Every night my boyfriend and I have been sitting on the sofa and hungrily watching strangers break up. Couples Therapy is a docu-series filmed in the New York office of elegant psychoanalyst Dr Orna Guralnik as she deftly sieves the lumps out of four relationships. Once you have got over the bogglement at the idea that these couples have agreed to be so vulnerable in front of this many cameras, knowing every eye-roll and revelation will be seen by millions (including their dads, bosses and exes), you can relax into the radical entertainment. And some time after that, perhaps in bed, or when flossing your teeth, questions might appear. Questions like, “Do I interrupt like she does?” and, “Could that guy not perhaps take his awful denim cap off inside?” and, “How can any of us hope to understand each other when we can’t even understand ourselves?”
The structure of a couple is one I am familiar with and fascinated by. Why (I ask myself fondly, 18 years into a relationship that could not be more traditional if it wore a blazer and drank real ale) do we choose this partnership, generation after generation, morning after morning? Two strangers leaning against each other like two cards trying to make a shelter. I think often of the tree that grew around a bike, evolving into something monsterish and beautiful that would never ride again. When the bike was left chained there in 1914, the tree treated it like a wound, scarring and scabbing itself around the frame – now the bike is more than 7ft from the ground, and the tree a living metaphor for every long-term relationship on this bended, burning earth. I like it, I suppose. Is that enough?
As some people are beginning to question the benefits of monogamous coupledom (and happier to discuss their mental health) it’s becoming more common for young people to visit couples counsellors, previously assumed a sort of hospice for those in the death throes of a cooling marriage. One 2017 survey put the number of millennials who had attended couples counselling at 51%, and in 2018 counselling charity Relate reported a 30% increase in UK clients under 40 in four years. Part of this shift is due, surely, to the way shows such as Couples Therapy (and Esther Perel’s podcast Where Should We Begin? which similarly invites an audience into real-life therapy sessions) have pulled back a curtain on the previously shadowed practice of therapy, one still stained by ideas of shame and failure.
And how we lap them up! How we love to watch! What joy is greater, in the first winter of 2022, than wild swimming in the frosty depths of another couple’s disappointments? Is there anything better than watching a marriage transform into a white ball of blood and fur from the comfort of your living room? There is the therapist, there is the couple, there is the relationship, and there is me, drinking Lady Grey with a raw sort of glee.
Was the husband or was he not (and here I’ll quote directly from episode one, featuring linen-shirted antihero Mau) entitled to “zero responsibility” for the birthday orgy his wife of 23 years had planned for him, and as much “spectacular, enthusiastic and genuine” sex as he wanted, without putting in “any work on his part”? When Dr Guralnik earnestly said it was “hard to meet him” I shrieked into my biscuit. But the questions each show left me with kept reverberating. How can a person manage the psychological bruises left by historical trauma in order to maintain a trusting relationship? How important are feelings when they knock against facts?
The biggest thing I’ve taken away from being a voyeur to other people’s therapy sessions, though, is the knowledge that listening is difficult, and successfully communicating feelings we can’t even articulate to ourselves almost impossible.
Not everyone can or should have therapy, but what I’m left with after a rich but exhausting binge-watch of Guralnik being wise and fabulous, is the realisation that we should all be taught how to listen. How could life be, if talking was not the only communicative skill applauded and prized? Rather than simply being a mirror, hearing as a passive state, I would relish the chance to learn how to listen in a way that allowed me to hear the subconscious whirrings, understand my own lingering soundtrack, hear what somebody is really trying to say.
You glimpse, in soft moments, a world where we could understand ourselves enough to show real empathy for others, or one where we can really try to know the people we say we love. It’s funny – though the cameras initially seem horribly invasive, after a while their focus reminds the viewer how important it is to pay attention to the person who isn’t speaking. How what’s being said is affecting them, and how they might misunderstand it; what memories, politics, judgments are also playing in their ears. Beneath that horrifying denim cap.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
