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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in SoHo. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. Whether you're listening on the radio, live streaming, or on demand, I'm grateful you're here. I'm especially grateful if you've made a donation to WNYC. It's the final day of our pledge drive. Thank you for showing up for us.

On today's show, in honor of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we'll talk about the exhibition just between us, which is on display at the Pearl River Mart. We have the creators of a new book that attempts to explain the meaning and cultural influences of Steely Dan lyrics, and we are getting ready for this weekend's Succession series finale with actor Zoe Winters, who plays Kerry, Logan Roy's assistant plus. That is our plan, so let's get this started with a little couple’s therapy.

At the beginning of the new slate of Couples Therapy episodes, Dr. Orna Guralnik tells a couple that she doesn't think she's the right therapist for them. They seem a bit shocked, and yet they return and engage with Dr. Guralnik's gentle, yet probing questions about their past, which leads to a new level of understanding. The second half of season three of the Showtime docu-series is out now, and over the course of a few months, we see the New York-based psychoanalyst help couples work through religious trauma, complex feelings about polyamory, and even a bit of gas lighting. Here's a little bit.

Dr. Orna Guralnik: We are here because we need to transition into polyamory. We need to.

?Speaker: I'm never going to be somebody who goes out and sleeps with another woman and wants to come home and talk about it with my wife.

Dr. Orna Guralnik: The ways that people struggle with monogamy are not 100% resolvable.

?Speaker: I want her to commit that she won't cheat on me again.

?Speaker: It just feels like he just wants to control the relationship with this.

Dr. Orna Guralnik: These old-time heteronormative structures, there's a great loss of faith in that.

?Speaker: I'm someone that enjoys being physical, that enjoys being wanted. I feel like a pervert.

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Dr. Orna Guralnik: How do you conduct therapy when people are not committed to truth?

?Speaker: I don't know how to work with this.

?Speaker: What do you want?

?Speaker: Why can’t I finish?

[crosstalk]

?Speaker: You want to punish if it doesn’t exist.

Dr. Orna Guralnik: I'm going to stop you. I'm not the right therapist for you guys.

Alison Stewart: The Daily Beast says, “Showtime’s under the radar series is unlike anything else on TV, a rare, honest, unvarnished look at the real problems partners struggle with every day. It's a must-see.” All the new episodes of Season 3 are now available via Showtime and Dr. Orna Guralnik joins us now. Nice to see you again.

Dr. Orna Guralnik: Good to see you, Alison. Thank you.

Alison Stewart: One of the main themes this season and this part of the season is monogamy. We have one couple that's there because the husband had a little bit of a don't ask, don't tell policy about sex outside of the marriage. Another couple is thinking about opening up the marriage. How have conversations around monogamy and alternatives to monogamy changed since you began working with couples?

Dr. Orna Guralnik: A lot. A lot has changed. I would probably pin it to like the last decade. More and more couples are looking for creative ways to address issues that come up between them. I think traditional structures of what it means to be a family are changing for lots of reasons, both cultural shifts and also technologies that help families come about differently. There's less leaning on the traditional heteronormative straight monogamous arrangement and couples are trying it out. Yes, I have it in my practice a lot that people come up with that question of, “Should we open the relationship?”

Alison Stewart: What are some of the first things you ask a couple when they bring that up, the idea they might want to open a relationship?

Dr. Orna Guralnik: Good question. I listen a lot. I first just listen. I try to understand what is-- The questions I have in my mind is what is the function of opening up the relationship, of shifting from monogamy to non-monogamy, and do the two or more people in the couple or polycule, are they all on the same page? Do they feel differently about it? Who wants what and why?

Alison Stewart: Is there a generational difference when it comes to monogamy?

Dr. Orna Guralnik: For sure. Yes. I think in my generation and earlier generations, it's not like people were always monogamous, but there were all sorts of ideas around cheating and either don't ask, don't tell, or cheating is like a horrible thing, it's the thing that will destroy the relationship. People had all sorts of different versions of how they respond to people not being monogamous, but the idea of being ethical and honest about it was not really in the cards. Younger generations, they have different ideas of how to do relationships.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to a couple that is seeking and trying to think if polyamory will work for them. This is a clip from the show. It's Nadine and Christine talking about their attempts to be in a more open relationship. This is from Couples Therapy.

