After Jessica and I received expert counselling from the hit show Couples Therapy, I became public enemy number one. Here’s what didn’t make it to the screen
“Y
ou are the reason women hate men,” a woman commented on one of my Instagram posts. “You don’t deserve Jessica, you schmuck,” another said in a direct message on Facebook. “I hope you’ve gotten the help you need and set your poor wife free,” wrote a third.
I am a novelist who relishes connecting with his audience. That disposition has suffered. The reason: three months ago, the US network Showtime aired the latest season of the documentary series Couples Therapy, on which my wife Jessica and I appeared as one of the pairs.
The series depicts four couples in 18 or so sessions of free therapy with Dr Orna Guralnik, a renowned New York psychoanalyst. The show is unscripted, and tries to avoid sensationalism. Participants are not paid, except for a modest stipend to cover childcare and transportation. The therapy takes place in a spacious office designed in the muted tones of the High Analyst style. The impression is that one is on New York’s Upper West Side rather than a recording studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. (The cameras are so invisible that it was always startling when, in the middle of one tear-filled testimonial or another, one heard discreet coughing on the other side of what suddenly sounded like very thin walls.) Though filming was always preceded by green-room small talk with the producers, we never crossed paths with the other couples.
