I watched the first season of Couples Therapy the other week. When I first started watching the show, several years ago, I had it in my mind that I was watching a mockumentary, not a sincere examination of what goes on in a therapist’s office and between couples. It wasn’t until I saw the show’s psychoanalyst, Orna Guralnik, do an interview on a YouTube channel I was watching that I realized it wasn’t staged, at least not in the way a lot of reality TV shows are.
Watching the show, I felt immediately invested in the couples and their stories. I was also invested in Orna, who was equally vulnerable with her clinical supervisor about how much pressure it felt to hold all of these stories and attend to each couples’ struggles. She is contemplative, thoughtful, and has a face that you could project all of your neuroses onto easily.
I had to pause and come back to the episode when I got to the COVID special. I had forgotten what a painful time the first few years of the pandemic had been, but that it was pain that was, at least on the surface, what felt like a brief second, collectively shared.
(Reader: it wasn’t at all collectively shared.)
Things feel and are very very different now. I have gotten COVID at least two times, once in 2023 and another in 2024, both during the summers, and now have a version of long COVID that makes it difficult to work consistently, though not impossible to live my life. I have had a habit of becoming more and more reticent about my health in the last while because of how non-consensual, care-as-violence has dominated and become such a bane. I have found it takes more and more effort to reach out to people socially, as it takes enormous energy/spoons to figure out where people’s COVID boundaries are and also whether our energies align. I also feel extremely irritated that BC’s Long COVID clinic feels like a university course, one I didn’t want to take, and one that feels like it’s a skip and a hop away from insulting the intelligence of its “students” (my subjective autistic take…). Absent of a disability justice perspective, mainstream chronic illness care feels like a series of doctors and experts talking down on patients, deliberately slowing down their voices as if we are children who can’t think for ourselves (lots of children think for themselves!!).
This is just one example of how things have evolved since 2020. Not a single course is available at the clinic to address the unique difficulties of racialized, queer, trans, Black, and Indigenous people might with long COVID, let alone those who can’t afford not to work. Instead of the province and country improving their disability income-support rates, we have workshops on financial distress.
Which is why it felt so bizarre watching the COVID special of Couples Therapy. It truly felt like people were prepared to face things five years ago, or at least grapple with a problem, together, and now that the world has ‘opened up’ from quarantine, everyone but sick and immunocompromised people have moved on. When I was looking for a place to stay for my upcoming reading in Toronto, I was secretly sad that I couldn’t really find anyone I knew who take similar precautions as me and also didn’t say, “for a week I’ll change how I live for you.”
(It’s hard not to say, I don’t expect anyone to, but also deeply strange to reflect on the fact that for a few months at least, we did do that for each other.)
At the end of the day, it’s not about individuals. Individualism is how we got here. It’s about how will we show up for each other as communities. If we all act laxly, why does it surprise anyone that every few weeks, another person in our circle gets COVID? Come on.
I say all this with gritted teeth, hyper-vigilance, maybe. It’s not good for anyone to be so isolated that they don’t see anyone for weeks on end, with nothing to accompany them but social media, group chats, Netflix, and their intrusive thoughts. And that’s not even getting into the economic impact of being unable to work, not being able to find work, seeing the online opportunities dwindle. I have a roof over my head and I count myself extremely fortunate and privileged as a result. Why is it so hard to create safety nets for each other? I wonder if it’s because we are like Orna in the moments when she feels pressured to take it all on. Once you support one person you want the whole world to change. But maybe that’s just me.
The other thing I found striking about the COVID special is how the show dealt with the uprising in the United States. Orna being a white therapist, she consulted with a Black psychoanalyst to think through some of the issues her Black clients were dealing with in their relationships and marriages. Looking back, it’s clear that the escalation of fascism we’re seeing is in part a whitelash to the racial recognizing of the beginning of the pandemic, among other things. Tellingly, Elon Musk’s estranged daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson remarked in an interview that she noticed he descended more fully into fascism as a direct response to COVID.
One of the most difficult parts of being disabled in the last few years is that I have not always known how to ask for the deep kind of care I need. And can I trust that the person offering it (if they do) will not feel resentful towards me afterwards? That it truly isn’t, actually, too much? I worry about this a lot. Interdependence is not at all straightforward. And this is why I was drawn to watch Couples Therapy: we don’t quite do the same kind of intense examination of a relationship between two people outside of a romantic, committed relationship. Conflicting access needs, boundaries, clashing values… one day we’ll work through it all, not as a married couple, but as a society.