Finding a couples therapist where they live turns out to be not so easy. They have coverage for it, but their area is remote enough that without a referral, it’s going to be trial and error. Not to mention that asking anyone in their very small city in the Hudson Valley for a referral seems likely to equate to announcing it in the paper. Also the husband doesn’t want to participate much in finding one. He wants the wife to find several, and then for him to choose.
They meet two.
He prefers one for reasons the wife isn’t clear on. This therapist has an office upstairs in a Victorian carriage house with a big old unrestored window, which seems like it might be a good enough reason for him. The wife would describe this therapist as seeming fine, which is maybe a low bar. But it’s been a month of looking and the wife wants to get started. So every other week they go to couples counseling and the therapist asks what they each want and they tell her some things they want. Some of these things aren’t out of the blue after fifteen years. The husband wants more affection, he wants excitement, he wants the wife to cook, and to go hiking, maybe bike riding in Central Park, he wants the wife to plan things for them to do, he wants more sex or he wants her to initiate sex or he wants sex later at night or he wants some other kind of sex that they aren’t having or he wants all those sex things, but he does not want any of the sex things to be planned. He wants the wife to stay up later at night and to not fall asleep watching TV and to be a better navigator in the car and to overall take care of him better. Differently. The wife wants the husband to take her on a vacation, be kind, commit to working on himself more, outside of couples therapy, on his own, to look at himself as deeply as she believes he once did. The wife wants the husband to read her most recent book.