Hi Tiredwife. Sorry things are so shitty for you at the moment. I have some good and some bad things to say about Relate. DH and I went quite a bit 18months ago. Then again this summer when thins threatened to go back how they'd been before. Both times I found it very helpful to have a third party, as all the other MNers have said. I really believe that if your problems are bad enough in the first place to be considering counseeling, then you are unlikely to be able to have as productive a discussion on your own. However "positive" your mindset going into a disucssion, the issues between you soon come up and tempers get frayed, nasty things are said, etc. For us it felt like going to Relate provided a safe place to thrash out the issues without us actually making them worse by fighting yet again over the same old things and thereby adding to the sense of futility of it all, IYSWIM.
On the downside, you have to be quite focused to prevent the sessions becoming just the place where you have a refereed argument. We did get to a point where I felt like I said nothing all week for fear of another argument, but then let it rip in the session and DH was horrified, having thought we'd had an OK week.
Also, we stopped going because at the end of the day I felt we'd established what the problems were and it was up to us to go away and work at fixing them. No point going back week after week to keep going over and over things. My personal situation is that actually, a lot of the things that upset me about DH haven't changed, and aren't ever going to. But my ability to understand them and accept them has changed, and, I expect, vice versa. It's not a bed of roses but we are, for the first time in a long time, happy again.
I didn't actually LIKE our counsellor very much. Felt she was more "on his side" IYSWIM. It's very important to feel an affinity with your counsellor, I think. But that might just be to do with my own personal problems etc.
Finally, I felt much like you re the whole hassle factor, babysitting, etc. My best friend (not married, no kids, but v lovely amd wise friend) said to me "If your marriage is important enough to you, you'll MAKE the time, rather than end up separating", and she was right. When we went back this year we had a 7 week old baby and a 2 yr old, with no family nearby, but we just about managed it. I'm not saying it's easy, especially when you don't really want to admit to anyone that you're going for marriage guidance counselling, but if the bottom line is that's what you need to do, then you will find a way to prioritise it.
Good luck
PS I recommend reading the chapter on marriage in the book "Emotional Intelligence". The rest is mostly self-help crap but I found that chapter really useful as a framework for looking at our relationship