This is a story about a couple who were in couples therapy for three years, what their therapist eventually did about it, and how they have ended up, at the time of this writing, spending Saturday nights in the back room of a small comedy theater in Providence, Rhode Island, pretending to be, among other things, two ghosts arguing about what to make for dinner.
The couple — I will call them Ida and Bram, because they chose the names together during our first conversation, and because when I asked why, Ida said, “It sounded like two people who had almost broken up but hadn’t, which is technically who we are” — have been married for eleven years. They live in Providence. Ida is forty-two. She works in hospital administration. Bram is forty-three. He is a high school history teacher.
They began couples therapy in the spring of 2022.
Their therapist gave up on them in the fall of 2024.
The referral their therapist gave them, in what the therapist has told them was “the most unconventional recommendation I have ever made,” was an eight-week class in couples improv comedy.
They took the class.
They took a second one.
They are, at the time of this writing, in their fifth consecutive session of couples improv classes at a small theater in downtown Providence.
Their marriage, by every account I have been given, has been saved.
They have not returned to therapy.
The problem
I want to be careful about how I describe the problem, because Ida and Bram have both asked me to be. They have told me that the specifics of the problem are, in retrospect, “less interesting than what turned out to be the actual problem.”
The problem, as they first described it to their therapist in 2022, was that they had, in the previous two years, “stopped being able to have a conversation.”
Ida described it, in her first therapy session, as follows: “I will say something. He will respond to something else. I will try to correct him. He will get frustrated. We will end up arguing about something neither of us is even upset about.”
Bram described it, in the same session, as follows: “She will say something. I will respond to what I think she is saying. It turns out she was saying something different. She gets upset that I did not hear the actual thing. I do not know how to hear the actual thing.”
The therapist, according to both of them, had said: “Okay. This is very common. We can work with this.”
The two and a half years
The therapist — I will not name her, because Ida and Bram have asked me not to, but I will say that she is, by their account, a good therapist, and that they still speak well of her — worked with Ida and Bram for two and a half years.
The two and a half years were, by both of their accounts, an honest good-faith effort.
The therapist had them do all the standard things. She had them practice active listening. She had them use “I” statements. She had them do the exercise where one person speaks for two minutes and the other person listens, and then the listener has to summarize what they heard before the first person can speak again.
The exercises, in Ida’s account, were not particularly successful.
She has told me: “We could do the exercises. We could do them well, in fact, in the therapist’s office. The problem was that as soon as we left the therapist’s office, we would immediately, within about eight minutes, be back to what we had been doing before. It was as if the exercises were a thing we could do, but not the thing we did.”
Bram has told me: “I felt like I was performing listening rather than doing it. And she could tell. She could always tell.”
The therapist, according to both of them, had told them repeatedly that these things take time. She had told them that many couples have this exact problem. She had told them that with patience, the exercises would begin to feel less like exercises and more like the natural way of communicating.
They did not, over the course of two and a half years, begin to feel less like exercises.
The fall of 2024
Something happened in the fall of 2024 that Ida and Bram have both told me was, in their memory, the turning point of the whole therapeutic project.
I want to describe it carefully because it is short but important.
Ida and Bram were, in a session in late September of 2024, doing what their therapist had begun calling “the summary exercise.” Ida had spoken. Bram was supposed to summarize what she had said. He was, according to himself, “trying very hard.” He had, in the summary, gotten most of it right. He had, however, missed one small thing.
Ida had said, in the middle of her longer statement, that she had been feeling, in the past few weeks, “sort of lonely.”
Bram, in his summary, had said: “You’ve been feeling frustrated with our schedule.”
Ida had said: “That is not what I said.”
Bram had said: “It’s basically what you said.”
Ida had said: “I said lonely. Not frustrated.”
Bram had said: “Those are similar things.”
Ida had said: “They are not.”
The therapist, at this point, had — according to both Ida and Bram — put down her pen. She had sat with them in silence for what Bram has told me was approximately forty seconds. She had, at the end of the forty seconds, said something that Ida and Bram have both told me they will remember for the rest of their lives.
She had said: “I want to try something new. I do not think what I am doing is working. I do not think you have a communication problem. I think you have a listening problem. And I think I have been trying to fix the wrong thing.”
Ida had said: “Okay.”
The therapist had said: “I would like you to sign up for a couples’ improv class.”
Ida had said: “What.”
The therapist had said: “There is a small theater downtown. They do an eight-week class for couples. It is not therapy. It is not a communication workshop. It is improv comedy. The first rule of improv, as I understand it, is that you have to hear what your partner has just said, and then respond to what they actually said, before you can move on. I think this may be more useful, at this point, than what we have been doing.”
Bram had said: “Is this a joke.”
The therapist had said: “It is not. I am completely serious. I would like you to try it. If, after eight weeks, you feel it has not helped, we can come back and continue.”
