Introduction: the present context

It turns out that, with the social crises, the dizzying changes and the instability of today’s working contexts described in Richard Sennett’s The Corrosion of Character (2), and with those characteristics of “liquid bonds” so widely publicised by Zygmunt Bauman (3), many people belonging to various age brackets and to different sectors of society are losing their faith in the couple bond; or, to be more precise, they are losing the parameters, the values and the customs that worked as orientation maps of the conduct approved and not approved by couples. That is why some set out to look for new bonds in other geographies, through the internet for instance, so as to secure themselves a certain amount of time for dialogue and get to know the person as such before rushing compulsively into living together. Perhaps the same thing is happening to many human beings on this upended planet. And to us: what is happening to us in this respect? Perhaps we oscillate between trust and mistrust towards our fellow human beings. It depends on whom we are speaking about. Or on what we are going through, and on the way we are facing it.

But the problem is that of the man who consults a psychiatrist because his brother thinks he is a chicken; the doctor then tells him: “Well then, have him admitted to hospital at once!” To which the man replies: “I can’t, doctor, I need the eggs.” It does indeed seem that, as Woody Allen says in one of his films, we keep relationships going because we need them. And also for those “reasons of the heart that reason does not know”, as the French philosopher Blaise Pascal put it.

In search of those “reasons of the heart”, the results of a study directed by a well-known Argentine researcher, Dr Martina Casullo, conclude that physical attractiveness and sexual performance are not, for today’s adolescents (between 13 and 25 years old), reasons to become a couple, still less to fall in love. What counts for them, by contrast, is mutual attraction in romantic terms, love, trust, warmth and emotional maturity. Beyond change over time and the questions proper to the life cycle of human beings, it seems that what not only sustains us but also energises us and allows us to build the hope of a better relational ecology is our loving bonds with our fellow creatures; bonds which need to take root in mutual trust, in emotional wisdom and, naturally, in the small acts of everyday life. Moreover, the richness of a loving relationship, bearing love given and received, constitutes a world of events that no articulated language would be enough to explain.

One of the great challenges of the couple: the “ménage à trois”

One of the great challenges of the couple is to leave the initial fusional phase, nowadays quickly brought about by the almost immediate cohabitation I mentioned above. The members of a young couple (or a not-so-young one) may even live together in the family home of one of the parties, at the parents of one or the other. From this stage and this original state, two distinct beings aim to move from a being-together in which one is somewhat a single one, in which one plus one makes less than one, to a later phase, sometimes founded on a richer exchange, generally the fruit of a process, of a demanding and intelligent relational work, nourished by will, affection, the desire to build and to enjoy in common, the readiness to go through crises, illnesses and losses supporting one another. It is in this phase or stage of the couple’s life cycle that the possibility of differentiating, of confronting one another and of carrying on appears. Or not. In fact, in recent years unions have been quick, and separations and divorces too. This moment, crucial in the becoming of a couple, when one perceives the other as different, would be the moment of the triangular relationship or “ménage à trois”. I am not referring to the classical sense of that expression, which points to a third person involved in one way or another in the dyadic relationship, including with the explicit consent of the original couple, but to this: to the sum of one plus one is added the relationship, that virtual “third party”, which makes far more than three, which stands between two people who differentiate themselves from one another but who have in common something that includes them and that, at the same time, exceeds them both: an unexplored territory of intersection between two worlds. It would be he, she and the relationship that both choose, sustain and build in a given context and in given circumstances. This last point, the co-construction of the loving bond, is gradual; it demands commitment, acts and an attitude of reciprocal co-responsibility from the two protagonists.

Various authors, such as Michael White for instance, mention this third part of a couple relationship, not only in a descriptive function but also, and above all, as a proposal for psychotherapeutic work. In White’s case, he uses it for his well-known concept of externalising the conflict situation: taking it out of the “inside” of the people who, in this instance, make up the couple, or of the couple itself as such, in order to address it with the couple, almost as though it were an autonomous entity called “the relationship”. Which naturally has to do with the two members of the couple – it is in fact their responsibility –, yet is neither the couple itself, nor intrinsically its individual components, but what these decide to do or not to do with it. Beyond the concept of externalising, if the couple can speak in these terms, one can say that, by coming out of a kind of fusion in which one does not know where one person ends and the other begins, the construction begins of an implicit but above all explicit alliance, from a place of clear differentiation from one another, which will allow them to hold a dialogue, that is, to begin to learn to listen to one another and to perceive and understand clearly, in this way, the aspects they have in common, what they share, and the aspects that differentiate them, that distinguish them as beings coming from distinct family “tribes” of origin; tribes which, very often, stimulate the quarrel, the comparisons, the criticisms, and the marital bed fills up with virtual characters, some of whom come to visit at the weekend. Only from the moment when they have cleared the couple’s ground, and only then, will they be able to build a solid and rewarding shared project. I remember the scene of a film in which the couple, in the marital bedroom – more precisely in the marital bed –, are arguing vehemently; little by little, members of the family of origin of each spouse appear and speak into their ears. These characters are not really in the scene: the director shows them to the audience so that we can see who the internal interlocutors are who dictate the script of the argument the couple is having. Little by little the couple, at first in full symmetrical escalation, calms down and listens; and then, gradually, the characters who represent the internal interlocutors disappear one by one, and the couple in question recovers its intimacy.

