Marriage Therapy Radio

Zach flips the usual format and welcomes two fellow podcasters: Iona Monk and Pam Stewart, the therapists behind Relationship Dish. They're podcast partners, not romantic partners, and they're quick to add that they'd be a terrible match anyway (Iona pursues, Pam withdraws). Iona started the show to take the shame out of couples therapy. Couples tend to show up six or seven years too late, like walking into a dentist after years aw...

Zach talks with Yowei Shaw and Kyle Pulley, a married couple who make the podcast Proxy together, a show that investigates "emotional mysteries" by connecting people who feel alone in a specific conundrum with a stranger who has lived through something close to it. Yowei spent about seven years creating and hosting the NPR documentary series Invisibilia before she was laid off in 2023. Kyle co-owns a recording studio in Philadelphi...

Zach sits down with Don and Carrie Cole, the Gottman Institute's clinical director and research director, and asks the question the show always comes back to: forget the credentials, what actually makes your own marriage work? Both Coles came into this relationship out of first marriages that failed. Don spent years stuffing his feelings to avoid upsetting his first wife, and it cost him the marriage. Carrie survived a relationship...

Zach sits down with Adam and Judith Nisenson, a husband and wife who both work in the betrayal space from opposite sides. Adam is known online as the betrayal shrink and works almost exclusively with men who have been cheated on. Judith works with women who have cheated, and hosts her own podcast, Women Cheat Too. They're four years into their second marriage together, and Zach opens by asking who they are as a couple before gettin...

Zach sits down with Neal and Rachel Miskell, a couple who got married in 2008, divorced, and remarried years later, and asks the question most people never get to ask a couple who made it back: what actually happened in between? Rachel is a mom of three and a marketing director for the 11th Force Support Squadron on an Air Force base. Neal had just come home from Afghanistan when their marriage started to unravel, carrying PTSD, co...

Zach steps out of the host chair for this one. In a swap with Heather Shannon of Sex for Couples, Zach is the guest, and the conversation goes straight at a question most couples never ask out loud: what is sex actually for, and does that answer change over the life of a marriage? Zach, who's been married almost thirty years, and Heather dig into why frequency becomes the default target when quality and clarity would serve couples ...

Zach sits down with baseball legend Darryl Strawberry and his wife Tracy for a conversation that has almost nothing to do with baseball. Both are on their third marriage. Both are in long term recovery, Darryl more than two decades sober, Tracy twenty five years clean. And both point to the same turning point in their story: faith. Zach wants to know what actually sits underneath a phrase couples say so easily, Christ is at the cen...

Zach sits down with his cousin Kara and her wife Stacy, two women he has known since before they were officially a couple, for a conversation that starts as a family reunion and turns into something much deeper. Kara and Stacy have been together for 26 years, married twice (once in civil union, once when it finally became legal), and are raising two kids, Rylan, 11, and Avery, 13, in a household they describe as running on accommod...

Zach sits down with Deborah Rozman, Ph.D. and Howard Martin, the married couple who have led HeartMath Institute since its founding in 1991. Zach came in curious after hearing his mentor Terry Real rave about HeartMath at a Relational Life Institute faculty meeting, and he opens the conversation admitting he still does not fully understand what it is or how it works. Howard and Deborah, who are married to each other and have built ...

Zach trades chairs this week. Instead of interviewing a couple, he's the one being interviewed, sitting down with Melissa Vogel of The Bomb Life for a wide-ranging conversation about what actually makes relationships work. Melissa is a health and fitness coach who works with individuals, often watching one partner transform physically and emotionally while the other stays stuck, and she brings that exact tension to Zach directly: w...

Zach sits down with Alexandra and Rod Stockwell, married almost 30 years and both trained as physicians. They met in 1993 as first-year medical students, passing paper notes back and forth during lectures, and that early habit of asynchronous, patient communication turns out to have shaped everything that came after. Alexandra is now a relationship and intimacy coach and host of The Intimate Marriage Podcast. Rod still practices me...

Zach sits down with Jim and Kelly, married 30 years, while Jim trains for the Ironman World Championship in Kona and works through his 25th round of chemotherapy. Jim was diagnosed with terminal cancer in April 2024. Rather than pulling back, he set a goal: arrive alive in Kona, finish under 17 hours, promote a book he wrote during treatment, and raise $100,000 for the Ironman Foundation. Zach wants to know how a marriage holds two...

Zach sits down with married couple A.D. and Courtney, who met on their first day at the University of North Texas and have been together, on and off, for over a decade. A.D. runs a coaching brand built around helping men value themselves inside marriage, and Courtney works in a corporate hybrid role while raising their three kids. Zach opens by asking what makes them tick, and gets a lot more than a love story. What follows is a co...

Zach sits down with Frannie and Danny, a married couple and wellness practitioners based in Florida who run an energy center in Palm Beach Gardens and lead workshops rooted in trauma recovery, energy work, and conscious relationship practices. Both come from what Frannie calls "war zones." Danny grew up in Israel with an Egyptian-French mother. Frannie was raised in Canada by Holocaust survivors, kept her Jewish identity secret, an...

Zach sits down with Eli, a therapist, podcast host, and author, and his wife Ariella, a registered dietitian, for an honest look at what it actually takes to build a good marriage, not the sanitized version you'd expect from someone with a therapy practice and a book on relationships, but the real one. Seven weeks from welcoming their third child, living in Las Vegas with two kids already in tow, this couple brings both credentials...

Zach sits down with Anna, a faculty member at the Relational Life Institute and one of his mentors, and her husband John, a self-described practitioner of life rather than therapy. Together, the three of them get into something that rarely happens on relationship podcasts: a real, textured, honest look at what it means to actually live relational principles inside a marriage, not just teach them.

The episode turns on a fascinating c...

Zach sits down with Kevin and Annie, a married couple from Los Angeles who have built parallel careers in comedy, social media, and content creation while raising two kids and juggling a genuinely hectic life. Kevin is one half of the Dumb Dads, a social media comedy brand that has racked up viral moments and national media coverage, while also recently stepping into a finance job to add income stability. Annie is a story producer ...

Zach sits down with James and Molly Christensen, a married couple and fellow therapists based in Sacramento, who spent more than six years in couples therapy before it actually worked. They burned through eight therapists, logged over a hundred sessions, and came within reach of a marriage that had been quietly failing for years. The fact that they are now both practicing couples therapists themselves makes this conversation someth...

Zach sits down with Kate and Cole Kelly, married co-directors of Camp Equahic in northeastern Pennsylvania and the authors behind the relationship practice they built almost by accident: Three Happys and an Appreciation. What started as a long-distance dating ritual, Kate asking Cole to name three things that made him happy each day just so she could get to know him, became the through line of a 25-year marriage, a shared business,...