Ida had said: “Are you allowed to refer us to an improv class.”
The therapist had said: “I am not sure. But I am doing it.”
The improv class
Ida and Bram signed up for the class.
The class met on Saturday evenings, from 7 to 9, at a small theater in downtown Providence. It was taught by a woman I will call Marcy, who has been performing improv for approximately fifteen years, and who has, according to Ida, “a specific gift for looking at two people and immediately understanding what they are not saying to each other.”
The class had six couples in it.
The first class, according to Ida and Bram, was — in Ida’s phrasing — “the most uncomfortable two hours of my adult life.”
They did warm-up exercises. They did name games. They did an exercise called “yes, and,” which is the fundamental building block of improv — in which one person makes a statement, and their partner must accept the statement and add to it, rather than negating it. They did an exercise called “one word at a time,” in which two people co-write a sentence by alternating single words.
Ida and Bram, in the “one word at a time” exercise, produced, in their first attempt, the following sentence: “The dog is sad because the mailman is a wizard who eats socks in his free time.”
They both, according to themselves, laughed.
They had not, in Ida’s memory, laughed together in approximately eight months.
The first breakthrough
The first breakthrough — as Ida and Bram now call it — came in the third week of the class.
Marcy, the instructor, had introduced an exercise called “the argument scene.” Two people were given a completely arbitrary conflict — for example, one partner had eaten the other partner’s last granola bar. The two people had to argue about the granola bar in character. The only rules were: (1) they had to listen to what the other person said before responding, and (2) they were not allowed to say no.
Marcy paired Ida and Bram for this exercise.
The scene, in Ida’s account, ran approximately five minutes.
The scene, in Bram’s account, was “the first fight we had ever won.”
I will explain what Bram means by this.
The scene was, ostensibly, about the granola bar. But because Ida and Bram were operating under improv rules — they had to accept what the other person said, and add to it, rather than deflect — the conversation, in Bram’s account, “started actually going somewhere.”
At one point in the scene, Ida — playing a version of herself who had discovered her partner had eaten her granola bar — said, in character: “I feel like you never notice when I am hungry.”
Bram, according to himself, felt at this moment the small familiar surge of the defensive response he had been trained by two and a half years of therapy to control. He was about to say: “That is not fair. I do notice.”
He caught himself.
He said, instead — because the rules of the exercise required him to accept and add — “I have been trying to notice when you are hungry. But I have not been trying to notice when you are lonely. I have been noticing the wrong things.”
Ida, according to herself, stopped mid-scene.
Marcy, according to Ida, quietly said: “Keep going.”
They did not, according to both of them, keep going, exactly. Ida instead said, in character, in a voice she has told me she has almost never used in the eleven years of her marriage: “I have been very lonely.”
Bram said: “I did not know. I am so sorry.”
They were, at that point, no longer in character. They were, according to both of them, “just talking.”
They had been, in some way that they had not been able to do for two and a half years in a therapist’s office, listening to each other.
The class had continued around them.
Marcy, according to Bram, had gently moved the class into a break.
Ida had, according to herself, cried in the hallway of the theater for approximately fifteen minutes.
The rest of the eight weeks
The remaining five weeks of the class were, in Ida and Bram’s account, less dramatic than the third week. They did the exercises. They laughed. They practiced the specific discipline of accepting what their partner had just said, and building on it, rather than negating it.
They did not, in the remaining five weeks, have another moment like the granola bar scene.
They did, however, begin to notice something in their lives outside the class.
Ida noticed it first. She told Bram, in the fifth week, during their drive home from the class, that she had been noticing, in the past week, that their conversations at home had begun to change. Not in a way she could clearly describe. In a way she could, however, feel.
Bram, in the car, said: “Yes. And I have been noticing too.”
Ida, in the car, according to Bram, laughed.
She said: “Are you improv-ing me right now.”
He said: “Yes.”
She said: “Was your ‘yes and’ just now sincere.”
He said: “Yes. I really did notice.”
She said: “Okay. Then thank you.”
The end of therapy
At the end of the eight-week improv class, Ida and Bram went back to their therapist for what turned out to be their final session.
They told her, in the session, what had happened. They told her about the granola bar scene. They told her about the drive home. They told her that they were, tentatively, in a way they were still trying to understand, better.
The therapist, according to Ida, cried a little in the session.
The therapist told them that she was glad. She told them that she had been genuinely worried, in the previous months, that she had not been able to help them. She told them that she thought they should not return to therapy at this time. She told them that if they wanted to come back, at any point, she would be there. But she told them, in a specific phrasing that Ida has told me she will not forget, “I think what you are doing is working, and I do not want to add anything to it.”
Ida and Bram signed up for a second improv class.
Then a third.
Then a fourth.
They are, at the time of this writing, in the middle of their fifth eight-week course.
