SO HOW DID EVERYONE FEEL?

For starters, all six participants said they felt closer to their date after the session.

“I can't imagine not growing close with anyone after something like that,” Nancy said afterwards.

Danielle added that it felt like the experience made things feel more serious between her and Scott; they had talked about some things that she hadn’t talked about with previous partners until months if not years into the relationship. “It just sort of felt like we were ahead of the curve,” Danielle said.

That said, both Scott and Danielle didn’t feel like the session itself offered radically new insights about each other. After committing to do the session, they had spent the days leading up to it trying to guess what topics would come up in couples therapy and had already started having wildly open and honest conversations—which, they admit, was itself an unexpected benefit of deciding to go to couples therapy. They both also said the session itself allowed them to contextualize their ways of being in certain situations and gave them a common, useful language to name their behaviors. 

“It took a very real but, in retrospect, kind of thin understanding of a person and added three-dimensionality to it,” Scott explained. “You don’t often sit with a person in normal conversation and ask the why’s and finding out about the moral stances they have on the world or how they operate emotionally.”

For Nancy and Anlee, the biggest benefit was accelerating the process of getting vulnerable and sharing about themselves—something both of them admitted tended to be hard for them, as both tend to be a little shy and prefer not to talk about themselves. For Anlee, it also felt really good to just know that Nancy actually liked her. “I'm prone to think the worst. If I'm not affirmed or reassured, then I'm just going to think like, oh, they don't like me. They don't want me, whatever,” Anlee said. “But she definitely really helped and was really open with that kind of reassurance.”

Nearly all of the participants, including Nancy and Anlee, also said they felt like they’d learned a lot about themselves as individuals.

“I am more aware of my faults now and how I move through conflict with another person, which is really, truly invaluable to me to know these things about myself,” Nancy said. “I can bring that forward [to] whoever I meet in the future.”

The participants’ experiences align with the body of research around couples therapy, which have found the therapeutic experience enhances “emotional, psychological, sexual, physical, relationship, temporal and intellectual intimacy.” It’s also been shown to support healthy attachment, enhance the partners’ coping abilities, and even support their individual mental health

But not all of our participants felt completely transformed by the experience. Reflecting back on the date, Gabriel had positive but measured feelings about the date. In the beginning, he felt a little apprehensive and underwhelmed with the prompts, which he found to be dry. He warmed up more as the questions picked up throughout the session and delved into more vulnerable themes, though he still felt like it was hard to answer any of the prompts in a straightforward way because of how little he and Bianca knew each other. It wasn’t easy to answer questions about their priorities or relationship history without offering some background first, he explained. To dive deeply, they needed more context and texture about each other. The two ended up improvising a bit and modifying the questions so they could best learn about each other.

“We don’t know each other well, so we just talk about like, for us, like very objective observations of ourselves and how we feel,” he explained. “It didn’t feel like we were trying to get anything out of one another or trying to push the conversation a certain way.”

Timing also got in the way for Gabriel, as well as Nancy and Anlee. Discussions only lasted minutes before the therapist would swiftly move onto the next section in the program to keep on schedule. Overall, Gabriel felt the session to be a bit clinical, though he did feel like modifying the questions helped him and his date really divulge a lot.

Bianca left feeling surprised by how much she ended up having in common with this virtual stranger. “We were just strangers, and then we entered this thing together. And then we found out like, oh, there’s actually a lot we have in common,” she mused, smiling. “I over-analyze who I should date or lend my life to … [but] maybe it just takes someone to show up and want to do the work.”

All three pairs said they wanted to continue getting to know each other and were down for another date.