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

50 The New York Review

devaluation?” Guralnik asks him. “I

think I don’t care how quickly I move

to devaluation,” says Mau.

There are apparently things Annie

believes are off-limits for discussion,

which keeps Guralnik feeling out of

the loop. They are the only couple that

cause her to glare. The word- parsing

Mau, who resembles the actor Clive

Owen, has come from a childhood of

poverty, violence, and neglect (though

he does not view it as abuse), and now

wants merely to be seen in his entirety

without having to indicate who he is.

This is an exaggerated form of a con-

dition common among the couples—

the desire to be known and accurately

acknowledged without having to spell

things out for their partner.

As an example, Mau sees himself, he

says, as a person who would like a “glass

of water and [to] have it there

before he asks.” This hunger

for magic is how he has got-

ten through life, he claims.

“I don’t have complicated

needs. I’m utterly transpar-

ent,” he insists. But he sees

his birthday as a test of how

well his wife knows him. And

she usually fails. Guralnik

finds the two of them both

mystifying and codependent.

“This marriage will keep

its peace if she gives up on a

certain piece of her subjectiv-

ity,” she says to Goldner. But

Annie is counting the years

until their fourteen-year-old

son is old enough for her to

leave the marriage. Children

are often the off-screen fac-

tor keeping Guralnik’s cou-

ples together.

The other three couples in

the show’s first season exude

touching vulnerability in the

sessions and, despite some

flashing anger and water-

ing eyes, bring determined

self-awareness and emotional intelli-

gence to their troubled situations. They

are strong people with wounded pride,

and the therapy sometimes involves

isolating the wound from the pride.

The tasks Guralnik sends them home

with—take two hours to yourself;

make him cook dinner; express affec-

tion; listen, listen, listen—are mostly

accomplished as the months roll along.

The balance between togetherness and

solitude, attention and boundaries,

trusting but verifying, needs to be fig-

ured out for everyone.

All but Annie and the stubborn,

self-educated Mau appear willing to

“do the work” that psychotherapy re-

quires (most of it a conscious breaking

of one’s own unhelpful habits). As for

his own “incredibly warm, sweet, vain,

and thoughtless” mother, Mau says in-

sightfully, “If you ask my siblings they’d

all agree that we’re all waiting for her

to take us to the pool thirty-five years

ago.” In marriage the past lands in the

present as a time capsule; in his mar-

riage, Mau is still waiting for his mom.

The second couple we meet in this

first season are Lauren and Sarah

(Lauren is trans and recovering sto-

ically from difficult surgery). They

are the most impulsive of the couples,

having moved in quickly, married

quickly, then sexually opened up their

marriage, and then tried for children.

Guralnik’s task is to slow them down.

Money and the division of labor, is-

sues common to many households,

also make appearances in Lauren and

Sarah’s conversation. Lauren doesn’t

like dishes in the sink but admits that,

because she makes more money than

Sarah, she believes that maybe Sarah

should do them. Plus ça change.

The couples on the show are selected

to demonstrate a range and diversity

of racial, sexual, ethnic, religious, and

social class suffering. Those who laugh

with each other give the viewer the most

hope. The ones who can eventually see

that immersive professional work is

not the enemy of a happy family—as

so many commercial Hollywood films

have repeatedly told us through the

decades—also seem to be on the right

track. As the credits roll at the end of

every half-hour episode, the music sug-

gests a theme for each of their stories.

One episode ends with the Soul Scratch

song “The Road Looks Long,” and in

it are flung and sung all the unreason-

able hopes and dangers of the marital

project. One feels precisely what the

singer means when he says, “Just give

me a little faith... Ain’t got much going

my way.” But everyone on Guralnik’s

couch manages at least one smile.

Who wouldn’t root for these cou-

ples? Though why we do touches on

our own fear of aloneness as well as our

belief, expressed in everything from

Shakespeare to Mamma Mia!, that the

preferred human narrative is one that

ends in an enduring marriage—that is,

one that can be endured.

The therapist is, of course, at the

center of this collection of unplot-

ted domestic tales: she is the constant

and the guide in the ramble, there to

help the couples deepen their under-

standing of their dilemmas—“noth-

ing more,” advises Goldner. A deeper

understanding of the trouble always

sounds like a good idea, but is it? The

therapist is not to offer an opinion as

to whether the couple should break up,

even if she has one. She is not to side

with any desire to end things. (They

can, if they choose, end things without

her help.) “I feel like I was siding with

the giving-up,” Guralnik says to Gold-

ner, about Evelyn and Alan, a gentle,

teary Latinx couple who exude almost

unbearable unhappiness. But Gural-

nik does not give up, and Evelyn and

Alan do as they are told. Guralnik is

able to crack the case by getting Alan

to reexamine his habits of checking out

and living solo in the world. Soon Ev-

elyn and Alan are meditating together

at home and the marriage looks as if

it’s been pulled from the ditch. “I feel I

have such power over them,” Guralnik

says, but she uses it well.

