Let me give you a free piece of relationship advice: just break up. If it’s more work than pleasure, if your heart sinks when they call, if you catch yourself writing ‘have sex’ on your to-do list, break up. Life is short, death is certain, relationships are for loving in, and if you can’t be with the one you love, you can at least leave the one you’re with.
I give this advice because I know that people in bad relationships don’t take it. They are like those evacuation refuseniks, stumping around on the volcanic hillside, saying they’ve lived there 20 years and they’ll be damned if the whole thing blowing sky-high will change that. You may be weary, you may be sad and sorry and enmeshed in tangled webs of silence and rejection, but you’re in it for the long haul. OK. Sit down. I have a podcast for you.
In less than an hour we see 20 years of unhappiness sifted down to a few abrasive gems
Where Should We Begin? is about people desperate to make it work. It is a thing of savage beauty. Each episode consists of a single counselling session, in which the host, relationship therapist Esther Perel, peels back layers of self-deception until she finds the writhing, needy ganglion at the root of the pain.
The episode titles reproduce the guests’ idea of their Big Problem. ‘It’s Very Hard to Live with a Saint’, goes one, in which she can do no right and he can do no wrong. ‘What Would It Take For You to Come Out?’, reads another, in which she is out and proud, but she isn’t, after four years together. Some of them seem self-explanatory. ‘He Loves Her, His Family Rejects Her’. ‘When I’m Manic I Cheat’. ‘The Chronic Philanderer’.
What we discover, over the course of a 40-minute conversation, is that these narratives are only approximations of reality.
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