You could say he is a minister of missed opportunities.

And not just because he passed up the chance to prove on prime-time television that he knows the name of the "medieval death cult" leader Australia is fighting a war against.

His pet idea, born in another ministerial life, has also become a policy punchline.

Andrews' relationship vouchers policy was killed off in February by his successor, Scott Morrison, who announced the funds from the trial would be redirected to frontline community services. Who needs a free chat about your love life when you don't have anything to eat, right?

But the epitaph for the Stronger Relationships Trial has been written more recently, with the release of Senate documents showing that out of 100,000 available vouchers, fewer than 13,000 were taken up. In a further kick in the shorts, the government spent more than $2 million of taxpayer dollars "administering" the scheme, which got only halfway through its trial period and almost $450,000 on a (now) redundant evaluation.

In other words, it paid $2.5 million to get dumped.

Ever since Andrews first introduced the policy – as a pre-2013 election promise – the trial providing $200 vouchers for couples to seek counselling has produced nothing but derisive sniggers and jokes about the government hopping under the doona with voters.

This was not helped by Andrews appearing on the front of a magazine, holding hands with his wife Margaret on a chintzy couch extolling the virtues of counselling. Nor by the fact that Andrews is known as one of the most conservative members of the Abbott government (outdone by perhaps only Cory Bernardi), with granite-hard views about people needing to get married and stay married. And for those people to not include gay people.

All in all, it smacked of something that was at once creepy, fuddy-duddy and draconian.

Which is a serious shame, because the actual idea behind the scheme – to encourage people to use relationship counselling – was really quite reasonable. Dare we venture, it was even progressive.

Indeed, in person, Andrews would speak passionately about how costly and hurtful relationship breakdowns could be avoided if people had open eyes on the way in and ironed out any issues that popped up along the way. As a fan of regular relationship counselling himself, he likened heading along to the counsellor with Margaret to taking the station wagon in for a service.

Besides, it wasn't as if the government wanted to keep metadata about all things that you fight about with your girlfriend, or learn the names of the women your husband had had an affair with. The program was simply about accessing information about how to resolve conflicts, how to make better plans and deal with big changes.

Indeed, it is worth pointing out that even though Andrews has a preference for marriage, the vouchers themselves were open to all couples in a committed relationship, regardless of their marital status or sexuality. While many who did use the vouchers used them for pre-marriage counselling, they could be used for many a splendid self-improving purpose.

And yet, despite the flexible freebie, more than 80,000 of the vouchers were left desperate and dateless.

We happily, readily and openly use professional expertise in so many areas of our lives. There's no issue with seeking help for everything from fitness and health to finances, careers, homes, holidays and pets. And yet when it comes to what is arguably the most important area of our lives (yeah, not counting the mortgage), we think we can do it all ourselves.

Or that seeking professional help is an admission of weirdness and failure.

Relationships Australia spokeswoman Susan Visser has previously told Fairfax Media that it's not seen as a "normal thing" to go for counselling if you're having problems or want to improve your relationship. Australian Association of Relationship Counsellors national president Guy Vicars agrees that people find it "amazingly hard" to get help.

He suggests this is because our romantic lives are so central to our identities and because we figure we should be able to work things out for ourselves. "It's an unreasonable but understandable expectation that we know about relationships."

So counselling ends up as the last stigma of love. You can live in sin, get divorced, date online, have a Grindr or Tinder account and a great time using them. But woe betide you find yourselves on the couch.

Vicars has counselled surgeons, Olympians, people in public office and more-regular folk. He argues many of us, regardless of our overall intelligence, don't have the listening and understanding skills to keep a long-term relationship long term – particularly these days when partnerships are supposed to last 60-odd years.

Andrews' heart was in the right place but the sad fact about his relationship vouchers program was that it was sold poorly in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was impossible for the Coalition to argue it should spend millions on the vouchers while denying dole payments to 20-somethings. And it may well be that it's impossible for a government any way to try to help our love lives in such a direct way.

Here's hoping that in the process, the failed experiment didn't turn people off counselling as something daggy and only for conservative government ministers. Because there will be times when all of us need a bit of couch.