The success of this particular loving alliance implies granting significant value to the relationship, which in turn implies not trying to impose what suits one or the other, but understanding whether “this or that” harms or benefits the relationship. Hence, as has already been said, every couple is always a little bit of a “ménage à trois”, as though there were always three of them living as two: he, she and the relationship they share.

The second “ménage à trois”: the “therapeutic genogram”

The other “ménage à trois”: the required, intrusive, curious, discreet, provocative, soothing, disturbing, catalysing, destabilising and containing presence of the therapist. Or of the individual therapists. And/or of the occasional lovers.

The whole is more, much more, than the sum of the parts

So there are 3 of us in the formal therapeutic web, but 5 in the virtual web: the couple, the individual therapists and me; and there is at least one more of us on the stage of the dramatic comedy of this therapy, the wife’s lover, whose presence, more virtual than physical but a presence all the same – all the more so if one takes into account the realism of today’s means of communication –, will accompany us for almost the whole duration of the couple therapy and will occupy a good part of the conversations in the sessions.

The couple, moreover, as I have already said, have two children, a boy of 8 and a girl of 14. They have been living together for about 18 years. They are today two people who are successful professionally.

They arrive in the middle of a crisis, when the husband discovers what he had suspected for quite a while: the presence of a third party. Previously, they had had a few couple sessions with the wife’s therapist, in the course of which the possible infidelity had been discussed, but in which, in that setting, the fact had been concealed and even denied in the face of direct questions from José. Let us make it clear that the individual therapist knew the subject very well.

After these matters were revealed, they both acknowledge the fact and, beyond the anger and the pain, agree to do a couple therapy and, above all, to put an end to the extramarital stories. The second part of the pact lasts less long than political alliances. The wife remains for quite a while in intense virtual contact with her lover, with a few more episodic personal contacts. And the game is uncovered again, when the couple treatment has already begun. These matters, in addition to the couple’s crisis – whose “liquidity”, that is, the “fragilisation” of the bond in the terms of Bauman, author of the famous essay Liquid Love –, greatly complicate the frame, quite as much as that of the jealous woman who, in the middle of a couple therapy, had paid a supposed saleswoman to seduce her husband so as to be able to check whether her suspicions were well founded. These matters, I repeat, nearly broke my frame, or complicated it considerably. And just as they put my patience to the test, I also had, why not say so, to hold back at times a frank burst of laughter at this comedy of imbroglios, recalling at moments Woody Allen’s brilliant constructivist film Melinda and Melinda. Especially when she told him that she “did not want to feel hampered in her professional development” and he replied to her with a certain irritation that “he did not want to hamper any academic development, but that he demanded that she cut off her relationship with her colleague and lover”.

From “yours, mine and ours” to “what is mine, what is yours and what is ours”

If the first are characteristic of stepfamilies, the second are characteristic of couple therapies. That is why I refer to the presence of the individual therapists and to my own. In this case – it is not always so –, the husband’s individual therapist accompanied the first segment, then quickly proposed to José that he focus on his couple therapy with me. The wife’s therapist, on the other hand, perhaps more attached to the therapeutic setting, carried on with the therapy and created the sense of a strong complicity with her, something that would later be confirmed by the client herself. During her therapy, the therapist is said to have authorised Viviana to “explore and live new experiences”, with that delicious new age vocabulary of “freeing her inner being” and that sort of thing. It is worth making clear that Viviana did not conceive of this without her husband’s knowledge: she therefore did not accept infidelity as a modality of the couple and obviously opposed with fervour any infidelity on his part towards her. In the end, she decided to leave her individual therapist, and then there were only three of us. At least within the therapeutic frame.

