By the time most couples book a first session, research and our own intake conversations both point to the same figure: roughly six years of quiet unhappiness has usually passed. That’s six years of a pattern getting more, not less, entrenched.
You don’t need a crisis to justify starting. A useful marker isn’t ‘how bad is it,’ but ‘has this stopped changing on its own.’ If the same disagreement resurfaces with no new information and no shift in how you handle it, that’s a pattern, not a bad week.
Other early signals worth listening to: you’ve started rehearsing conversations with your partner in your head rather than having them out loud; a decision has been ‘we’ll talk about it later’ for months; or you notice you’re more emotionally honest with a friend than with your partner.
None of these are emergencies. That’s exactly the point — they’re the moments where a few sessions do the most good, precisely because nothing has hardened yet.