Reality show romance is supposed to be my escape from the news, and yet I can't stop thinking about this one moment from the Netflix show Love is Blind, where the personal did in fact become political. The show is basically speed dating on steroids, ending with a high stakes alter I do, or this case.

Ben, I love you so much. But I've always wanted a partner to be on the same wavelength. And so today I can't.

So in this scene, a contestant, Sara Carton left her fiancé of 3 weeks Ben Mezzenga, at the altar because, as she put it, she just couldn't get past their political differences, which, as a crossover cultural moment, went about as well as you would expect in the political manosphere. This is conservative commentator Charlie Kirk.

Her views very well could change if she had a man to lead her. Stay away from liberal women, got that? That should be a shirt, stay away from liberal women.

I've never been more unimpressed with an individual. It's not over a difference of BLM views, it's that he refused to have one that was in lockstep with her. And that's the hallmark of that side.

'And not wanting to deal with anyone on this or that side is very much a thing. Researchers with the dating app OkCupid wrote that political alignment isn't just a side note in dating, it's a filter. More than 1.2 million daters, for example, in the US have added the I'm pro-choice badge to their profiles on the site. In the DC area, that same bio might read, laid off by DOGE, according to the news site Axios. Or on the flip side, display a photo with the potential love match posing next to President Trump. But isn't love supposed to conquer all?

Look, I'm a romantic and I believe that love is the most powerful force on Earth. Love, love can do a lot. But love is not, it's not a feeling that's independent of ethics and morals.

'Today's guest, Dr. Orna Guralnik, clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst known for her work on the docu-series Couples Therapy. We're going to talk to her about the politics of love. I'm Audie Cornish and this is The Assignment.

'Couples therapy is a docu-series, it's not a rose dispensing pageant show or a gonzo booze-fueled matchmaking experiment.

What I hear from viewers is that they start off with this kind of attitude of, you know, oh, I'm going to see someone in trouble and it's going to make me feel better about myself and I'm gonna judge.

Real couples volunteer to get weeks of free relationship therapy from psychoanalyst Orna Guralnik. In return, their experience is filmed in high, depth detail.

And as people get to know the participants better they gradually kind of the attitude of judgment evaporates and instead it gets replaced by a certain kind of compassion and deep empathy and

finding a lot of commonalities. As new episodes of the show's latest season begin to drop, I wanted to talk to Guralnik because she's been out there saying political movements like Me Too and Black Lives Matter forced difficult conversations that now surface in relationships in unexpected ways. On the show, even Gen Zers and polycules and LGBTQ couples kicking traditional gender roles to the curb struggle despite being armed with therapy speak.

'I mean, I have to tell you that there's probably no couple, no individual patient that I know that is not really preoccupied with these questions nowadays of like a major fight, a major cultural fight now, both here in the United States, but beyond the United states between, in a way, two ethics or methods of living, right? There's like a serious cultural moment here between. Let's say a more liberal progressive ethic of becoming aware of these systemic differences, taking care of the vulnerable, considering like our government, the role of the government is to protect the most vulnerable versus this ethic of, I don't know, to be cynical, survival of the richest. Or let's, let's pull back from all of this progressive rhetoric and try to hold on to some kind of old school values that really support a very particular portion of the population, and in extreme cases, disappears the other. And this is not only happening here, it's happening in Israel-Palestine, it's happened in other places in the world, it's happen around migration. I mean, this is like a major clash.

But how does it surface at the kitchen table? I mean, one of the things that's remarkable when you're watching a couple that is in therapy, you almost always find it is the fight about washing the dishes, the fight about walking the dog, they're always about something else. Like, yeah, how are you actually seeing it on the couch?

