The New York Review of Books - USA (2021-12-16)

48 The New York Review

The Tender Trap

Lorrie Moore

Couples Therapy

a documentary series directed

by Josh Kriegman, Kim Roberts,

Eli B. Despres, and Elyse Steinberg

Scenes from a Marriage

a miniseries written and directed

by Hagai Levi and cowritten

by Amy Herzog

Sometime toward the end of the twenti-

eth century I dimly recall in the culture

and among the people I knew a gener-

ationally ambient feeling that marriage

was no longer an important theme or

plot point in storytelling—and this

included the story of one’s own life.

Marriage was a trap into which one

should not be irrationally enticed, and

from which one would want ultimately

to escape, a diminished sideshow and

distraction from life’s main projects of

personal autonomy, meaningful work,

self-actualization, political activism,

and noble causes generally.

Or so went the conversation. Tinged

with patriarchic taint, marriage was

not the mutual journey and social ne-

cessity it had been promoted as, and

for women in particular this became

a feminist idea. A bride who took her

husband’s surname was not forming

a team or partnership but taking the

“slave name,” and in so doing was ac-

knowledging the vexed nature of the

institution while still participating in

it. The erosion of one’s own personal-

ity was inevitable and could lead only

to bitterness. The stigma of divorce

seemingly gone and its traumas under-

advertised, whether marriage hap-

pened or not, succeeded or not, was

not a priority for my immediate peer

group. Weddings were infrequent, and

if you cried while attending one, the

tears were a surprise, and their mean-

ing was unclear.

But marriage remains one of the

biggest structural and emotional deci-

sions one makes in life. It determines

so much of one’s future (and precipi-

tates a conversation with one’s past), no

matter how casually one enters into it. I

remind my students of this—especially

when we are discussing whether the lit-

erary concerns of Jane Austen, Henry

James, and Edith Wharton are out-

moded—and the students from South

Asian and African countries have

sometimes appeared to understand

this best, with respect and trepidation.

Marriage has much to do with com-

munity and family, things that in this

country keep collapsing and then get-

ting rebuilt in new and often inventive

ways. Being in an American marriage

can feel simultaneously dangerous to

the self and societally protective of the

individual, in the ways that activists for

gay marriage have enumerated over the

years (taxes, health care, housing).

The business of couples therapy,

taken up by shamans, clergy, MSWs,

psychologists, and psychiatrists with

both medical and analytic training,

shines a spotlight on the difficulties

of marital arrangements when the two

people begin to awaken from initial

romance, flex, and stretch apart: some-

one has changed who wasn’t supposed

to; someone hasn’t changed who was

expected to. The desire for personal

growth plus affectionate companion-

ship, sexual appreciation, and spiritual

renewal are all placed within a fragile

marital arrangement originally de-

signed for the management of property

and offspring. Of course, money and

children are often the main issues in

marital discord and are thus prominent

topics in couples therapy. As is com-

munication: one person has usually

persuaded their more reluctant part-

ner to embark on this verbal project.

A third party is needed to referee and

interpret. More speech, however ex-

hausting, is required, if not necessarily

desired, by everyone. Human language

was invented only 70,000 years ago—it

sometimes just feels longer than that.

That these therapeutic sessions are

also often theatrical—that is, the mar-

riage is performed for an audience, its

problems enacted for a critic in that

audience—has not gone unnoticed by

the theatrical world. (Most recently,

Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play used

psychodramatic couples therapy as

its structure.) And now television, in

a strange but elegantly edited reality

show on Showtime, a “docu-series” ti-

tled Couples Therapy, has also gotten

into the business of turning our inti-

mate lives, with their negotiations and

compromises, into theater. The series

offers up some real-life New York City

couples who have agreed to do their

therapy in front of a camera. Perhaps

some of them are would-be actors:

many are charismatic and unafraid,

as if auditioning for agents. All are ar-

ticulate and a little sad. Occasionally

there is reassuring laughter, which is

the sound of hope. There is no story

arc, but there is growing comfort and

optimism as the series proceeds to the

finale of each season.

