Science Monday: Do women have more power to get their men to come to counseling?

The nightmare of every beginning counselor: your new client doesn’t show up for the second session. The first session seemed to go just fine. But the client fails to show and doesn’t call or return calls to reschedule. What happened, the counselor wonders. Was it me? There are a number of interesting attempts to find out why people stop counseling before they really get going. There is good evidence that premature termination happens because of bad connections between client and counselor. Younger counselors have more premature endings. It may be more the result of the counselor meeting the client’s preconceived expectations as much as the greenness of the counselor. Lack of adequate explanation of the counseling process also plays into early endings. But, three Marriage and Family students did a study (unpublished) of how gender of the person making the first contact impacts the longevity of a couples’ counseling relationship with their counselor. Before I mention their findings, a couple of caveats first. This study is of clients of a university counseling center. The counselors are grad students and not professionals. clients in this setting usually are short-term. The sample size was pretty small. Despite these issues that limit generalization, here’s a couple things they found:
1. When males initiated first contact with the counseling center, the couple NEVER went beyond 4 sessions. In fact, they averaged 1.2 sessions before quitting.
2. When females initiated first contact, they averaged nearly 8 sessions before ending (and some continued for 45 sessions).

Are women more invested in keeping the relationship going? Are men less so? Do women have more power in getting their spouse to come/continue in counseling than men? Though I haven’t done any research on this, I suspect my female clients stay longer in therapy than do my male clients, though this is not always true. I have seen that when men want their wives to go to counseling, the women resist more than the opposite situation. Women seem more effective in getting their husbands to come than the men are. Is that because women hold a secret weapon?