Startseite
Podcasts
The Daily Podcast
The Sunday Read: ‘How I Learned That the Problem in My Marriage Was Me’

The Sunday Read: ‘How I Learned That the Problem in My Marriage Was Me’

The Daily vor 1 Jahr

0:00

43:20

One thing I’ve learned from being married to my wife, Jess, who
is a couples therapist, is how vast the distance is between the
masks people show to the world and the messy realities that live
behind them. Every couple knows its own drama, but we still fall
prey to the illusion that all other couples have seamlessly
satisfying relationships. The truth about marriage — including my
own — is that even the most functional couples are merely doing
the best they can with the lives that have been bestowed on them.

This past spring, Jess and I had the first of eight sessions of
couples therapy with Terry Real, a best-selling author and by far
the most famous of the therapists we’ve seen during our marriage.
Real, whose admirers include Gwyneth Paltrow and Bruce
Springsteen, is one of a small number of thinkers who are
actively shaping how the couples-therapy field is received by the
public and practiced by other therapists. He is also the bluntest
and most charismatic of the therapists I’ve seen, the New Jersey
Jewish version of Robin Williams’s irascible Boston character in
“Good Will Hunting” — profane, charismatic, open about his own
life, forged in his own story of pain.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and
Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app
here
https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher.
For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York
Times app at nytimes.com/app.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for
information about our collection and use of personal data for
advertising.