Colliding couples
By Pamela Paul |
March 28, 2010, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
A number of years ago on a camping trip with another couple, I had a dreadful fight with the man who was then my boyfriend while we were hiking up the mountain. Well ahead, we paused in a clearing to holler at each other, when the other couple poked their heads through the brush. Later, mortified, I apologized to my friend. "Oh, please," she replied. "I was grateful!" Eavesdropping on our battle, she and her boyfriend had consoled themselves: "At least we don't argue about that."
Wouldn't it be grand, I thought, if couples could air their grievances with other couples as witnesses and mediators? Group couples therapy: it must exist.
With a hefty dose of skepticism and gloom-tinted glasses, Laurie Abraham, an Elle magazine editor, personal-essay veteran and connoisseur of relationship lit, seems to have had this very thought.
"How does marriage work to tear people down -- leaving them feeling bitter or diminished, dulled or lost -- and if that process can be interrupted, if a therapist can lift spouses out of the muck of their own making, how does it work?" she asks in "The Husbands and Wives Club."
Abraham Google-searched her way to Judith Coche, a Philadelphia psychotherapist who has made 1970s-style group couples therapy her specialty and doggedly trekked once a month to the Philadelphia area, Ted Conover style, and sat in on over a year's worth of six-hour therapy sessions.
She's well suited to the task. Toggling between cynic and romantic, Abraham is fluent in both the wonky and the fuzzy-wuzzy language of marital therapy. She bandies about a dizzying assortment of competing therapeutic philosophers and distills their approaches with aplomb. She also has the restraint and fortitude to endure 10 people's harping on the petty hurts and resentments, the drudgery of punctured hopes and accumulated disappointment without walloping anyone or, worse, falling asleep.
Through no fault of her own, Abraham has fallen in with a rather dull lot. The mood is "leaden," the group "formless," its members "impressively withholding." At one point Coche mutters, "Sitting here for six hours you just know what it's like to be married to him," and we know exactly what she means. Part of the trouble seems inherent to the form: people self-censor in individual therapy and doubly so as a couple; in front of a full-blown gathering, inhibitions may be especially hard to unleash, more so with a reporter taking notes. It could also be that the couples too busy tearing each other's hair out to even bother dissecting their conjugal deprecations before a therapist are the more interesting ones.
"The Husbands and Wives Club" calls to mind Paul Solotaroff's 1999 "Group," another voyeuristic foray into mass therapy. Both books suffer from the same narrative constraints. Most of the action takes place in one room, and it's talky, talky, talky, like a play that fails to kick off from page to stage. Solotaroff had the advantage of documenting a dicey bunch whereas Abraham faces a more pedestrian collection of middling professionals.
Abraham's great, if melancholic, achievement is flipping Tolstoy on his head. What lies within the cocoon of most troubled marriages is far more mundane than you might think. What goes on in happy marriages may, in fact, be the real mystery.
Wouldn't it be grand, I thought, if couples could air their grievances with other couples as witnesses and mediators? Group couples therapy: it must exist.
With a hefty dose of skepticism and gloom-tinted glasses, Laurie Abraham, an Elle magazine editor, personal-essay veteran and connoisseur of relationship lit, seems to have had this very thought.
"How does marriage work to tear people down -- leaving them feeling bitter or diminished, dulled or lost -- and if that process can be interrupted, if a therapist can lift spouses out of the muck of their own making, how does it work?" she asks in "The Husbands and Wives Club."
Abraham Google-searched her way to Judith Coche, a Philadelphia psychotherapist who has made 1970s-style group couples therapy her specialty and doggedly trekked once a month to the Philadelphia area, Ted Conover style, and sat in on over a year's worth of six-hour therapy sessions.
She's well suited to the task. Toggling between cynic and romantic, Abraham is fluent in both the wonky and the fuzzy-wuzzy language of marital therapy. She bandies about a dizzying assortment of competing therapeutic philosophers and distills their approaches with aplomb. She also has the restraint and fortitude to endure 10 people's harping on the petty hurts and resentments, the drudgery of punctured hopes and accumulated disappointment without walloping anyone or, worse, falling asleep.
Through no fault of her own, Abraham has fallen in with a rather dull lot. The mood is "leaden," the group "formless," its members "impressively withholding." At one point Coche mutters, "Sitting here for six hours you just know what it's like to be married to him," and we know exactly what she means. Part of the trouble seems inherent to the form: people self-censor in individual therapy and doubly so as a couple; in front of a full-blown gathering, inhibitions may be especially hard to unleash, more so with a reporter taking notes. It could also be that the couples too busy tearing each other's hair out to even bother dissecting their conjugal deprecations before a therapist are the more interesting ones.
"The Husbands and Wives Club" calls to mind Paul Solotaroff's 1999 "Group," another voyeuristic foray into mass therapy. Both books suffer from the same narrative constraints. Most of the action takes place in one room, and it's talky, talky, talky, like a play that fails to kick off from page to stage. Solotaroff had the advantage of documenting a dicey bunch whereas Abraham faces a more pedestrian collection of middling professionals.
Abraham's great, if melancholic, achievement is flipping Tolstoy on his head. What lies within the cocoon of most troubled marriages is far more mundane than you might think. What goes on in happy marriages may, in fact, be the real mystery.
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