Beyond the interventions and the vicissitudes of the therapy itself, I wish to set out publicly a therapeutic setting that is fairly common in my experience and in that of many colleagues, as well as the challenge it implies: the presence of the individual therapists, as ménages à trois, “à quatre” and “à cinq”, where sometimes, beyond the unquestionable professionalism and good intentions of the latter, one clearly perceives in the individual therapists an interest in their client, and not always in the relationship. Which does not prevent it from sometimes being necessary to save a couple from a couple therapy. But, to stay with the encounter of the therapist–client pair, the latter being a member of a couple, the one writing these lines acknowledges that, when one member of a couple speaks to me about the other, I inevitably invent for myself an image of that other which rarely coincides with reality. The advantage of our orientation is that if someone is spoken about at length to me and that someone can be convened, I shall end up, like many systemic colleagues, convening them and dealing with that flesh-and-blood being; and the prior image, created by my imagination through the account of the other member of the couple, will gradually fade.

To come back to the therapeutic relationship, I am referring simultaneously to that of the couple itself, plus that of each member with their individual therapist, that of the couple with the couple therapist, and that of the therapists involved among themselves, whether or not they communicate with one another, whether or not they know one another. Let us add to that the variable of perceived or unperceived rivalry, of professional jealousies, of the theories and practices not shared by these three therapists involved, and we would have a therapeutic web of great complexity, one to which we are fairly accustomed; which is neither necessarily good nor necessarily bad, but decidedly stimulating and singular.

Moreover, the scene I am describing as a participant observer – who can, if need be, rely on a team or on a supervisor, in the terms of a first-order cybernetics, that of observed systems – in fact includes me; and consequently I also question introspectively the third member of the encounter in question, the therapist present there. That is to say, myself:

• What is happening to me, up to that moment, with all this?
• How do I feel physically: oppressed, tense, or comfortable and relaxed? Or perhaps on the alert and waiting?
• Am I working as a team with the individual therapists, or in full confrontation of styles, ideas and types of intervention?

The endless number of bodily signals, in addition to the contents that come from the conversations with the other therapists, speaks to me, influences me, disturbs me and questions me too. It begins to alert me to my sensations, to my nascent emotions, which will perhaps dissipate or settle in; and I shall then have to do something about it.

The relational therapeutic work

As for the therapeutic work of this particular therapy, it centred on a narrative of the consented learning of FIDELITY and RELATIONAL COMMITMENT, in capitals: that is to say, we questioned – and I stress the use of the first person plural, proper to the therapeutic alliance – the facts that damaged “the relationship”, and we looked for the attitudes that helped it, generating a new language and therefore a new reality, new codes of conduct, new relational pacts. We could also say that we recovered certain founding bases of the couple’s initial project of forming a family. The central idea was to set aside the secondary characters little by little in order to give the leading role back to the members of the couple: so that, beyond the others in question, therapists and lover included, the couple should reappropriate its decisions and create a relational ecology suited to its own needs and its own tastes.

The psychotherapy lasted about ten months, with a few intervals due to holidays and to the professional travel of the two of them, some of it particularly risky, but which the couple got through with determination and intelligence.

An emblematic scene of the therapeutic setting evoked here: the therapeutic ménage à trois – the trio, the couple and I – was looking at a cushion from my consulting room that symbolised the couple relationship, placed between them on a chair, and we were conversing about what would be best, in this or that situation, for “Her”, the couple relationship. In this way, naming her, looking at her and sometimes touching the object that represents what we are talking about and what we are attending to gives her a tangible presence: it is something delicate, vulnerable, fragile, pleasant, which depends on both of them, similar to the care of a child but decidedly different.

The repetition of these scenes and the imagination of the protagonists will make her become practically real, will allow them to hold a dialogue about “Her” and, from there, to decide on good terms what it is appropriate to do.

Dialogue, personal experience, the creation of the work: a few reflections on the couple

The following dialogue, between two Argentine actors, Susana Cart and Arturo Bonin, a couple in real life and co-protagonists of two reflective comedies about the couple (Hasta que la Vida nos Separe and Cómo Ríe la Vida), expresses to my mind the emotional intelligence and the proactive attitude of those who bet on life as two.

Susana Cart: This play started from the observation of a phenomenon that was occurring around us. Of all the couples among our friends who were contemporaries of ours, who had lived together for more than twenty-two years, the only “survivors” were us. And there was one sentence that was a common denominator in the separations: “when the children left, I turned round and I did not know who this man was, or this woman…” The idea is that one: what happens to these people who no longer manage to notice one another, who have lost contact to the point of no longer recognising each other?

