When Loving Men are Drifting Apart | Counselling Works…?

Why Men in Relationships Considers Counselling 💔

What brings a male couple in to counselling? (Alanjvm)

Maybe repeated arguments have started to circle without ever reaching a resolution. Maybe intimacy has faded into a silence.

Sometimes the problem isn’t about conflicts, but there is a quiet sense of disconnection; a feeling that you’re living side by side rather than together.

Men – friends or boyfriends – who are drifting apart may not know who to turn to for help.

Stress from work or family, rejection, internalised homophobia, having suicidal thoughts or simply experiencing the decline of a gay community to lean on are just some experiences that can hurt men’s relationships with one another.

But when love feels complicated and the conflicts exceed what men can manage alone, counselling for men’s relationships offers partners an opportunity to pause, talk openly, and rediscover what drew them to each other. It works for men both in an intimate or platonic relationship.

By caring enough to invest in your relationship, counselling gives you a neutral space to understand each other more deeply, strengthen emotional safety, and rebuild a partnership that feels alive again.

An Integrated Approach that helps Men 🔮

Counsellor Dean Richardson MNCPS (Accred/Reg) applies an integrated systemic & psychodynamic approach to couple counselling. This means that he helps you both look at your relationship from at least two really useful angles.

Counselling Theories and Models (Gerd Altmann)

• The systemic side shows the patterns you fall into – who withdraws, who pursues, and how conversations spin out. Think of this as zooming out and watching how you behave together.
• The psychodynamic side goes deeper: it explores how past experiences – messages about masculinity, early rejection, or the stress of hiding parts of yourself – can shape how you connect now.

Combined together, these views of looking at relationships can help you, as the couple, begin to see your behaviour cycles more clearly, and reveal the hidden feelings that have been fuelling unhappy behaviour.

Healing your Partnership through Comprehension 💡

Many gay men carry emotional weight from earlier years: family rejection, bullying, or the effort of always explaining who they are. Most of us have experienced homophobia, and some of us still feel fear at the core of our lives. Experiences like these can result in a kind of armour that grows, making it harder for you to trust and be close.

Healing by Understanding (Alessandro Alle)

In counselling, we create an emotionally safe environment where both partners can take the risk of lowering their defences (aka the “armour”).

The counsellor will help guide your conversations so that both of you feel heard rather than just feeling you’re receiving nothing but blame from your partner.

When defences begin to soften, empathy has room to grow – the first real step toward restoring genuine intimacy in your relationship.

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How Couple Counselling Addresses Stuck Patterns 🧩

Gay male couples can become stuck in repetitive patterns of behaviour. Arguing about chores, sex, or time together is rarely just about those topics, but perhaps these are the topics the couple feel they can argue about without opening the proverbial can of worms (i.e. dealing with the sensitive topics that they really want to).

Stuck Behaviour (Arek Socha)

Often the same emotional pattern keeps playing out: one partner withdraws, the other pushes for closeness, and the loop repeats.

In counselling, the systemic lens helps us recognise the loop, while the psychodynamic lens helps us understand where it came from (and how it developed) in the first place.

Maybe a long time ago, one partner learnt that needing anyone would lead to rejection, and the other partner learnt to defend rather than feel vulnerable, resulting in the relationship becoming helplessly behaviourally stuck.

When learning to detect patterns of behaviour and what they’re really about under the surface, the couple can change how they respond to one another: pain becomes visible, not just provocational, and the couple can manage the actual pain together, rather than argue about who is supposed to be washing the dishes.

Rediscovering Connection between Men’s Relationships 💘

Connection doesn’t always mean complete understanding of their partner, perfect sex, constant romance or holding hands at the cinema.

Rediscover Intimacy (Tyli Jura)

Connection and/or intimacy are about feeling safe enough to be yourself and to share your needs with your partner.

When vital aspects of your relationship are lost, counselling can help rebuild intimacy and safety, and when safety returns, physical closeness can follow naturally.

Therapy encourages curiosity – asking fresh questions about each other’s wants, fantasies, and boundaries. By employing curiosity, the couple can learn new information – and with new information comes new choices and new directions in which to take the relationship.

These conversations, handled with care, can lead to a more honest and satisfying sex life as well as both partners developing a better relationship with intimate affection.

Beneficial Tools & Exercises to Improve Connection 👨🏻‍🔧

Counselling isn’t just talk. You get to develop your own clear tools that you can use at home:

Relationship Tools (Steve Buissinne)

• How to spot and name your relationship patterns before they escalate.
• Simple communication techniques that prevent arguments from turning personal.
• Ways to ask for what you need without triggering shame or withdrawal.
• Steps to rebuild trust after distance or small betrayals.

These tools – when developed together with your counsellor – can help you move from reacting defensively to choosing how you want to be with each other.

Taking Pride in Growth & Achievements 🏳️‍🌈

When two men invest in their relationship, they strengthen more than their bond – they strengthen a partnership that can weather stress, change, and outside pressures.

Pride through Growth

Counselling helps you bring your full selves – resilience, vulnerability, humour – into your distinct relationship.

By bringing your true selves, your relationship can grow, and you can both take pride in that growth.

Couples in counselling can build a shared confidence, and the quiet pride that comes from choosing to work through difficulties to create a more honest, joyful partnership may be the most satisfying achievement the both of you achieve together.

A First Step is Simple Conversation 🗣️

It’s normal to hope problems will resolve on their own. But relationships don’t come with instructions, and when they go wrong, there’s no manual to refer to. Asking for professional support doesn’t mean you failed; it means you care about the future of the relationship.

First Steps in Counselling (sayays)

If you want to explore couple counselling, look for therapists (a) experienced with LGBTQ+ relationships and (b) who are qualified to employ an integrated systemic and psychodynamic theoretical model of therapy.

Online therapy for gay male relationships is no different than meeting your counsellor in his office – except you’re using video conferencing devices just like you do for business, and just like you did with family and friends during the 2019/20 Lockdowns.

One honest conversation together in the presence of a skilled, experienced counsellor like Dean Richardson MNCPS (Accred/Reg) could be the beginning of lasting change for you both.

Get in Contact Today… 📝

You might like to arrange to make a first conversation with Counsellor Dean. That’s easy to do, using this website’s Contact Me page.

So if you’re thinking: “my boyfriend and I are drifting apart” and you’d like to develop ways to nip that in the bud, let’s create a big, easy button for you both to press together… Are you ready?