Nadine: I truly believe there's something divine between us. Christine was the first woman that I had like romantic, like a desire for a relationship, like that kind of future. There was just a space for the first time in my life, like unconditional love. In that unconditional love, I felt free enough to come forth. Starting polyamory to sustain myself to have a relationship, this is something that I think needs to happen for myself.

Dr. Orna Guralnik: What about you Christine?

Christine: Well, ideologically I'm in full support of polyamory. I think it's delicious and amazing, but three months into our relationship, she was like, "I think we need to open. I don't really think there's anything you can do." I go into the bathroom, I get into a fetal position and like hyperventilate. I feel like blacking out.

Nadine: I almost don't remember all of it.

Christine: Yes. I was just so devastated. I was like, “I'm not good enough, I'm inadequate.”

Alison Stewart: That is from Couples Therapy. You used the word ethical before. What does ethical polyamory look like?

Dr. Orna Guralnik: People talk about ethical non-monogamy in the sense that the primary value is truth, is honesty. The couple are agreeing to first of all be very honest with each other about what they're doing, what they need and why, and respect each other's reactions to it.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Dr. Orna Guralnik. We're talking about the second half of season three of Couples Therapy, available now via Showtime. Very interesting couple. You have Brock and Kristi. They are Mormons who left the Church. They left at different times, Kristi much earlier than Brock, and she was unfaithful to Brock at one point in the marriage. Brock wants Kristi to promise she won't cheat on him again. He actually identified the person with whom she shouldn't cheat or go outside the marriage, and then she went outside the marriage with that person. They seem stuck at some point. When a couple gets stuck, what is really happening?

Dr. Orna Guralnik: Lots of things happen. Getting stuck is usually a symptom of many possible factors. For Kristi and Brock, it was a very complex, layered issue that got them to that stuck point. One indeed as you're saying, it had to do with how the Church and its prohibitions and for in Kristi’s case, abuses have contextualized their marriage, and what does it mean for one of them to ask the other to comply? Is that a repetition of some authoritarian and damaging request to comply rather than to negotiate?

When those kind of background or unconscious forces are feeding the particular fight, it's very hard to resolve the fight because it's not really about the thing itself. In their case, it wasn't even about necessarily that event, like Kristi is sleeping with someone, it was about what does the negotiation between them mean in the context of their history. If I had to say something very general, people get stuck when the unconscious reasons that they're trying to negotiate are not clear to them.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to a clip from the show. This is Kristi talking to you, Dr. Guralnik about her marriage with Brock. This is from Couples Therapy.

Kristi: For the first time in our lives to be asking what does love mean to us? What do we want out of a relationship? What does partnership look like to us? Who are we? It sucks to have to do that. It feels like an unnatural just progression of things to make the decision to get married and to have to leave a cult and then do all of this. It's like you have to do it all backwards.

Dr. Orna Guralnik: You feel robbed.

Kristi: Yes. I grieve. I really do feel like so much was taken from me of my life and now I'm having to start from scratch with the pieces of an old life that wasn't authentic to me.

Alison Stewart: I was also struck about how young she was when they got married. I believe she was 19. He may have been 21. Just generally speaking, what do you see in couples who are having problems, couples that did get married young, when do problems start to come up? What kinds of problems come up with couples that marry very young?

Dr. Orna Guralnik: Interesting question. I think what happens, and also it depends on which generation we're talking about, but let's say nowadays, when people get married young, first of all, they depart from their cohort so they're doing things somewhat differently. For example, for Kristi and Brock, even though they were in line with the other people in Church, but once they left the Church, they realized that they're not in step with the rest of the world. They have to in a way evolve together into a new phase of being older but here they are stuck with an arrangement that they made as kids, and they might be moving at different speeds.

They might not have role models of how does one live when the rest of society didn't get married this way. In a way, they have to keep a connection between them while they're working on very different issues. In the case of Kristi and Brock, there was also a lot of questions around feminism and gender and gender roles that they inherited from the Church, but once they left the Church, they have to reconfigure the whole understanding of what's the relationship and power dynamic between them.

Alison Stewart: I'm not sure there's an answer to this question, but it did hit me as I was watching, you're New York-based, these couples are New York-based, some of these couples are very New York, what are some unique stressors on New York couples?

Dr. Orna Guralnik: Huh, interesting. I think one of the stressors on New York couples, especially young ones, is how hard it is to make a living. How expensive it is and the material reality of what it means to actually try to support one’s self in the context of the economy nowadays, the fact that there's not enough welfare system to support a developing family, really stressful. Material reality can be super stressful.

