What if counseling weren’t a last resort for couples whose marriage was on the rocks?
Kerry Washington says that she and her husband of 13 years, NFL player-turned-actor Nnamdi Asomugha, were proactive about couples therapy, and turned to the practice before there were any pressing issues to address in their marriage.
“We started couples therapy before anything was wrong … kind of preventatively,” she told Alex Cooper on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast.
“He was newer to therapy, I feel like I’ve been in therapy my whole life,” she said. “We were like, ‘We should just start having these conversations so that if something does get hard, we already have a culture of knowing how to talk about stuff.’”
She added, “I’m obsessed with couples therapy. It’s my favorite. It’s like part logistics meeting, part party, part date in the afternoon. I so look forward to it. We start every session with something that the other person did well. Like something that we appreciate about the other person.”
Washington called her therapy sessions with Asomugha “the best part of my week,” and said that she is often surprised by the comments he makes when they start their sessions with complimenting one another.
“So often the thing he shares with me that he appreciated—or the thing I share with him—it’s not something I would’ve guessed. It’s something that to me was small, but to him it meant a lot,” she said, adding that this part of the session helps them “learn how to love each other better.”
This tidbit about Washington and Asomugha’s marriage is a rare insight into the couple’s relationship, which has been kept mostly private despite having high-profile careers in TV, film, and sports. They married in 2013, after dating for four years, in a low-key ceremony held in Idaho. And they have two children together, a boy and a girl, and Washington is a stepmother to Asomugha’s daughter from a previous relationship.
In 2024, Washington told People Magazine, “I think just from the very beginning, Nnamdi and I have been really protective of our partnership and our relationship, because we wanted it to belong to us, and we found that we were able to define and create a relationship for ourselves and with each other outside of the public eye.”