Arturo Bonin: Right from the start, in trying to tell this from our own perspective, a dramatic tone arose that was not what we were looking for, because we did understand, yes, that we wanted to do it through humour. Accidentally, while attending a friend’s show, we discovered a way of looking at dramatic facts from a perspective close to the one we wanted, and we got in touch with the author. We were surprised and terrified, because he was a young man of 23 whom we nevertheless convened; and we had the enormous surprise of encountering a gaze which, as he confessed afterwards, corresponded to the son of that hypothetical couple. From there he could bring that share of humour, impossible for us.

Susana: We try to reflect on what we are, and we attempt to modify what we understand can improve the relationship and, through it, our life. All of this through humour, because we believe it is an excellent vehicle for the spectator to relax and identify with what is happening on stage.

Arturo: We give neither recipes nor solutions; we simply try to question everything so that, out of the exchange, a possibility of change may arise.

Susana: When we started performing these plays, we asked ourselves: why should people come and see us? And we thought they might come (and indeed they came and go on coming) because they are going to spend an hour trying to understand what happened to this couple who, after 25 years of marriage, separated and found each other again two years later. Perhaps that, with a smile, leads us to reconsider some of the little things of a couple’s everyday life, which are the hardest of all.

Arturo: Perhaps we come to see ourselves, because I always say that theatre is a critical mirror of reality: perhaps we see ourselves reflected critically and, since we smile at that outburst or that situation, we may come to relate to it from another place and say, always with a smile: “that happens to me too, I should try to change it. Maybe tomorrow…”

What unites and what divides a couple

Arturo: What unites, besides physical attraction, is discussion, opening up and being sincere, telling what is happening to you, not what you think. Taking on with responsibility life, health and integration with the other. What divides is indifference, not talking to each other, assumptions, prejudices.

Susana: What unites is the possibility of a work carried out every day, which implies maintaining the couple’s independence with regard to the family and social surroundings. What divides is disloyalty, mistrust, competition, holding the other responsible for one’s own misfortunes.

Both: We are defenders of life in common. Very often we tell ourselves that we would have at least four or five daily reasons to separate, but we have taken the political decision to fight for our deepest bonds.

To conclude…

In these final lines I want to share a few very simple reflections: for example that, in the stimulating and fascinating psychotherapy of the couple, it is very often more useful to show and to practise ways of doing things that are very different from those they were practising until then, and to avoid argumentative rhetoric – even if one is a brilliant and charismatic speaker (and far more so when one is not).

That it is also worth making the effort to create a good climate of teamwork, one that allows us to ask advice of the clients themselves: to ask them how things usually change or improve (and it is certain that this has already happened to them, that they have already achieved it); what tools, what forms, what strategies they use when they reach the desired results; and above all what they themselves would regard, very concretely, as help on the therapist’s part.

And, last but not least, what each of them would like to obtain in the first place as a result of the psychotherapy – without accepting as an answer ready-made, stereotyped, vague and imprecise phrases, but concrete facts, precise objectives, relational scenes achievable within a reasonable span of time.

In the second place, whether they have common objectives, equally specific. And finally, in the third place, whether they know the objectives, the goals and the aspirations of their partners or spouses, and what attitude they have about it; to which the other member must respond as to whether or not they perceive this or that stated attitude.

In this way, we permanently build a circular perception of relational situations, in which both can always perceive the co-responsibility of their respective actions.

Finally, I suggest asking as often as possible whether the work we are doing is useful to them; and, once again, whatever the answer and above all if it is affirmative, asking what exactly is useful to them and what it serves them for, in what way it changes them, and whether they would like to add something or change something in what we are doing. In this connection, and as a paradigmatic example, in many cases I discuss with the clients, when they come back the following time, the frequency of work they prefer: weekly, fortnightly, or perhaps they need more time for an assigned task. I always prefer the decision to be theirs, which allows them gradually to appropriate the process of change according to their own rhythms, and leads them to incorporate the permanent practice of consensus and teamwork.

Paraphrasing the quotation from McCullers, I would say that:

“Above all, couple psychotherapy is an experience shared by three people, but that does not mean that the experience is the same for the three people involved. There are those who love each other, but those two come from distinct regions, or perhaps they do not both love each other equally and, above all, do not describe that love in exactly the same way. And there is the therapist called upon by the couple, coming too from a distinct region, from a culture perhaps similar but always different, with their theoretical map, narrower or broader; with their professional training and their life experiences on their shoulders at that particular moment; and with the love they can transmit to each member of the couple and to the relationship that unites them.”