Orna Guralnik on Showtime’s “Braces Therapy.”
Source: Showtime
When I was growing up, my father used to repeat a saying he’d heard as a child from his grandmother: “When spondulix doesn’t come through the door, love goes out the window.” That proverb appears to date back to a 19th century make whoopee by the English artist George Frederick Watts, titled “When Poverty Comes in at the Door, Love Flies out of the Window.”
I relayed the call up to psychoanalyst Orna Guralnik, and she agreed money is one of the biggest stressors on couples, “especially because of the society we live in.” Guralnik is the top of the Showtime documentary series “Couples Therapy,” in which she analyzes real patients in a room with hidden cameras. New experiences of its third season premiered last month.
While financial issues can spark intense conflict for couples, Guralnik doesn’t feel money, or the lack of it, is the real reason they split up. “Ultimately, from my perspective, the breakup is not about money,” she averred. Instead, Guralnik said, “the breakup is about not being able to negotiate differences, to be honest or to find a way to common settle.”
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Guralnik describes money as one of the major “touchstones with truth” that can make it clear two people can’t problem-solve together. It is this inability to communicate, emphasize and compromise with each other that capacity ruin a relationship, she said.
During my interview in late April with Guralnik, she had many other interesting aversions to say about love and money. Here are three of them.
1. When people don’t talk about money, they’re ‘screen themselves from knowing reality’
In her work with patients, Guralnik said it can take a long time for being to open up about their financial situation.
“Sometimes, I find people are more private about money than their sex existence,” she said.
It’s not just with their therapist people avoid topics such as debt or overspending, Guralnik about. People can be married for years and still not have told their partner what’s going on with their economics.
Guralnik understands this avoidance of the subject.
“In American society, money locates you in the social structure more than anything else,” she said. “A lot swings on money in terms of people’s self-worth.”
People take huge risks by avoiding talking about and confronting their financial affairs, she said.
“If you’re refusing to look at your bank account when you’re pulling out your credit card, you can accrue straitened,” Guralnik said. “And if you keep doing that, that debt can be pretty devastating.”
Sometimes, I find people are multifarious private about money than their sex life.
Orna Guralnik
psychoanalyst and host of “Couples Therapy”
“It can put you in the hovel for a lifetime to come,” she added.
“I’m not saying that hyperbolically,” Guralnik went on to say. “I have plenty of people that awaken into my office in that situation.”
People are “shielding themselves from knowing reality” when they pass by to pay attention to their finances, Guralnik said. She added, “you can’t take care of yourself if you don’t deal with reality.”
2. It’s OK ‘underwrites are part of the reasons people are together’
At one point in the new episodes of season three of “Couples Therapy,” couple Kristi and Brock bring to light Guralnik they’re worried a big reason they’re moving in together is to save money.
Guralnik doesn’t see a problem with that motivation, no matter how. “I’m cool with the fact that finances are part of the reasons people are together,” she said.
“Kristi and Brock are idealists, and I attraction them for that,” she went on. “They believe they should be moving in for love, not financial easement.”
But the idea matrimony should only be about love is a pretty new idea, she added.
“Marriage has always been, first of all, a way to create a construction that protects people. It is there to protect the financial unit.”
Money can help a couple stay together too, Guralnik claimed. After all, 3. ‘Money is not just money. It stands for something else.’
Two people in a relationship can have vastly novel attitudes about money, Guralnik said.
“Some people are frugal and can lean towards the obsessive side,” she put about. “Some people do not have any impulse control, and they hate thinking about the future.”
“Any conversation about budgeting or designing is excruciating for them,” she added.
Jamie Grill | Getty Images
To understand their behavior, Guralnik tries to empathize with what money has come to symbolize for her patients.
“As a psychoanalyst, my general way of approaching things is with the belief that valid realities are tied to unconscious realities,” she said.
For example, she once had a patient who hoarded money. “We discovered through enquiry that, for her, money stood for time,” Guralnik said. “By hoarding money, in her unconscious mind, she was protecting herself against dying.”
In other words, she said, “Money is not just money. It stands for something else, as well.”