Dr. Orna Guralnik on Couples Therapy

Somewhere in every long relationship there is a dishwasher. Not a literal one, necessarily, though often that too. It is whatever small, recurring thing makes a person think: why are you like this. Why do you tell the forty-five-minute version of a story that could have taken four minutes. Why do I have to ask for quiet instead of you simply knowing I need it. The psychoanalyst Dr. Orna Guralnik, who treats real couples on camera for Showtime's docuseries Couples Therapy, has spent decades sitting with exactly this question, and her answer is not what most people expect. The dishwasher was never the problem. The problem, and also the point, is that the person loading it wrong is a genuinely different person.

Guralnik's central idea is that people do not choose partners to find themselves in another person. They choose partners to let a stranger into their life on purpose.

"We don't partner with another person to find ourselves. We partner with another person to invite otherness into our lives, and then we spend years trying to negotiate what to do with that otherness." (Dr. Orna Guralnik, [00:55])

Otherness, in Guralnik's usage, just means the fact of the other person's difference: their taste, their pace, their family history, their nervous system. A relationship is the ongoing project of living with that difference instead of erasing it. Most couples, she says, default to one of two moves when otherness gets uncomfortable. Either they decide they are right and the partner is wrong, or they decide the partner's wrongness means the marriage itself was a mistake (08:20). Both moves, she points out, do the same thing: they try to get rid of the difference instead of learning to live inside it (08:58). Her alternative is almost administrative in its plainness.

"You could imagine it that you're creating your own mini political system. So what kind of political system do you believe in? What are your ethics about difference? And try to have that guide you." (Dr. Orna Guralnik, [07:54])

That reframe, a couple as a tiny nation negotiating its own constitution, turns a fight about the dishwasher into a fight about which values govern disagreement. It also explains why so many arguments feel bigger than their stated subject. Underneath, someone is asking: if you are allowed to be different from me, does that mean I am not entitled to exist as I am (11:15)?

To explain why that question feels so dangerous, Guralnik reaches for a concept from the British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein called splitting. Splitting is a basic defense, present from infancy, in which a person sorts experience into good and bad and then keeps the good inside while pushing the bad onto someone else (15:05). A baby does this with a mother who sometimes feeds and sometimes does not. Adults do it with partners who are sometimes warm and sometimes absent, except adults are supposed to grow out of needing the split. Guralnik calls the alternative integration: understanding that the loving partner and the unavailable partner are the same single person, and that a person can hold both love and frustration toward them at once (16:01). Mental development, in this account, is not about feeling fewer hard feelings. It is about keeping good and bad in one container instead of two.

Splitting, Guralnik argues, is also how rigid gender roles do their damage. Patriarchy, the social system in which men hold disproportionate power, is usually described as something only women suffer. Guralnik pushes back on that in couples work. Men suffer too, she says, because performing masculinity requires splitting off anything coded feminine: softness, need, verbal emotion.

"They have to, like split off all that's within them that has to do with femininity, and it empties them out. Like any kind of splitting ultimately empties you out." (Dr. Orna Guralnik, [17:20])

Women, meanwhile, are often split off from qualities coded masculine, like ambition or dominance, and then quietly resent a partner for having easy access to them (17:20). The goal in therapy, she says, is to get both partners to a "deeply felt understanding that we're everything," so the split stops doing the work of a false boundary (17:53).

The Vacuum Where Masculinity Used to Be

One of the more pointed exchanges in the episode concerns a newer symptom: passivity. The hosts ask whether withdrawal, rather than yelling, has become the modern face of toxic masculinity, and Guralnik agrees it can be its own form of dominance (26:12). Her explanation is less about individual men behaving badly and more about a system in transition. The old definition of masculine success, breadwinner, decision-maker, emotionally closed off, has been devalued as women earn more and take on roles once reserved for men (27:34). But no clear replacement script has arrived yet. Men are left, in her words, "paralyzed," holding old pressure to perform a role whose coordinates have been erased (28:00). She is careful to call this a generalization, but it reframes passive withdrawal as confusion rather than simple avoidance, which changes what a partner might usefully say to it.

That same instinct, to look underneath a behavior for its origin story, drives one of Guralnik's more unusual diagnostic tools: the intergenerational errand. Borrowed from the analyst Maurice Aprey, the term describes a task or debt passed down through a family that never got resolved, and that a person then tries to resolve through a current partner without realizing it (32:30). Guralnik offers two examples from her case files. One involves a woman from a long line of families in which men left, who feels her otherwise loving partner owes her a debt that predates him, a debt accumulated by generations of abandoned women (33:49). The other involves a man who grew up as the only English speaker in his immigrant family, always translating his parents into the surrounding culture, who then partnered with a deaf woman, taking up the same task of translation in a new form (34:43). Neither person chose these roles consciously. The errand chose them.

Turning Annoyance Into Information

If otherness and splitting explain why couples fight, Guralnik's practical tools are mostly about interrupting the fight before it calcifies into a pattern. One is what she calls a paradoxical intervention, a technique borrowed from cognitive behavioral therapy in which a person is instructed to do the opposite of what the therapist actually wants to happen, in order to disrupt a stuck system (24:09). She describes working with a hyper-functional wife who had lost touch with pleasure entirely, running the household while her husband asked for more fun and rest. Guralnik's prescription was blunt: the wife had to take two mandatory hours a day and do absolutely nothing productive (23:46). The paradox worked. She rediscovered that she actually liked unstructured time, and her husband realized he missed the functional tasks he had ceded entirely. A gentler version of the same move applies at home: instead of criticizing a partner for a recurring annoyance, like shoes left in the wrong spot, go hug them instead (25:10). The irritation stops needing to be acted out by either side.

A second tool is countertransference, a term from the therapy room for what a therapist feels while sitting with a patient. Guralnik treats that feeling as data, not noise (50:17). The same logic applies outside the therapy room. If a partner's long monologues make someone want to walk away, that urge to flee is information worth reporting back, kindly, rather than suppressing. In the episode, one host describes going quiet during a walk rather than saying she needed rest, and stewing instead of simply naming the need (53:57). Guralnik's point is that the quiet withdrawal and the irritated monologue are both symptoms of the same missing step: translating a private feeling into a shared sentence.

A caller named Caitlin raises a related problem that has nothing to do with conversation: she cannot sleep in the same bed as her boyfriend of two years, despite trying for his sake (61:03). Guralnim offers two lines of thought. One is simply logistical: nothing requires two adults to share a mattress to prove love, and plenty of couples thrive with separate rooms (62:22). The other is more probing: sleep is a state of total vulnerability, and the anxiety Caitlin describes might be less about noise sensitivity and more about what her unconscious fears could happen if she actually let go in front of another person (63:27).

The episode ends where it began, with otherness, but turned into something closer to an instruction. Guralnik's closing challenge is to take the single trait in a partner that is most irritating, the thing that reliably gets under the skin, and try on a different frame for it entirely.

"Challenge yourself to think of the thing about your partner that is the most disturbing to you, that brings you the most agita, to try to imagine it as the thorn from which the most growth can happen." (Dr. Orna Guralnik, [64:55])

It is a strange request, treating irritation as a resource rather than a verdict. But it follows directly from everything before it. If a relationship exists to bring a genuinely other person into a life, then the parts of that person that chafe the most are usually the parts doing the most otherness work. The dishwasher was never really about the dishwasher. It was a small, recurring referendum on how much difference two people are willing to live inside, together, without voting the other one off the island.