Can you do couples therapy when one spouse, usually the husband, refuses to participate? More and more, the answer seems ‘yes’.

A five-year longitudinal study of 300 couples at the University of Denver found that women who received relationship skills training saw as much improvement in their marriages as those who got the same training as a couple.

Marriage and family therapists, who are trained as systems thinkers, would say this makes intuitive sense. When one person in the couple system changes his or her behavior, it changes the behavior of their partner.

Why not the same result with men? It seems that women were better at learning the skills and folding them into the marriage.