They are not doing improv because they think they are, in any technical sense, becoming good improvisers. They are doing it, in Bram’s phrasing, “because it is the specific setting in which we have learned how to listen to each other, and we do not want to lose it.”
They have, in the year and a half since the first class, made a number of friends within the small improv community in Providence. They occasionally, according to Ida, “get invited to perform in front of small audiences, which we do, and which is both terrifying and, in a strange way, the most fun we have had together in eleven years.”
They have started, in the past six months, doing improv scenes at home.
The home improv
I want to describe the home improv, because it is the part of the story that has, in the weeks since I first heard about it, stuck with me most.
Ida and Bram, in their day-to-day life, have developed the habit of, when a small disagreement is beginning to build between them, quietly asking each other whether they would like to “run a scene.”
The scenes are not, in the standard sense, about the disagreement. They are about something else. One of them will propose a scenario — “two ghosts arguing about dinner”; “two coworkers at a company party”; “two dogs who have been left home alone” — and they will improvise the scene together, for perhaps five or ten minutes.
The scenes have, over time, developed a specific function.
They function, in Ida’s account, as “a small pressure valve.” They allow Ida and Bram to inhabit the emotional shape of the disagreement without having to fight about the specific content of the disagreement. They allow, in Bram’s account, “each of us to accidentally say the thing we could not say directly.”
The two ghosts arguing about dinner, according to Ida, ended with one ghost telling the other ghost that she had felt, for a long time, like the other ghost was not seeing her. The other ghost had, in Ida’s account, said: “I have been trying. I do not know how to see a ghost.”
Ida and Bram, according to both of them, went to bed that night having had, in the ghost scene, a conversation they would not otherwise have had.
The scene, according to both of them, was probably not, technically, good improv.
The scene was, in some quieter way, the thing that made the marriage work that week.
What the therapist has said
I want to briefly reproduce something the therapist told Ida and Bram, in what turned out to be their final session, which Ida has, with the therapist’s permission, allowed me to include here.
The therapist told them, at the end of the session, that in the two and a half years she had worked with them, she had been trying to fix their communication. She had, she told them, come to believe that this was the wrong thing to fix. She told them that most of the couples she worked with did not have a communication problem. Most of them, she told them, had what she called “a listening habit problem.” She told them that she was going to, in the future, refer some of her other couples to improv classes.
She had, in the year and a half since Ida and Bram first told her about the granola bar scene, referred, according to Ida, six other couples to Marcy’s class.
Marcy, according to Ida, has now, in her class rosters, a small growing constituency of couples who have been sent by therapists.
She has not, according to Marcy’s account to Ida, done anything to advertise this.
What this is
I have, in the weeks since I first heard this story, thought about the small and specific things that get in the way of people who love each other actually being able to hear each other. Ida and Bram loved each other for eleven years. They did not, for the last three of those years, know how to listen to each other. They tried to learn how in a therapist’s office. It did not, for reasons that neither of them fully understand, work in that setting.
They learned how in a small theater on Saturday nights, from a woman named Marcy, in an exercise involving a granola bar.
I do not know exactly what to make of this. I think there is something important in it about how the specific setting in which we try to learn something matters as much as the thing we are trying to learn. I think there is something important in it about how listening — real listening — is difficult to teach in a room where the stakes feel too high. I think there is something important in it about how a small pretend fight, about a pretend granola bar, in a room full of six other pretend fights, gave two people who had been unable to hear each other for two and a half years the specific narrow permission to actually hear each other.
I do not think this is a universal solution. I do not think everyone whose marriage is having trouble should sign up for improv. (For a related earlier piece on how people find the specific settings in which they are able to be a version of themselves they cannot access elsewhere, see the Wattalife story about the woman who joined a running group by mistake and became a person who could run a marathon.)
I do think, however, about the following thing, which Ida told me at the end of our final conversation.
She told me that she had, in the past year and a half, developed a small habit of asking Bram, in the middle of an ordinary conversation, a specific question. The question is: “Are you actually listening to me right now, or are you responding to what you think I am saying.”
She has told me that Bram, when she asks this question, is now able to answer it honestly.
She has told me that this is, in her opinion, the entire point.
She has told me that this — the fact that Bram is now able to answer the question honestly — is what improv taught them.
She has told me the improv did not teach them how to listen.
She has told me the improv taught them how to know when they were not.
—
Margot Hale is the editor of Wattalife. She has, since reporting this story, briefly considered whether her editorial assistants — of whom she has none — might benefit from an improv class. She has decided that they would probably not. She has, however, in the past week, on three separate occasions, asked the person she was speaking with whether she was actually listening to them, or only responding to what she thought they were saying. In two of the three cases, the honest answer was the second one. She is trying to be, at fifty-nine, slightly better about this. She is not, so far, entirely succeeding.