and women were nearly identical: 26% of husbands and 25% of wives said they were willing.1 That wording shift matters. Some men may resist the word "therapy" but still accept a professional conversation under a different label. Clinicians who only market "couples therapy" may miss them.
A large 2020 relationship checkup study, in which 69.2% of participants lived below the poverty line and only 58.5% were married, found that men, people of color, lower-income individuals, and cohabiting couples began with less favorable attitudes toward couple treatment.2 Women and married participants were generally more positive. But the same study found those gaps were not fixed: people of color and cohabiting individuals showed larger positive attitude change after a brief intervention.2 This suggests stigma is often a product of limited exposure, not fixed identity.
For sexual minority men of color partnered with White men, relationship-specific stigma can be higher. Interracial couples report microaggressions, family and community disapproval, and a real fear of being pathologized by clinicians without racial awareness. LGBTQ+ people of color may reduce help-seeking even when their relationship satisfaction and identity affirmation are high, because heterosexist oppression itself becomes a barrier to finding lgbtq affirming mental health care.
A wider limitation deserves attention. Couple therapy research through 2019 underreported race, sexual orientation, age, and income, and samples were overwhelmingly White, heterosexual, and cisgender. That invisibility can signal that couple therapy is "not for us" to many queer and gender-minor clients. It is not evidence of lower need.
A single marketing message about "married couples" or a narrow focus on communication issues in couples therapy will underreach cohabiting partners, unmarried couples, men, lower-income families, and LGBTQ+ relationships. Instead, use language that names multiple relationship types, avoids assuming failure, and offers a low-stakes first conversation.
Two couples can walk into the same therapist's office for very different reasons. One is trying to salvage a relationship after an affair and may be pursuing affair recovery therapy. The other is doing a check-in before a stressful move. On screen, audiences mostly see the first story, and that asymmetry shapes the impact of movie therapists on public perception, which drives whether the public views couples therapy as failure management or relationship maintenance. The contrast matters for outreach: people avoid help when they expect blame, embarrassment, or an emergency-room version of therapy.
Many TV and film plots introduce a therapist only after infidelity, a divorce threat, or a blowout fight. The clinician becomes a referee, a last resort, or a punchline. That pattern is not neutral. A 2008 study of 369 college students found TV exposure influenced therapy attitudes through perceived stigma and anticipated benefits; the model explained 54 percent of the variance in attitudes and 47 percent in intentions.1 Viewers who consumed more comedy and drama with psychological treatment associated therapy with more stigma and less anticipated benefit.2 A 2009 study added a similar finding: heavier TV viewing and more frequent comedy or drama exposure predicted more stigma, negative expectations, and lower willingness to seek services.3 That is not just a cultural curiosity; it predicts whether a couple books a first session.
Not every screen treatment tilts negative. In experimental viewing of selected In Treatment episodes, willingness to seek help rose after an early episode, and perceived benefits increased.4 A 2014 APA summary reported that a positive impression of a movie character's psychologist reduced stigma, while negative portrayals of people with mental illness increased it.5 More recently, a 2024 USC Annenberg report found viewers of best-practice mental health storylines had greater knowledge, reduced stigma, and more willingness to seek help, including therapy and support groups.6 For MFTs, the takeaway is not that media is uniformly hostile, but that the narrative frame drives the public response.
Social platforms have begun to offer an alternative: therapists and creators showing couples work as ongoing maintenance rather than emergency intervention. That content may help normalize early and preventive care. Still, quantitative evidence on social media is sparse. No couples-therapy-specific study establishes a direct link between social media exposure and reduced stigma, and most recent material is media analysis or survey work. MFTs should treat the public perception gap as partly a media education problem. Clinicians who appear online, correct misconceptions, and model calm, ordinary therapy can do what a single TV subplot often cannot: show couples work before the crisis.
Did you know? In a recent survey, 30% of people said seeking couples therapy signals a relationship is failing, according to Therapy Explained's couples therapy statistics. While no formal study has tallied how often TV and film echo that crisis-only framing, entertainment portrayals likely reinforce this misconception, making early, preventive therapy feel unnecessary until a relationship is already in trouble.
When a reporter walks up to strangers on a New York sidewalk and asks about couples therapy, the answers reveal something clinicians already know: most people are picturing a last resort, not a tune-up.
