Laurie Abraham’s portrait of couples group therapy for the New York Times Magazine is riveting. In part, that’s because it’s a rather conventional narrative that develops its protagonists through their own transformative self-discovery while god, otherwise known as therapist Judith Coché, pulls strings to bring about that transformation. As much as that, it’s a snapshot of how marriage is developing among us:

When Coché lists the virtues of the group over other forms of therapy, she cites the “Greek chorus” effect, a term that captures how members begin to harass one another, if politely, about the habits corroding their marriages. “In a group, there’s an experience of being held accountable for one’s own behavior,” Coché told me, adding that it’s more powerful to be called out—or cared for—by a civilian than by a professional. “I’m a paid consultant. I’m a nonperson.” Other benefits she cites are the often-silent products of group dynamics. No matter how ultimately prosaic their woes, members are startled to see reflections of themselves in the other marriages—My God, I do that, too—and if one person musters the strength or resolve to make a change, somebody else may consciously or unconsciously follow. The principle of isomorphism also comes into play, she said, meaning that as people forge intimate connections within the group, the enriching encounter in that system may spread to the other system: the marriage.

Finally, Coché extols the “community” in which the group envelops couples. As panoramically documented by historians like Stephanie Coontz, marriage used to exist in a web of extended-family obligations. For the upper classes, its purpose was to magnify wealth and power; for the lower, to choose a spouse who could contribute sweat or material goods to the small business that was each household. Gradually, with industrialization and the movement of jobs outside the home, love replaced communal economic imperatives as the glue between husbands and wives, striking two blows to the institution. First, romantic love isn’t known for its long-lasting adhesive properties; and second, no one is as deeply invested in a marriage as the two people in it….

Romantic love has its limits, in other words, a fact that shouldn’t be any great surprise, but is a real deficit in our culture’s definitions of love. Indeed, after describing a series of brutal group sessions through which the protagonists begin to see their own impishness, the point of the group is revealed to be an attempt to understand the inevitable disappointment that comes when romance’s edges are found.

In “Intimate Terrorism,” Michael Vincent Miller theorizes that marriage, like childhood, has developmental stages, the most dangerous of which, following the heady romantic period, can be summed up as: This person, or this union, isn’t at all what I imagined. What can easily happen at this point, he writes, is that because modern marriage is “under so much pressure to provide so many levels of fulfillment,” because “love and sex are so thoroughly… bound up with one’s sense of identity as a man, as a woman,” people become consumed with feelings of failure, feelings that are so unbearable that spouses lash out at their partners rather than apprehend their own panic or contribution to the decline.

The core problem, he goes on, is that our culture doesn’t teach us “to fail gracefully or fruitfully.” Instead, “our notion of the comeback is an attempt to recapture original glory.” The husbands and wives who can move beyond terrorizing each other, or avoid doing so in the first place, he speculates, are those who can first acutely experience their profound disappointment in their inevitably changed circumstances: “Unlike jealousy, cruelty, or boredom, disappointment contains secret hints of mutuality…. It is not such a long stretch from disappointment to empathy.”

Obviously, I left out the therapy narrative—it’s worth reading, of course, to see how this theory is put into practice—and I left it out because I wanted to emphasize the ideas in play. I take disappointment here to be a more complex emotion than, say, being disappointed that your son threw two interceptions and lost the game for his team; rather, disappointment is akin to angst, a sense of the limits of things, of discovery that flaws in personӕ often endure, that a character’s commendable traits aren’t without limits. It’s also a confronting of the discrepancy between one’s own expectations about an other’s, no matter how significant, behavior, a realization that those expectations might never have been realizable. Disappointment in this sense is necessary—it’s how we recognize each other’s autonomy, which is to say, with Miller, it’s how we discover empathy. That is a necessity in all relationships, not the least long-term ones.

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