'It's, I totally see it on the couch in the sense that these are ethics that guide how people relate to each other. So if you take this like big story ethical question of is the government slash the family, the father, the caretaker, is their job to protect the vulnerable or is their job to push people to move as fast forward in the race? That will influence literally how people talk at the kitchen table. Meaning if someone is bringing vulnerability to the other, is that something to attend to with an open heart and try to see where the commonalities are, where the, where person needs support, or is that something to fight about with as much force as possible? If someone hurts you, do you listen for where that comes from, like what happened, or do you retaliate? These big cultural questions that we're negotiating among, you know, between like Dems and Republicans or between Israelis and like pro-Palestinians or... Zionists, I mean, they really translate into how do we relate one person to another? Are we going to try to understand differences and find some kind of common ground in which vulnerability is dealt with compassion? Or are we going use brute force to make the other person surrender or disappear? It really goes all the way there from the big picture to the most minute conversation. And I see it. Does that make sense to you what I'm saying?

It does, it does, because then I start to think about how people have opted out, meaning those people who go on dating sites and are like, I don't want to date a liberal, I don't wanna date a Republican, I do not want to do this, I want to be in a relationship where the work will be X. And I've thought about it a lot, because I'm in an interracial relationship, and I can assume that when it was against the law in so many states to be such relationship. Those kinds of conversations happened in so many families where you were basically saying like, there's a moral component to the existence of this relationship or these children and what to do with those family members who do or do not embrace it. Now it feels strange to be having that kind of conversation.

All over again.

Yes, but with like multiple topics like so many different things could be the moral thing That you take a stand on no matter what and I remember seeing it surface in love is blind You know like netflix reality show where you've already suspended disbelief being on the show, you know where you Couples talk without seeing each other and then all of a sudden weeks later They're supposed to say I do or not and then with some of them the thing that tripped them up was They're politics, did you believe in vaccination? It just seemed crazy to me to see it surface...

But it's not crazy.

Yeah, say more.

It's not crazy because it does boil down to, as you're saying, very key morals and ethical values that guide how you're going to relate to another person.

But love was supposed to conquer all Dr. Guralnik! Like, love was supposed be this thing that like...I don't know.

People have, look, I'm a romantic and I believe that love is the most powerful force on earth. Love can do a lot. But love is not, it's not a feeling that's independent of ethics and morals. I mean, loving has an ethical component to it. And how do you understand that ethical component? If you love someone else, does your love manifest in you doing your best to try to understand who they are. Or do you understand love as you are going to enforce your way of living on that other person supposedly to protect them, right? These are very different ideas of what love is.

You were writing in the New York Times that you see like patterns in couples who are in conflict. And you mentioned this one concept splitting, like kind of categorizing people as good, bad.

Yeah, yes.

And can you talk about how that works? Because I do think in couples in general, or throuples or whoever people partner these days, storylines can emerge as they say, and you can sometimes be the villain and you are the hero in your own story. But what makes the splitting concept different?

When you're in the mind's instead of splitting, you try to preserve all the good to yourself. You try to think of yourself or the person you trust as all good. And then everything that threatens that, every aspect of yourself, or of the other person that doesn't go with this pure good, is projected outward and it's all bad. So you imagine yourself in a very simplistic way. You have only like high quality behaviors. You're not greedy, you're not envious. You have no anger. You're just like a good person. And the person outside of you is the one that has all those like negative qualities and they're all bad. It's a very simple way of cutting the world, cutting yourself and cutting the word. And when you're in that state of mind where you split a lot, the world can become very dangerous to you. Because if all the bad is outside and it's not like a nuanced, both good and bad, when you imagine people are bad, they're really bad. You don't remember that they're also the same person that yesterday helped you cross the road. It's a very all good, all scary world that you live in, in the mindset of splitting. On the other hand, if you're not in that mindset, if you were in a more integrated mindset, then you can see nuances, then you can see that, oh, that qualities that I dislike in the other person, well, I recognize them in myself sometimes, too. And I can understand the humanity of both of us.

I remember watching one of the seasons of the show where there was a couple where one was a Palestinian background. And that came up as a topic.

I mean, to address the elephant in the room, our dynamic as an Israeli Jew with a Palestinian in the midst of the political made me a little bit anxious, but I feel love in this space. I feel like there's a real shared experience here that is happening. Yeah, a communion. Do you want to say more though about that elephant, like in terms of your concerns? I'm scared that... Other Palestinians might criticize me for placing myself in this position. Yeah, for agreeing to this. However, sometimes I think when we look at things from the collective level, things that we do to bar people from seeing each other like a literal separation wall further perpetuates the conflict because I have no opportunity to even see that my enemies are just... Not your enemies. Yeah, they're just people. And we're also trying to live who come from so much trauma as well. One way to think about it is that we are relating under the radar of how we're supposed to relate, which is as enemies.

