Something has been shifting in the couples work I have been doing lately, and I think it is worth naming.
We have always known that money is one of the most common sources of conflict in relationships. But what I am beginning to notice is something a little different, and arguably more complex.
It is not just couples fighting about money. It is couples who want to separate, but cannot afford to. Couples who are, in the most practical sense, financially trapped inside a relationship that has run its course.
This is new territory. And I think our field needs to start paying attention to it.
The Economic Reality Couples Are Living In
To understand what is happening in the therapy room, it helps to understand what is happening outside of it.
Canada’s housing market has undergone a dramatic and well documented shift. Following a historic rate hiking cycle from 2022 to 2023 that raised the benchmark cost of borrowing to 5%, national average home prices fell by roughly 15%, but still remain significantly elevated compared to pre pandemic levels.
For couples who bought at or near the peak, selling now can mean absorbing a significant loss on what is likely their largest financial asset.
At the same time, as of early 2024, a homebuyer purchasing the average Canadian home with a standard down payment would be spending nearly 48% of pre tax household income on their mortgage, with cities like Toronto reaching as high as 73%.
These are numbers that make dual income living not just convenient, but in many cases, necessary for survival.
Family lawyers are already seeing this play out directly, noting that higher interest rates have made it harder for divorcing couples to buy one another out of a shared home, and that even couples who agree to sell are often finding they cannot each afford to rent separately in the same city.
As one lawyer put it, “They just cannot do that, because they cannot afford two rents in expensive areas.”
Statistics Canada data from 2024 confirms the broader picture. Nearly 45% of Canadians reported being very concerned about housing affordability, and more than one in five households were already spending more than 30% of their income on shelter costs.
For couples on the edge of separation, these are not just statistics. They are the walls closing in.
What This Looks Like Clinically
I have now experienced couples in session who arrive not with the goal of repairing their relationship, but with a much more complicated question: how do we survive each other while we figure out what comes next?
This is a different kind of clinical presentation, and it requires a different kind of attunement from us as therapists.
These couples are not necessarily ambivalent about the relationship in the traditional sense. They may be quite clear that the partnership is over.
What they are ambivalent about, and often ashamed of, is the financial reality that is keeping them under the same roof.
The shame piece matters here.
Recent research on financially distressed couples in therapy found that shame was a pervasive experience, affecting not just how partners perceived themselves, but how they saw their place in their relationship and in society more broadly.
When couples feel they should be able to leave but cannot, that sense of being stuck can intensify feelings of failure, resentment, and helplessness on both sides.
Research also tells us that financial stress does not stay neatly contained in its own compartment.
Studies have found that daily financial worry is linked to lower relationship satisfaction, and this effect extends not just to the person experiencing the stress, but to their partner as well.
A 2024 study by the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy found that 56% of couples cited money, including spending habits, debt management, and saving, as the topic they argued about more than anything else.
When a couple is trapped by financial circumstance and also experiencing the relational erosion that financial stress produces, the compounding effect can be significant.
A Clinical and Ethical Tension
This is where I think our role as therapists becomes particularly nuanced.
Traditionally, couples therapy operates on a premise of genuine choice. The idea that both partners are choosing to be in the room, working toward something.
When financial entrapment removes that freedom, the clinical contract becomes more complicated.
Are we helping people reconnect?
Helping them coexist?
Helping them grieve a relationship they cannot yet leave?
In my experience, the answer is often all three, sometimes within the same session.
Emotionally Focused Therapy gives us a useful framework here.
Even in relationships where the romantic bond may have eroded, the attachment system does not simply switch off. People still need to feel seen, safe, and not alone, especially when they are frightened about their future.
Understanding the emotional undercurrents in these sessions, the fear, the grief, the resentment, and the occasional flicker of tenderness, remains clinically relevant even when the couple’s goal is not reconciliation.
What may need to shift is how we hold the frame.
Being explicit with ourselves, and sometimes with clients, about what we are actually working toward in a given season of therapy is important.
Clarity around goals, even provisional ones, can reduce the emotional chaos that financial entrapment tends to generate.
What This Might Mean Going Forward
I do not think this is a temporary blip.
Canada’s housing supply shortfall is estimated to require roughly 6 million new homes by 2030 to restore affordability, and even with rate cuts, the structural conditions that make single income living precarious are unlikely to resolve quickly.
If anything, we may see more couples arriving in our offices in this kind of in between state, not quite together, not quite apart, trying to find their footing in circumstances that feel entirely out of their control.
As clinicians, this asks something of us.
It asks us to hold complexity without rushing to resolve it.
To stay curious about what people actually need, rather than what we assume they came for.
And to expand our understanding of what couples therapy can be.
Not just a space for repair, but sometimes a space for navigating an impossibly hard reality with as much dignity and care as possible.
The economics of love and loss are changing.
Our practice needs to keep pace.
