First Day of Marriage Camp: HERE’S the Beef

Twenty years of marriage and we’ve been bare-knuckling it alone. It’s time.

We had our first marriage counseling session today. I was nervous (see previous fear rant) and skeptical as the therapist the online couples counseling program set us up with shares the demographics of our last few presidents. This means that for the 45 minute session, we only got to see 2/3 of his face at any given time because Zoom cameras can’t be trusted and also I’m pretty sure he thinks my name is Farrah, because Zoom microphones probably shouldn’t be. Obviously he did quote Winston Churchill several times, but still, we liked his quiet, wise, calming Dumbledore energy and he gave us some good ideas to try right off the bat.

I’ve done individual therapy enough that I figured we’d start with a getting-to-know-us interview kind of thing, but instead, he read off the application Robb submitted like, “I see here you have some ancient grievances with each other that you just keep rehashing and you want to finally put all that beef to bed? And….go!”

It was a bit off-putting to just invite us to launch at first, but we eventually got into the flow. Our tasks this week are to 1) Come up with a list of the ancient beefs we want to resolve and 2) Spend 10 minutes/day talking to each other where we rotate- 5 minutes each- of just sharing whatever we…