Holly Gordon, our reed-thin psychoanalyst, did not think much of our plan. “To get the most out of your time here we need to talk about some dissatisfaction or problem, something you’re trying to improve,” she instructed, closing a double set of soundproof doors. So we settled into airing some well-rehearsed gripes — the time Dan came to the hospital to visit me and four-pound, premature Hannah, and all he could talk about was the San Francisco building code. (He’d torn the front stairs off our house and kept rebuilding them and ripping them off again, fearing they were imperfect.) The time Dan proposed a trade: he would clean up more, he swore he would, if I would just French-kiss him spontaneously once a day; I gave up first. (I found the forced affection claustrophobic. I was also still stung, I later realized, by critical comments Dan had made about my kissing style before we were engaged.) These were many-times-told tales, and as such we both felt inured to their dark content. We used them to avoid committing what Doherty calls “therapist-induced marital suicide.” We did not want therapy to set a pick for our divorce.

So instead of speaking our harshest truths, for six weeks running Dan and I pursued the lesser offense of making the other sound crazy. Holly cooperated, too, offering feedback that we used to confirm our sense that the other was neurotic. Some weeks Dan took it in the teeth; others, I did. At home, Dan and I had been following a de facto acceptance strategy. He even convinced me that the best response to his lecturing me, again, about conjugate-periodization strength training was for me to say, “Oh, you lovable, obsessive man, you!” and walk away. But Holly took a fix-it, or at least diagnose-it, approach. This is another major complaint about marital therapy: mental-health professionals find mental-health problems. All of a sudden you’re married to a narcissistic personality disorder; who wants to stick around for that? One day Holly ended our session with this synopsis: “On the first count, you find Dan unavailable because he’s not relating to you. He’s just using you as a sounding board. But on the other hand he feels he can’t reach you either. He wants you to accept his affection and praise, but those attentions make you feel smothered, and that makes him feel alone.” I still believed our marriage was good. But I felt that Holly had reduced it to an unappealing, perhaps unfixable conundrum. Would her vote of little confidence hurt or help?

I did start watching my reactions when Dan told me that I looked beautiful. Did he mean it? What did he want from me? I would try to accept the compliment graciously, even offer one in return. But the endless therapy required to become less neurotic generally seemed outside the scope of this project. I felt confident we could build a better marriage, less so that our individual personalities would change. Marital therapy, to me, seemed akin to chemo: helpful but toxic. Leaving Holly’s office one day, Dan, ever valiant, made a strong play to titrate how much negative feedback we let in. “Do they spray shrink powder in these places,” he asked, “to make them extra depressing?”

IV.

Monogamy is one of the most basic concepts of modern marriage. It is also its most confounding. In psychoanalytic thought, the template for monogamy is forged in infancy, a baby with its mother. Marriage is considered to be a mainline back to this relationship, its direct heir. But there is a crucial problem: as infants we are monogamous with our mothers, but our mothers are not monogamous with us. That first monogamy — that template — is much less pure than we allow. “So when we think about monogamy, we think about it as though we are still children and not adults as well,” Adam Phillips notes. This was true for us. On our wedding day, Dan and I performed that elaborate charade: I walked down the aisle with my father. I left him to join my husband. We all shed what we told ourselves were tears of joy. Dan and I promised to forsake all others, and sexually we had. But we had not shed all attachments, naturally, and as we waded further into our project the question of allegiances became more pressing. Was our monogamy from the child’s or the mother’s perspective? Did my love for Dan — must my love for Dan — always come first?

This all came pouring out last summer in the worst fight of our marriage. At the time, we were at my parents’ house, an hour northeast of San Francisco. More than food, more than child-rearing, we fought about weekends — in particular, how many summer weekends to spend up there. I liked the place: out of the fog, free grandparental day care; the kids could swim. Dan loathed it, describing the locale as “that totally sterile golf community in which your mother feeds our kids popsicles for breakfast and I’m forbidden to cook.”

For the past few years I dismissed Dan’s complaints by saying, “Fine, don’t go.” I told myself this was justified, if not altruistic: I was taking our girls; Dan could do what he wanted with his free time. But underneath lay a tangle of subtext. Dan wished he spent even more time with his own parents, who were quite private. I felt an outsize obligation toward mine, because they moved to the Bay Area to be closer to us. We’d had some skilled conversations, which helped a bit, as I now knew those weekends with his in-laws made Dan feel alienated and left out of our family decision-making. Yet at root we fought because the issue rubbed a weak point in our marriage, in our monogamy: I didn’t want to see my devotion to my parents as an infidelity to Dan. To him, it was.

That June weekend my folks weren’t home, we’d gone up with friends, but Dan hated the place more than ever. Saturday morning I woke up early, went for a run and came back to find Dan on a small AstroTurf putting green with the girls, ranting about how he hated all the houses that looked the same, with tinted windows blocking the natural light; the golf course that obliterated the landscape and all the jerks that played golf on it. The next day was Father’s Day. I took the girls to do errands with what I thought were the best of intentions, but I was so angered by Dan’s relentless crabbiness that I failed to buy a gift. The final insult came Sunday afternoon as we packed to go home. I informed Dan that I told my mother that she could bring the girls back up the following weekend. Dan erupted in rage. “Those are my actual children. Why do you insist on treating me like I’m some potted plant? I, too, get to decide what happens in this family. Do I need to tell you to tell your mother, ‘O.K., Mom, I’m not allowed to make any plans for our children without getting permission from my husband?’ Do I need to be telling you, ‘I’m sorry, little girl, I make the plans in this family, and I’ll tell you what to tell your mother about where my children are going?’ ”