'And I remember thinking, oh, that's really interesting that, like, Dr. Guralnik had to say, like well, wait a second, how is my presence affecting you? How are you thinking about it? And just for people's understanding of your background, as far as I understand, you spent some time both in Georgia and then as a child moved to Israel for several years, which I think was at age seven, which now that I have a seven-year-old. It's a very influential moment that time.

Yes.

Can you talk about some of the formative experiences?

Yeah, when I moved to Israel, I mean, it was a long time ago, it was in the 70s. First of all, I moved and very soon after we moved, the Yom Kippur war broke out. You know, my dad was called into the war, he disappeared for months, I was like in bunkers. It was like a crazy time, like a very intense way to be introduced to the state of Israel. And then growing up, It was during a time where Israel went through a few different ideological political changes. When I moved to Israel, it was a pretty socialist country. And as I was growing up, it kind of went through transformation into a much more kind of very similar to the United States, a much capitalist kind of society that was also deeply going through many complicated phases of the conflict with the Arab world. And late in the 70s, there was already like the we moved from like speaking of splitting, never believing that the war would ever end to suddenly like a peace accord with Egypt. I mean, I witnessed growing up like many intense socio and political transformations in this country.

And specific milestones for Israel itself, and inflection points. And I didn't realize this, but like later on, you ended up keeping in touch with this particular, I guess, the patient, the right word.

She's a participant.

Participant in the show. And I read this conversation, it was in The Guardian, and I watched you in real time deal with the conflicts you're describing. Someone looking at your fundamental identity and saying, you and the people around you, your collective, your system, fundamental damage to me and my system.

Absolutely.

What was that like?

What was that like? I mean, the relationship with her is one of the most important relationships of my contemporary life right now, but it really, it's not just Christine. It's about the basic question, you know, I'm a couples therapist, I'm citizen, I am a mother. I mean these are basic questions about what do I believe ethical relationships between human beings should be. Do I believe in overpowering another person? Do I belief in over powering another people? Do I believed in occupation? Or do I believe in the ability to find some kind of mutual dignity, humanity, and resolving these kind of domination relationships? And you can imagine that I believe in the latter, but it's challenged. It's challenged when Sometimes it gets to the point where you're like, wait a minute. Is it me or you, or is there a way for both of us to exist? You know, river to sea, is it just the Palestinians? Is it just Jews or is there a way to coexist.

There were moments in the conversation where you actually had to say, can you make room for this? Or I have to swallow the frog, which I hadn't heard in a while. Or you would what I'm feeling is anger or I am I feel rage that you can't like you had to do the things that I often see you asking the couples to do. Yes. And I think we think that, oh, if you're a therapist, this is going to be easy, or like, I don't know, that somehow you have the tools, and so it's an easier way. But it's still, I could feel you working. It was work to get to a place where you could sit across from someone who, you know, you just had such fundamental differences. And looking at this conflict and you are allowing yourselves to be proxies for both communities, which is even scarier in this environment.

Yes, very scary. Scary in this environment. Yes, agree. Yeah, this environment is not conducive to that. Which is a big problem.

What did you learn from going through that experience and still going through experience? And I mean that in a very literal way. What did learn about trying to suppress those or trying to hold that bay, those feelings that can overtake a conversation? What did your learn about even the idea of changing a mind, you know? I pretty much, it's cable news. I feel like I sit through discussions all day where people claim in a way they're. Trying to change each other's minds, but they clearly conduct the conversation in a way where you never would if you were actually trying to do that. I know. So for you, like you must have had an internal moment of like, maybe I'm not so good at this, or actually this is harder than I thought, even for my patients, like what kind of, yeah.

