When the seven-year itch arrived, as it did fashionably late in the eighth year of our gay marriage, it caught me off guard. I mean, come on: we were the Valdes Greenwoods, paragons of domestic bliss, so happy I even wrote a weekly newspaper column about it. In retrospect, that seems like hubris — and we all know what pride comes before.
On the morning of our eighth anniversary, we were barely speaking. A subject we shall call The Elephant had entered our lives. Elephants are big, and we live in a small house. You can imagine the effect of sharing 700 square feet with such a large creature. It didn’t matter that this was a metaphoric elephant; it seized as much room as it could, crowding us off into opposite corners, where we were barely able to see each other past its hulking mass.
We had not prepared for The Elephant's move into our home. It had taken us a full year even to hang art on the living-room wall, and we still had half-painted areas upstairs. To say that we hadn’t factored in room for The Elephant — or considered how to negotiate around one in the unlikely event of its arrival — is an understatement. But here was the beast, looming over us and casting baleful glances our way, as we cowered in our corners, hurling invective across the room.
We argued about who was most responsible. For each emotional equivalent of "I never wanted to live in a zoo," there came a rejoinder of, "Well, you’re the one who brought the damn thing into the house!" Round and round we went, until we got tired of shouting over what we couldn’t see past and lapsed into silence. Quiet can be calming, but not when you use the time to nurse a grudge or blame the man you love for bringing home The Elephant. Something had to give.
The answer suggested itself to us in whispers: get therapy. Now, we’re not a therapy couple. Till recently, all our counseling has come from calling our best friends on the West Coast or simply talking things through with each other. We’re a couple that eats breakfast and dinner together every day, so most of our processing comes at the table. But past dinner conversations didn’t usually revolve around "you suck" and "you suck more." At a loss as to how to make progress, and with a mammoth obstacle snoozing in the living room, we knew we had to act like civilized, modern grown-ups and find ourselves a therapist.
At first, we approached this task with all the secrecy of a spy mission: no friends or family were involved, and our search consisted mostly of looking at counseling ads in a gay newspaper. We called our HMO and got names that didn’t mean anything to us and made lists of questions to ask faceless people. The Elephant may have been imaginary, but the very real therapists seemed nearly as intangible and spectral. Maybe that’s why we didn’t call any of them right away. Instead, we let things simmer until it was all gloom, all the time.
But then, in the midst of our funk, a beam of light broke through. As we finally began to tell friends about our situation, a curious pattern emerged: we discovered that many of the long-term couples we know had already gone through therapy together. One wife had left her husband before they endured months of counseling so brutal that they couldn’t ride in the same car to get there, only to emerge happy and back together. One lesbian friend, bouncing her child on her lap, just chuckled, "Oh, we’ve been down that road!"
Suddenly, all these couples that were like us in surface ways turned out to be like us in invisible ways, too. We’d had no clue that, for couples of our generation, therapy was the emotional Home Depot: the first stop for relationship repair. It was like discovering a secret handshake, or seeing your uncle’s Shriner fez for the first time — a realization that a whole other world exists behind the façade of the world around you. And if that was true, well, maybe it wasn’t so weird to find ourselves a good doctor with side-by-side couches.
You can imagine the first few calls: "Uh, hi, my gay husband and I need to talk to someone who has dealt with same-sex couples with Elephant issues ..." Somehow, just talking about finding a therapist landed us on the same side of the room again. No, The Elephant wasn’t gone, but he was lurking off to one side, where we could both keep an eye on him. And every call seemed to dispel a bit more of the gloom.
Of course, if you’ve ever had therapy, you know what comes next in the story: the impossibility of getting an appointment. Every time we got a recommendation from someone, the therapist in question turned out to be free only at, say, 9:48 a.m. on workdays in his remote office in Nova Scotia. A social worker explained that HMOs only approve a certain number of therapists, in hopes that the wait will be long enough that you’ll break down and pay for a non-approved counselor out of your own pocket instead.
This appalling practice has made our progress slow on one front, but it’s come with an unexpected bonus: now we’re fighting the system together. There’s nothing like a common enemy to bond a couple, and "Fuck the HMO bastards!" might as well be "Go team!" When we’re making phone calls, filling out insurance paperwork, and comparing notes, we act like the couple we once were and hope to be — when The Elephant finally leaves the room — once again.
David Valdes Greenwood can be reached at valdesgreenwood@worldnet.att.net
