GeniesLoki

Stray thought: I wonder if people who object to being a free therapist for their partner also object to being a free sex worker.

TBF, if your partner treats you like a sex worker you absolutely should object to that. But that's not the same as having sex with your partner, and I'm not sure that people are making that fine grained distinction on the "free therapist" front.

I should perhaps point out that I am typically the "free therapist" in my friendships and relationships to a really disproportionate degree. I'm not saying that people don't have valid problems they are describing by this term, I'm saying that I think the labelling is badly off.

I've seen this go very well and I've seen this go very badly. When it goes very well, it looks nothing like therapy because it is about mutuality and deepening the relationship. When it goes very badly it looks nothing like therapy because you cannot be sufficiently objective.

In the bad scenarios they are almost always behaving in ways that would make for a spectacularly shitty therapy client, and your options for dealing with that are very limited in a way that they would not be for an actual therapist.