Couples Therapy for Gay Men in Croydon

You can be two men who love each other and still lie in the same bed like strangers, each waiting for the other to reach over first.

You're not fighting. That might almost be easier. You're just flat. Great on holiday, brilliant at a party, the couple your friends envy, and then strangers again by Tuesday.

Nothing is obviously wrong, which is part of what makes it so hard to talk about. You both keep busy. You keep it pleasant. And somewhere underneath, the aliveness that used to be between you has gone quiet, and neither of you quite knows when.

None of this is because you're gay. Being gay isn't the problem in the room. But the particular shapes this takes between two men, and what you each reach for instead of each other, are worth understanding properly.

I'm a BACP registered psychodynamic therapist, currently in advanced training at Tavistock Relationships, working with couples in Croydon. The work here isn't to take the openness, the drugs or the holidays away. It's to understand the quiet they're covering.

Because the quiet isn't nothing. It's usually full: of things that stopped being said, disappointments that got swallowed, a slow drift into being careful with each other. You each arrived in this relationship with a different sense of what closeness is safe, shaped by how you learned to attach long before you met.

So we look at what each of you is protecting when you turn away. What feels too dangerous to want out loud. What you're each afraid you'd find if you stopped filling the silence and actually looked at one another.

We won't just talk about it. The pattern that deadens things at home will show up here too, in the room, where we can finally see it and work with it instead of managing around it.

Maybe you've been together years and somewhere along the way the spark went quiet. Maybe you're newly serious and already sense the pattern setting in. Maybe you're thinking about opening up, or you already have and it's more complicated than you let on. Maybe one of you uses and the other doesn't, and you've stopped knowing how to talk about it.

You don't need to have it diagnosed. You just need to know that being good on holiday and strangers at home isn't what you want, and that the things you reach for aren't bringing you back to each other.

We meet in person at my Croydon practice, near East Croydon station and Reeves Corner. Men come from Croydon, South Croydon, Purley, Wallington, and nearby parts of South London. I don't offer online couples therapy: both of you attend together, in the room, because that's where the relationship can actually be worked with.