Also exciting and then there's a lot of interesting and good things happening in New York. The general zeitgeist is very progressive, so there's a lot of room for couples to carve their own way and figure out how they want to live, which is super exciting, but it's in the context of intense financial issues.

Alison Stewart: My guest, Dr. Orna Guralnik, we were talking about Couples Therapy. Season three is available to stream now on Showtime. We heard a little bit of it in the trailer, that moment when you say you're not sure you're the right therapist for this particular couple, what led you to that moment? What leads you to a moment where you say that out loud to the couple?

Dr. Orna Guralnik: Yes, that was a really tough spot for me, really tough. I don't get to that moment often, but one thing was that it was very hard for me-- One of the ways that we work as analysts, as therapists is we work by way of connecting empathically to our clients. It's not the only thing we do, but that's one channel. It was really hard for me at that point to connect with Sean.

His way of talking about his motivation and why he was choosing things was not-- He wasn't speaking from a place that I could connect to, understand from within. In a way, the language we were using was not-- we weren't meeting each other and it was repeatedly happening and I felt like I'm basically failing them because my language is not working. Part of it, in the most superficial way you could say that, part of it had to do with a different idea of what it means to speak truthfully, but I think there was more than that.

Alison Stewart: There's a moment, and it's almost a throwaway line, you tell them time's up, and they're leaving, and they're still talking, and they're still very much engaged, and a little bit agitated. He says to her, "Your feelings are wrong." I just thought, “Can feelings be wrong?” I know sometimes the facts that people work with could be wrong, but can feelings be wrong?

Dr. Orna Guralnik: Right. That is a very common issue, whether it's said so explicitly or it's said in more subtle ways, that is a common issue for couples when one of the couple is terribly upset about something, and they launch a complaint, and the other person is like, "I'm a good person. There's a mistake. The mistake is in your feelings. If you really knew what's going on inside me, you'd never be mad at me, you'd never be upset."

People immediately assume the feelings are wrong. It's hard because when someone launches a complaint at you and you really take into account that you may have hurt someone, it's a difficult position to be in to take responsibility for that.

Alison Stewart: Dr. Guralnik, you wrote a piece for the New York Times with this headline, “I am a couple's therapist. Something new is happening in relationships.” What are you seeing that's new?

Dr. Orna Guralnik: The piece that I felt that I needed to write was-- First of all, it had to do with the fact that there are really powerful movements, social justice movements that are happening nowadays, probably since 2016 or a little before and then exacerbated by the pandemic. Whatever your politics are, wherever you are on the battles that are happening in our society nowadays, those movements are having a really, really powerful impact. I actually believe a very good impact in terms of pushing people to really think about things they didn't want to think about before. That's what the piece is about.

Alison Stewart: What does that introduce into a couple's relationship?

Dr. Orna Guralnik: Basically, it gives people a language to address differences between them, injustices, differences. I think the key word I have if I had to look at the key issue there, it has to do with privilege, a different way of thinking about privilege that makes it possible for couples to have a much richer, more honest conversation and less defensive conversation. I think it's just profound what these movements have given us, of course, regarding the specific issues they're addressing but even beyond that.

Alison Stewart: What is something that is not discussed enough when people have conversations about couple’s therapy?

Dr. Orna Guralnik: What is something that couples don't discuss between them?

Alison Stewart: Or that we as a culture. I think people would say, “Oh, there's been infidelity. That makes sense you would go to therapy. Oh, perhaps there's been a change in economics. Oh, maybe you should go to therapy and discuss that.” What is something that we don't talk enough about that maybe should be discussed in therapy, couple’s therapy?

Dr. Orna Guralnik: Lots of things. One of the things that people have a hard time taking as serious and a reason to really seek help is loneliness. People can feel profoundly isolated in relationships and lonely and they don't talk about it. It's easier to focus on fights about money, or sex, or the kind of stuff that we're used to thinking about when we think of trouble. I'd say loneliness and then the anxiety that comes up with realizing your partner is different from you and what does that mean?

Alison Stewart: Dr. Orna Guralnik, you can see her in Couples Therapy. The second half of season three is available now to stream on Showtime. Dr. Guralnik, thank you for making time today.

Dr. Orna Guralnik: Thank you, Alison. Take care.

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It.

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