They don’t go bike riding. They don’t go on vacation. They do some of those other things. He reads her book. He is more kind. She cooks, a little. She stays awake. She tries to be more affectionate, though because he is so affectionate already, sometimes she forgets that he wants a little more from her direction. They do some sex things.
Outside therapy, maybe the third time they go, they’re parking the car and before he gets out, the husband sort of jokingly says I don’t want to do this. Why are we doing this? We don’t need to do this. Everything is fine!
The wife laughs, because she sure as shit doesn’t want to do this either, but everything does not seem fine. She may not know what is wrong exactly, but maybe fine is not the base level you’re looking for in a marriage. And so far, the therapist is not even helping them level up a notch above fine. Maybe that’s the whole idea when the therapist themself is only fine. More than once, the wife has to translate between the therapist and the husband. The therapist’s style is to slowly recalculate like a GPS when you keep turning the car around. She starts with an idea, she’ll say Okay, let me put it like this. And she’ll begin some kind of parallel, but not even get far enough for a germ of the idea to emerge, before she stops herself and says No wait. Let me put it this way. And she’ll start to put it that way, and then she repeats this cycle several times until she finishes a complete thought. Occasionally the wife finds it a useful thought, just as often, not. Just as often, the husband doesn’t get it at all, which is when the wife provides a pared-down version for the husband. She thinks we need a vacation. Next in the communication sequence is that the husband will start to say something, but her husband is a slow talker, takes long pauses between phrases in a complete sentence (more so when he really doesn’t want to say something), and even though the wife can usually figure out where he’s going, the fine therapist often doesn’t fully follow, at which point the wife has to translate back for her. He wants me to plan it, the wife says to the therapist, and this two-sentence exchange takes place over the course of ten or fifteen expensive minutes of their not-covered hour because this therapist does not work with their insurance provider. They see this therapist every two weeks, six times over the next two months.