I had a couple come in for marriage counseling who were having a lot of problems communicating. They fought constantly. Their marriage was in crisis.

He was an engineer; he talked very logic-based, very reason-based. She was all emotion and everything was an emotional thing for her. He was really attracted to that in the beginning and she was attracted to him because he was organized and  logical guy.

Eight years later, they’re no longer attracted to each other. So they talked about what they felt like they needed to do which was work on their ability to communicate with each other and hear each other in the language that they used.

So I took their idea of what they felt they needed to do and built an intervention around it. The intervention was that over the next two weeks to pick one topic each time they had a discussion, go some place where they could be alone, take a bag of marshmallows, divide it in half, and start talking about the problem at hand.

Every time the engineer slipped into “engineer talk”  she was to hit him with one of these marshmallows. And every time she slipped into emotional language he was to hit her with a marshmallow.

It sounds kind of silly but when they came back in for the following session they had done the assignment five or six times in a two week period of time, they told me that they could never get through the task, “we just start laughing, and it’s just too funny”.

“After four or five hits with the marshmallow we get to laughing and start talking about other things and now we’re at the point where if one of us or the other one catches the other kind of not comprehending the other we say oh is it time for marshmallows. And that brings it right around”.

After four sessions they were done. They never needed to come back for another session.

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If you are experiencing problems in your marriage or relationship, couple’s therapy may help.