Although she feels “the limits of

how much [any] relationship can de-

liver,” Guralnik is there with all of her

patients, to rejoice calmly and with af-

firming declarations when any couple

reaches a sense of unbreakability while

also abandoning destructive patterns.

At that point, they curtail therapy with

her—perhaps because they feel they’ve

achieved all they can; perhaps only be-

cause their medical insurance has run

out, though the series does list a med-

ical insurance provider in the cred-

its—and she is left with the intensity

of their situations (addiction, abuse,

fatal inertia, insufficient love, job is-

sues). Her occasional worries that her

work with them might be both meager

and futile seem to reveal themselves in

anxious expressions on her face, but

her successes also leave her bereft. She

has become involved. “Suddenly the

enormity of their stories is just sitting

with me,” she tells Goldner. She is not

as detached as she might wish. “What

a bizarre profession,” she confides to

Goldner in the season 1 finale. In the

end, she is alone on the set, the clien-

tele having gone home. A new cast will

arrive shortly.

Season 2 introduces three new cou-

ples: two gay white men (Gianni and

Matthew) and two straight couples,

one interracial (Dru and Tashira),

and one Orthodox Jewish (Michael

and Michal). The gay men must deal

with Gianni’s homesickness for his old

dance troupe and for his native Italy, as

well as with Matthew’s alcoholism; the

devoted Dru and the reluctant Tashira

must deal with unequal affection; Mi-

chael and Michal must deal with un-

equal ambition. The season begins

just before the pandemic, and so, as it

proceeds, it includes all the domestic

suffering of the quarantine: unemploy-

ment, exhausting childcare, social iso-

lation, Zoom. Sheltering in place often

forces each member of a couple to give

up whatever exit fantasy they may har-

bor, or, on the other hand, to nurture it

in silence and deferment.

The counseling for a while is forced

to go online, which makes everyone’s

home life seem funkier and blurrier.

Guralnik sits in front of a jammed

bookcase with Bleak House promi-

nent on one of the spines above her

head—a witticism. We imagine that we

get a glimpse of what time-tested love

resembles from the inside—the pets,

the kids, the chores. Goldner, however,

appears to have a calming country re-

treat, the series’s quick nod to class

disparity in the pandemic. No toddlers

burst in squealing. Pastoral springtime

dapples her windows.

Luckily for the clients, the virtual is

only temporary, and soon the couples

are returning to Guralnik’s office and

her new pink print in the waiting room.

Summer both heralds their

return and closes out the ses-

sions of season 2. Lessons

have been learned: a couple

must share anxiety, passing it

back and forth between them

until it is understood; a part-

ner must smile fully or it may

resemble a smirk. Guralnik

has been patient and seem-

ingly effective; the couples

give her affectionate good-

byes as well as gifts to say

thank you and farewell.

“It’s hard to let them go,”

she says to Goldner. “Are

they going to mess up the

work we’ve done? ‘Don’t

mess it up!’” Though she

may feel abandoned (“I’m

left with this void,” she con-

fesses), this is her territory—

starting over with a new set of

problems—and she is good at

it: unknotting the discourse,

excavating the past, nam-

ing emotions (most of them

forms of sorrow). “That’s

sabotage,” she will say, or, “If

that’s the dynamic, why go there?” (The

one time I was in couples therapy, the

therapist turned to me and said, “And

now I have a question for Lorrie: Where

did you get your boots?”) Since the se-

ries began, it has been almost impossible

for new couples to get an appointment

with Guralnik: she is completely booked.

This glimpse of successful couples

counseling is interesting to compare

with the recent HBO drama Scenes

from a Marriage, which, despite the

dissolving relationship at its center,

has mostly disparaging comments in

its script regarding the “psychobabble”

of professional therapy. Psychother-

apy here is offstage, referred to but

not participated in jointly. Hagai Levi,

who created the original Israeli televi-

sion series BeTipul (In Treatment), has

put together an honoring reassembly

of a modern classic, the famous 1973

Ingmar Bergman television series, a

program that is said to have prompted

a spike in divorce in Sweden in the

mid-1970s.

Levi’s Scenes from a Marriage is

slightly more alert than Bergman’s to

the theater of couples talking, even if

not in therapy, and the performances

by Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac

are harrowing in their concentration

and intensity. Their scenes are like a

postgrad theater workshop (and indeed

the two actors attended Juilliard to-

gether). Perhaps Levi’s script (written

Liv Ullmann as Marianne and Erland Josephson as Johan in Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, 1973

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