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

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 9 March 2025

⏱️ 43 minutes

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Summary

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.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Every marriage has periods of disconnection, but what if you could have fewer of them?
0:13.0	That's what I wanted for my marriage and what I wrote about for today's Sunday read.
0:20.0	I love my wife Jess deeply.
0:23.1	From the start of our marriage, though,
0:24.3	we've just had a lot of conflict.
0:27.1	Jess has always sprinted toward intimacy and vulnerability
0:29.8	at a thousand miles an hour.
0:32.0	I'm pretty much the opposite.
0:34.3	And along the way, we've done a lot of couples therapy
0:36.3	to try to smooth things out.
0:39.6	My name's Daniel Oppenheimer, and I'm a contributor to the New York Times Magazine.
0:44.5	I'm 48 years old, and I write about art, culture, and politics.
0:48.9	Also, my marriage.
0:51.2	Jess is also 48.
0:53.2	We've been married 18 years and have three kids. The oldest is about to go off to college.
0:59.8	A few years ago in our eternal search for a theory or person to help improve our marriage,
1:05.7	we heard about Terry Real, who's pretty famous in the therapy world. I always like to point out to people that he's
1:11.5	Bruce Springsteen's couples therapist. Terry's great, but he is really expensive to see. He charges
1:18.8	like 30 grand for a weekend intensive. He does sometimes offer low-cost therapy, but there's a
1:25.4	catch. You have to be okay with having your sessions
1:28.2	observed by other therapists and recorded for training purposes. Jess and I signed up. We thought if
1:35.7	he can help Bruce Springsteen, he can help us. We both had a lot of issues that we were bringing
	...

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