Why we are so fascinated by other people’s relationships?
The compelling new documentary series Couples Therapy explodes our Hollywood understanding of romantic relationships. The truths of human intimacy are messy, painful and complex
There’s a moment in Couples Therapy that proves that even the pettiest grievance has the potential to reveal our deepest selves. Near the beginning of this gripping docuseries in which four real-life couples attempt to mend their fraying marriages on the couch of acclaimed New York psychoanalyst Dr Orna Guralnik, an insurance broker called DeSean feels suffocated by his partner Elaine.
She expects his undivided attention and calls him 20 times while he’s working. She insists they go out for brunch every weekend and sometimes he’d rather stay home and do nothing. As we watch Dr Guralnik lean forward, ask them more questions, tease out their emotions, we make our snap judgments.
Later, we find out that Elaine’s need for control and affirmation springs from another source: a childhood that was rife with danger and abandonment.
Suddenly, she’s no longer a caricature of the needy wife. She’s a complex person with unresolved issues that play out in the private folds of her relationship, just like the rest of us.
In an instant, the mysteries of coupledom – why do we care who does the laundry? Why does it matter if we can’t sustain the chemistry? – feel a little clearer, a lot less out of reach.
Representations of coupledom, of course, have always been part of modern culture. In the 80s and 90s, Hollywood was ruled by romcoms, those sugary accounts of unions that start with the “meet cute”: the heroine’s brush with a handsome stranger on the beach or in a bookstore. The central drama always revolved around the tension of “will they, or won’t they?”, the logistics of getting together rather than the relentless puzzle of staying together.
In the noughties, these romantic struggles became the stuff of reality television. These shows often trafficked in escapist fantasy. Tales of temptation islands, dashing millionaires and lovelorn beauty queens re-created the most dangerous stereotypes about the pursuit of love: that women will fight with each other for male attention, that courtship means being bought expensive things and that true romance is jealous and possessive.
These representations were watchable, sure. Their heavily edited plot points stoked our most voyeuristic instincts. Rather than shedding light on our own intimate relationships, they created further distance between ourselves and the people that we were watching.
But in the past few years, we’ve become hungrier for depictions of relationships that close this gap. As social media has turned the private stuff of our life public, we’ve seen a renewed cultural appetite for art that holds up a mirror to the messy dynamics of making a life with another person and the ways that this deviates from the narratives that are sold to us.
Examples include films such as Marriage Story, which exposes the fault lines of a partnership between two creative, ambitious people, and podcasts such as Where Should We Begin?, which invites listeners to a counselling session between the therapist Esther Perel and an anonymous couple.
Couples Therapy, produced by Josh Kriegman, Elyse Steinberg and Eli Despres, belongs to this new tradition. But the show, in which four couples are filmed over 20 weeks of therapy sessions, carefully edited into nine half-hour episodes, radically reimagines the act of watching other people’s relationships.
Here, the camera is a silent presence, hidden behind one-way glass in Dr Guralnik’s stylish, light-filled office. By prioritising ethics and safety at every level, the couples’ natural patterns, cycles and stories rise to the surface with minimal interference from the filmmakers. This sets the stage for emotional honesty and difficult truths.
“There are very parallel processes to documentary filmmaking and the psychoanalytic process – the process of storytelling, narrating, finding the underlying narrative of something that seems obvious,” said Dr Guralnik .
On Couples Therapy, we glimpse, firsthand, how these couples fall prey to the stories they tell themselves about their relationships, about who plays the villain and the hero. But thanks to Dr Guralnik’s gift for empathy, we also see how these categories are rarely straightforward.
The show also breaks new ground in the way it shows that some of the disputes that fracture our relationships are the products of larger cultural forces. DeSean, a black man, hates going to fancy restaurants with Elaine because he’s often treated as a second-class citizen. Lauren, who’s trans, isn’t ready to be a mother – even though that’s what her wife, Sarah, desires – because she’s just coming to terms with what it means to be a woman. Dr Guralnik wonders how Mau’s dismissal of his wife’s feelings is linked to larger feminist questions about whose perspectives the culture validates.
Couples Therapy gives us a backstage pass to the private battles of couples that seem just like us. It appeals to our fascination with other people’s relationships. But it owes its true power to the way it deepens our understanding of what a partnership actually is.
