A Short Story that Might Help Your Marriage

Clients sometimes ask me for a book recommendation that might be helpful to our work together. Usually they want non-fiction—something by Esther Perel or Terry Real. But on occasion someone asks me to recommend a piece of fiction, which can be more difficult. Even more difficult is when it’s a couples therapy client. What novel or collection of short stories might help my clients to work on their relationships?

The fact is that literary fiction does not provide us many exemplary relationships from which we can get tips on how to improve or fortify our long-term romantic unions. “Happiness writes white,” goes an old French dictum: contentedness and consistently full hearts are barely legible on the page.   

I was thinking about this the other day while reading Benjamin Balint’s recent biography of Polish-Jewish writer, Bruno Schultz—not the first writer from whom most of us would seek marital advice—when I came across this passage: “Bruno Schulz believed that human weaknesses—carnal and otherwise—allow human beings to find companionship.” Schulz expressed the idea in a letter to a friend: “Without flaws they would stay locked inside themselves,” he wrote, “not needing anything. It takes their vices to give them flavor and attraction.” 

This idea put me in mind of “The Lady with the Little Dog,” a short story by Anton Chekhov that depicts with exuberant detail the process of Gurov, a philandering middle-aged banker, falling for and later deciding to commit to Annya, a married young woman he’s having an affair with. Gurov is getting older in Chekhov’s story, and after dozens of extramarital affairs throughout his adult life, the love he feels for Annya is crystalized as he sees himself in the mirror:

His head was beginning to turn gray. And it seemed strange to him that he had aged so much in those last years, had lost so much of his good looks. The shoulders on which his hands lay were warm and trembled. He felt compassion for this life, still so warm and beautiful, but probably already near the point where it would begin to fade and whither, like his own life. Why did she love him so? Women had always taken him to be other than he was and they had loved in him, not himself, but a man their imagination had created, whom they had greedily created all their lives; and, then, when they had noticed their mistake, they had still loved him. And not one of them had been happy with him. Time passed, he met women, became intimate, parted, but not once did he love; there was anything else, but not love. 

In this passage, I see the human weakness Schulz wrote about embodied in Gurov’s gray hair and fading good looks. Gurov has never really loved; his sudden awareness of his own vulnerability allows him to for the first time. 

I think this is a useful notion for those of us struggling in our marriages and long-term relationships. My mentor, the writer, George Saunders, used to talk about the irony that we don’t necessarily fall in love with people because of their prowess or talent; the moment of falling in love might happen when watching a partner clumsily trying to ice skate.

I wonder if, the longer we’re in a relationship, the harder it is to appreciate and care for our partner’s vulnerabilities and the easier it is to forget how much their love for us makes our own frailties more tolerable. If you have a partner, take a moment and consider their emotional vulnerability. Does that not make you feel more tenderly and loving towards them? And what better way to consider the nature of love than by reading some Chekhov?