The Joy Of Platonic Couple's Therapy
When there's nothing wrong and you're not banging
This is my roommate, Amber! We’re not dating, and as stated in the subtitle we’re not having sex. On top of that, we haven’t had any arguments. Both of us agree that things are, for the most part, healthy and peaceful. Still, we go to couple’s therapy once a month.
To Catch Things Ahead Of Time
A couple’s therapist isn't as much about dating as they are about the general goal of helping two people coexist.
It's a preemptive measure. Most people wait until their relationship has deteriorated beyond repair before seeking help, like waiting until your engine seizes completely before even thinking about an oil change. By then, there's so much resentment and hurt feelings built up that therapy becomes more about damage control than actual growth.
By going monthly even when things are good, we catch minor irritations before they fester into genuine resentments. That comment about dishes in the sink doesn't stay buried for six months until it explodes into "YOU NEVER RESPECT MY SPACE!" Instead, it gets addressed immediately, dissected professionally, and resolved before either of us even realizes it was becoming an issue.
It's a lot easier to prevent a bad thing than it is to reverse it, and the further along you are in the deterioration of a relationship, the more difficult it is to say, “We should bring in a third party to fix this.”
Because I have the money
Why do some of you pay mechanics to do your oil changes, when there are plenty of YouTube tutorials online? Why do many of us sometimes go out to restaurants when we could make the same meals at home? It’s the same reason why I hire a therapist to run our monthly roommate meetings: because we don’t want to do it ourselves.
Being in a one-hour meeting once a month to get any debts, lingering concerns, or debates settled is hard enough. Having to run it is a whole other monster.
For $325 USD a month, I sit in a nice couch in a room with my roommate, across from our therapist who is paid to do all that mentally draining work of prompting everyone for their feelings, concerns, reports in an equitable manner. I don’t have to worry about whether or not I’m giving enough space for my roommate to talk, because our therapist does the worrying for me!
Am I ignoring Amber’s preferences? The trained therapist would tell me if I was.
Am I creating a welcome space for Amber to speak her mind? Well, that’s the trained therapist’s job.
Is there any way I can communicate better? Therapist.
To separate me from the animals
In the last four years I've been through a lot of drama:
I've been disowned by my parents for being transgender
I’ve left a rape cult
I've been threatened with a libel lawsuit for calling them a rape cult
I’ve been physically assaulted by someone from the rape cult
I've been blackmailed by someone else from the rape cult
I‘ve waged a flame war with two people who have the same politics as me
I’ve mailed out screenshots of Armand Domalewski’s sexual harassment allegations to at least two dozen people in San Francisco
I’ve admitted, in front of my old K-12 school district board, to breaking California state law by recording my old high school teacher dropping racial slurs
I’ve started a company that allows people to legally murder Trump supporters
Even if you’re willing to assume that I’m in the right on all of these stories, you might wonder about my sanity given that I keep ending up in these situations.
Insanity is on a spectrum: you can deviate from societal norms in a good way, a bad way, or somewhere in between.
There's a good chance that you've met at least one social deviant who was extremely good at lying to themselves and to others, crafting self-serving narratives that leave out crucial details - details that would otherwise cause everyone to realize that who the real bad guy was. Like Humpbert Humpbert in Lolita, a book I have never read, they may even fool themselves into thinking that they aren’t the abuser in the relationship. When the victim, who may be unable to leave for various reasons, raises and expresses concerns, the abuser’s survival instinct can kick in and shut down the conversation to maintain the happy illusion of a healthy relationship.
If only someone who… who specialized in identifying these toxic patterns… if only they were allowed to periodically inspect a relationship, interviewing a couple for true equanimity.
Going out of my way to get one of those people in my life sounded expensive and time-consuming. But I asked myself what could elevate me away from the monsters and jerks that I've met. In the end, I concluded that one good way would be to actively seek self-accountability, to go out of my way and have an impartial, experienced third party evaluate my conduct in my personal relationships.
Because she's a keeper
If I had to look for a roommate and randomly picked an applicant, I would probably have to walk on eggshells around them because the median USian sucks and I'm a transgender Asian-American.
It's easy to find a roommate who can say, “I’m not racist, and I’m not homophobic. I like to keep an open mind!” But like gender and sanity, discrimination is a spectrum, and that someone doesn't have to be a virulent bigot to make life harder for marginalized groups.
A classic example is women’s nipples: recently, my HR lady apologetically told me that I had to start wearing a bra to work because at least one dude in the office complained about my nipples poking through my shirt. I didn't protest, because I knew that fighting this wasn't worth the effort. I *could* have argued that the men’s nipples were visibly protruding through their shirts *all the time*, and that they weren't getting the same flak. But the HR lady and I both knew that we didn't have the political capital needed to fix this discrimination:
We'd have to carefully tailor our words to not trigger the fragility of the men in the office, interrupting our own cases with the obligatory, “I'm not saying you hate women, I’d trust you around my daughter, and I know you're fundamentally good person…”
If we manage to convince them we're right, the men would go “Listen, I'm on your side, but *our* bosses wouldn't understand your case” and then we'd have to convince the men in the office to give us a shot at making a case to *their bosses*, and then-
There's like, six more layers of management that we'd have to repeat this with, ad-nauseum.
I can stand to wear a bra for eight hours a day and work in an office around men who aren't ready to acknowledge this cognitive dissonance. I can put up with going by the feminine “Tammy” instead of the non-binary “Standard.”
Hell, I even speak English *slightly* imperfectly around them because I know that using *perfect* English as an Asian-American can be jarring and unexpected enough to make many Whites uncomfortable.
And for the last year, I've been growing a bonsai tree at work to emulate the aura of the wise competent Miyagi from Karate Kid, a movie that everyone in the office has watched. Since then, I stopped getting frequent vague complaints about my lack of “professionalism” at work and started getting praised for being a team player.
But if I had to do all of this at *home* to keep the peace, I'd be miserable. This is why I'm happy to spend this effort to keep a healthy relationship with Amber: when I get home, I don't have to whitespeak.
End
We had our monthly session yesterday:
Me: I know you said that you were okay with me using a photo of you for my essay, -
turns to therapist
Me: It’s for my blog, the essay is called “The Joy of Platonic Couple’s Therapy.”
turns back to Amber
Me: - but I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t putting you on the spot when I asked you in the kitchen. So I figured I’d wait until today, where I could ask you in a controlled environment. Because… because I can always go with Plan B, two stick figures sharing a comfortably platonic distance on a couch across from our therapist.
Amber: Uh, yeah. Either is fine.
Me: Okay thanks!
The next day, also known as right now, I pressed the orange “Publish” button.