The best way to predict your future is to create it.

If your relationship feels stuck, strained, or even on the brink, you're likely searching for something powerful enough to create real change. You may have considered couples therapy—sitting down with a therapist for 45 minutes a week. While that method has its place, there's another option that can bring about deep transformation more quickly: a marriage intensive.

A marriage intensive is a focused, multi-day experience where couples work intensively with a therapist or coach to make major progress in a short amount of time. Unlike traditional therapy, which happens in small weekly sessions, intensives provide the space and time to fully engage in your relationship challenges without interruption or delay.

Most couples wait far too long—on average four to seven years—before seeking professional help. By the time they walk into a therapy session, the issues are deeply rooted, and emotions are running high. Unfortunately, the traditional model of one 45-minute session per week barely scratches the surface.

In weekly sessions, therapists often spend weeks or even months simply getting to know the couple’s dynamic—identifying patterns, understanding triggers, and digging into personal histories. That’s a slow and often frustrating process for both the couple and the therapist.

In contrast, a marriage intensive allows the therapist to gather and synthesize this information quickly. With hours of uninterrupted time, the learning curve is dramatically shortened. The therapist becomes more effective, faster—offering targeted, relevant guidance from the start. As a result, the couple begins seeing results much sooner.

A marriage intensive, however, is designed to get to the heart of the matter. One of the core goals of an intensive is to uncover and address the deepest sources of pain and resentment. In my own intensives, I spend time with each partner individually to understand their history and perspective, then help them identify the major resentments driving the wedge between them. We spend the rest of the intensive systematically working through those resentments, one by one. That clarity and depth are hard to achieve in traditional therapy.

One of the most frustrating things about weekly therapy is the long wait between sessions. Let’s say you talk about one resentment this week—then you wait seven more days to talk about the next. Meanwhile, you’re still living with unspoken frustrations, emotional tension, and daily conflict. It’s like trying to mop up water while the faucet is still running.

In a marriage intensive, that pattern is broken. Because you have continuous, focused time together, you’re able to clear the air in a way that’s just not possible in spaced-out sessions. You don't have to compartmentalize or suppress your pain anymore. You can finally get it all out, process it, and begin healing. The emotional relief couples feel from this is often one of the most transformative parts of the experience.

Couples who come to therapy are often in crisis. They’re not sure if they’ll make it. They feel emotionally exhausted, confused, or defeated. The once-a-week model can unintentionally reinforce that hopelessness—because progress feels slow, and the issues feel insurmountable. There’s too much ground to cover, and not enough time to do it.

But marriage intensives offer something different. Hope. And they offer it fast. When couples are able to work through multiple issues in one weekend—when they see resentments melt, communication improve, and emotional connection re-emerge—they begin to believe that change is truly possible. They start to feel empowered. The darkness lifts. The progress is not just faster—it’s deeper. And with that progress comes renewed optimism about the future.

When problems escalate due to communication breakdowns, my couples counseling intensives can make a difference. Through meaningful exercises and heartfelt discussions, you learn to communicate more effectively to resolve conflicts and bond better.