THE TWO MOST IMPORTANT QUESTIONS IN A RELATIONSHIP

A Love Letter To Showtime’s Couples Therapy

After far too many years of avoidance, I have finally started watching Showtime’s Couples Therapy. I’m a bit ashamed it took me this long considering my fascination with couples therapy, my master’s in psychology and my multiple books about romantic relationships. (One out, one coming!) But in addition to inching my way toward being more comfortable claiming the title of “relationship expert,” I am also a deeply flawed creative who experiences flames of jealousy whenever someone makes something I wish I had made first. And Couples Therapy, which follows psychologist and analyst Dr. Orna Guralnik as she leads therapy sessions and later reviews them with her own clinical advisor is the epitome of a show I wish I got to work on.

Luckily, these uncomfortable feelings of envy dissipated enough during a cross country flight for me to click “season one, episode one” on my small Delta screen. (Normal rules don’t apply to airplane watches after all!) Within moments, I was enthralled. Not only is the show masterfully done in terms of editing and style, but it also somehow manages to show this thing that I have been desperate to find: how couples therapy actually works.

This longing might seem strange because I have not only been to couples therapy myself, I have also taken multiple classes about it. During one grad school assignment, I even had to sit in front of my classmates and pretend to be a couples therapist as two fellow students played the role of a fraught couple. Afterwards, my professor commended me on continuously asking the couple to address each other instead of me and I thought, “Well, yeah. That’s the only directive in this modality that feels easy to do.” I know how to say, “Can you say that to them instead?” What I don’t know is how to remain an objective third partner observer who deftly helps two individuals navigate the intricacies of life-long partnership. Especially if they are already struggling to stay together.

But Dr. Guralnik sure does!

I watched with my mouth open as Orna managed to challenge people about their assumptions in a way that made them seen heard—not attacked. It felt thrilling to see people come to realizations about themselves or their partners that had never occurred to them before. So much of my grad school experience left me wondering, “Okay, but how do we actually do it?? How do we actually get people to change in the moment??” Professor after professor called therapy an artform not an exact science. Which is all well and true, but also a bit confounding if you’re the one in charge of spearheading the art project. 

As I’ve written about before, I made the decision to not get licensed as a therapist because of the liability and commitment it involves. Instead of gathering three thousand underpaid hours as an associate before even being able to practice on my own, I realized that I would prefer to do my part for relationship struggles from a more macro approach through my writing and advocacy. So, in some sense, I don’t really need to understand how Orna does what she does because I am not working with individual couples as their therapist. Instead, I am writing and exploring the intersection between romantic relationships and mental health on a broader scale. 

Except…the specific is the universal. And seeing what these individual couples are going through and what actually helps them speaks to human relationships as a whole.

My book on modern marriage comes out in October, so I have spent the last few years trying to figure out why some relationships last while others fizzle or blow up. Watching Couples Therapy the other night helped locked something into place for me. It was during a scene with a couple who appeared ready to break up. It seemed like neither wanted to keep working on the marriage and didn’t see a way forward. Then the husband asked Orna if they had the “signs” of a couple that should get divorced. He wanted proof that what they had wasn’t salvageable.

But the thing is, aside from relationships with abuse of any kind, almost any marriage can be “saved” based on partners’ answers to the following two questions:

Can I accept you as you are?

Am I willing to change?

To me, these are the two most important questions when a relationship is in conflict. Because most often conflict comes from one or both partners not meeting the other person’s expectations or needs.

For example, maybe one partner loves to go out and socialize multiple times a week while the other partner prefers to stay home. These different lifestyles have become an issue and seemingly deadly incompatibility. The couple can’t stop fighting over it.

At this point, Partner A, the one who goes out all the time, has to ask Partner B: can you accept that I am someone who likes to go out and socialize a lot? Is that something you can come to terms with instead of constantly trying to alter that part of me?

If Partner B says, you know what, now that I understand you like going out because you are an extrovert—not because I am not enough for you like I initially feared—I think I can intentionally accept this part of you. And it will no longer be a continuous source of conflict so long as we get to spend some nights together alone.

But if Partner B says, actually no, I can’t stay with a partner who goes out so often, Partner A has to ask themselves, am I willing to change? Am I willing to not go out as often to prioritize my relationship’s well-being?

Partner A might decide, sure, I can do that, I can make that change. And then the relationship has a chance to survive in an adaptive way. Much like it would if Partner B learned to accept that Partner A likes to go out a lot and no longer gets mad about it.

However, if the answer to both questions is no—you are not willing to accept me and I am not willing to change—the relationship isn’t able to improve. And that’s why the same cycles and unhealthy patterns continue and continue until someone finally decides to jump off the ride. Or both people die unhappy.

I’ve learned that couples need to learn how to both accept their partner and change their own behavior in order to thrive. The amount that they need to do either depends on how much conflict there is to begin with. But no happy couple doesn’t require at least some of these two approaches.

However, deciding whether you want to learn to accept and/or change is a morally neutral decision. There is no moral imperative to put your romantic relationship above everything else in your life. Some relationships will require more work and compromise than you might be willing to give. And that is okay.

What’s most important, in my opinion, is understanding that these are the very things that will help improve unhealthy dynamics. And once you realize that, you need to sit with yourself and your partner to figure out if this is the type of work you are willing to do. Are you willing to change? Are you willing to learn to accept parts of your partner you don’t like? Or does it make more sense to walk away?

The answers to these questions are going to be different for every partner and every couple. But having clarity about what you need to ask yourself can help remove you from the nitty gritty details of daily conflict and allow you to look at the bigger picture of your life and how you want to live it. I had been circling this conceptualization for a while, but seeing Orna work her magic gave me the clarity I have been looking for. And isn’t that what therapy is all about? Even when it’s someone else’s?

xoxo

Allison

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