Engy › Who's who in longevity › Terry Real
At a glance
- American family and couples therapist with decades of clinical experience, and founder of the Relational Life Institute, which trains therapists and couples.
- Developed Relational Life Therapy, a direct approach that helps couples move from fighting and withdrawal to working together.
- Wrote I Don’t Want to Talk About It (1997), one of the first popular books on hidden depression in men.
- Followed up with books including The New Rules of Marriage (2007) and Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship (2022).
- Joined Rangan Chatterjee (Feel Better, Live More) in 2026 to talk about more meaningful and intimate relationships.
- Relevant to longevity because the quality of close relationships is, in long-running studies, one of the strongest predictors of health and wellbeing in later life; his work is about how to improve them in practice.
Criticism and nuance
Relational Life Therapy is a practical method he developed himself and offers commercially through his institute; research on the method itself is limited.