That couples seek therapy during the

death throes of a collapsing relationship

is something of a truism—and one not

contradicted in the series, though there

is also footage of the couples out and

about in the city, usually looking hap-

pier than they do in the office of Orna

Guralnik, the empathic and beauti-

fully accessorized therapist. (A viewer

would not be faulted for coveting her

necklaces. Or her well-trained dog, a

blue-eyed miniature husky.) Guralnik,

through two seasons and nineteen ep-

isodes, does her best to ferret out the

underlying truths of these intertwined

individuals while also disrupting their

unhelpful self-presentations. Mostly

what the spouses are looking for is to

be seen and to be heard. “Say your ver-

sion, unedited” is a typical directive

from Guralnik. Or, “Anger is rarely

a primary emotion. Usually anger is

some kind of defense against some-

thing else. People usually don’t like to

feel vulnerable so they put up anger.”

The show’s exterior photography

is often a valentine to New York City.

Glimpses of two people snuggling on

a bench or holding hands or sharing

earbuds are part of the camera’s ro-

mantic urban panorama. Couples stroll

in parks, take the subway, sit at a café,

sometimes checking their phones (no

valentine is perfect). Indoors it is often a

different story. In Guralnik’s tiny wait-

ing room there is some framed Abstract

Expressionist art, what looks like either

a Franz Kline or Willem de Kooning

print. In either case, it is a Rorschach

test: waiting tensely for the doctor to

invite them in, the couples sometimes

guess what the painting might repre-

sent—an ax, a bird, a broken sign.

Well, a bird is already a broken sign.

Eventually, Guralnik switches out the

waiting room print to one that is rest-

ful to the eye, abstracted shades of rose

with floating mechanical elements, like

the design of a whimsical, erratic con-

traption. Marriage yet again, perhaps.

People do better with the truth than

without it, believes Guralnik, and that is

her underlying philosophy throughout.

Without the truth, one is either sleep-

ing or guessing and will be plagued by

dreams and childhood fears.

In Jonathan Franzen’s recent novel

Crossroads, set in the 1970s, the matri-

arch of the family, a pastor’s wife, seeks

counseling from a therapist who occu-

pies a space in a suite of dental offices,

and in their waiting room she has “seen

patients emerging from the clinic with

expressions more distraught than den-

tal work could account for.” That one is

going to undergo a painful procedure

without anesthetic is not necessarily

what Showtime’s set prepares one for.

Guralnik’s immaculately designed office

is both austere and invitingly warm. The

Architectural Digest–ing of the sets of

upper-middle-class drama has been es-

calating for some time now; the fictional

office of Bob Newhart, who played a psy-

chologist in a 1970s TV sitcom, is not a

patch on Guralnik’s, and hers is actual—

or at least a replica of the actual—as is

that of Virginia Goldner, her unflap-

pable supervisor, whose space is full of

light and orchids and lithe table sculp-

tures. The visits with Goldner are help-

ful for expanding the interior spaces as

well as adding a layer of meta- narrative

as Guralnik debriefs with her (which is

something she does in real life).

Within Guralnik’s office, however,

there is much controlled agony. Few

of the people sitting on the couch

avoid the cliché of one person (a man)

playing fruitlessly with a plastic puz-

zle while the other speaks tearfully

and avails herself of a Kleenex box.

In season 1, there is literally a Ru-

bik’s cube, and no one ever solves

it, an unfortunate but apt metaphor.

During one session, when the cube

has been placed out of reach, one of

the husbands gets up to look for it,

finding it on a shelf. All of the couples

seem somewhat aware of themselves as

performers in a reality show. But their

ownership is like a time-share: the

show is only partly theirs, but when it’s

theirs they seize it. The cameras are not

obtrusive, and no one is cripplingly shy.

Season 1 begins with four rela-

tionships. The first one, Annie and

Mau—the most strikingly actorish and

emotionally enigmatic of the couples—

have been married for twenty-three

years. They have a tendency to quib-

ble, and he is a handsome mansplainer.

“Do you see how quickly you move to

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