Yeah, many moments like that. There's one thing which is that I learned at various points in the conversation where I'm getting stuck, where, for example, Christine is saying something that I suddenly feel like I can't work with because I'm coming up against a certain kind of limit in myself. At least for me, the commitment is when I'm meeting those kind of hard moments where you can't dislodge something. I do have a certain kind of commitment in myself to spend some time there and see what I can do, what I can with myself. You're talking about the feeling. It's not just a feeling, it's a thought too. It's a though of like, oh no, that cannot be true or that's too much or you've gone too far or this is too offensive. It's a feeling, but it's also a thought. There's a whole kind of complex that goes along there that means like no more, we can't talk anymore. This is where we reach the limit of our understanding. This is exactly where you need to sit and breathe and both listen to yourself with compassion, but also know that you're getting stuck and also ask the other person to talk to you again. So I would ask Christine, can you say what you're saying in a different way that doesn't make me feel so attacked or doesn't...

Right.

Like help me go through this process of hardening, so that I can understand better, and maybe you will understand better. I mean, with Christine and I, I mean she's a very special person, despite the fact that she's fiercely political and fiercely protective of her people, she's also a deeply empathic, respectful person. So we could offer that to each other, even in...

Yeah, you guys really were the best case scenario of two people trying to have this discussion, which was very hard. But I think it just struck me that like, yeah, all of a sudden you're you're on the couch.

Yes. and I'm often on the couch. I mean, when I work with patients, I may not talk about it, but I'm often on the couch with my patients, meaning I meet certain moments in myself in which I have a hard time empathizing or hard time understanding or I don't agree with something and I have to walk myself through a process.

More of my conversation with couples therapist Orna Guralnik, stay with us.

'You will have what people are describing as a kind of romance recession. You have a generation of people who are less likely to be in a long-term relationship, less likely to seek one. And then if I think about their slang, my favorite is catching feelings,.

Right.

Which is to move from your beneficial sexual arrangement in the threat of you having emotions during that. It always drives me crazy because catching sounds like you caught a disease. Like you catch an STI, you don't catch feelings. But I think it says something about this generation and where they are. Do you think we're in a romance recession? Or what are the ways you might see what this generation is going through that feels different?

Oh yeah, there's definitely a big seismic change in the younger generation. It's not just a romance recession. They're also having less sex. They are less rushing to get involved with each other. They're more kind of wary. But I think there's a real thing going on and I think it has to do with a bunch of things. Both, you know, people's lives are, this is true for us too, but it's true for younger people their profoundly mediated by technology nowadays, right? Like they have much less direct access to each other and they're much more living through social media, YouTube, there's a way in which experience is less immediate, it's more mediated and more insular in that way. So that's one factor. Also the fact that Um, people are living in very different realities because of technology. I mean, it's the last decade has been so fragmented in terms of society and like, what can you trust? Like whether you can trust the reality, we're not sharing the same reality, whether you could trust the government that it's going to protect you. Whether there there's a way in which people have become a lot more fearful and suspicious. And that, of course, affects their willingness to love and their willingness to be vulnerable and open themselves up to each other. So all of this creates a very different environment, let's say, than the environment I grew up in when I was younger and starting to get involved in romance. It's a complicated time for people. And I think people are wary.

Are they right to be?

'This is going back to the beginning of our conversation. How can you separate your romantic relationships from the political context you're living in? If you're in a political context in which you can't trust that your government is there to protect you, it's like living in a family in which the parents are not worrying about the wellbeing of their kids. You grow to be paranoid and self-protective. It's harder to extend vulnerability and care and love to each other. So are they right to be? Yes, it's tricky out there.

I have to admit, this is the part of the interview where I'm supposed to be like, so what should we do now to change and improve this situation? But really I feel like I need to write a letter to all those like feminist websites that were like, you were right. The hetero ladies are upset for a reason.

Agree.

I don't want to do that. I don't want to do that, but I want to, what I do want to figure out is you've learned a lot in the last couple of years. I've learned a lot doing this job. I don't know how to talk to people who come up to me and say, how can we be talking to each other differently? They ask me in a political context, but there are people who ask you that in a relational, in a romantic context, now that our worlds have collided.

'I think it has to do with kind of a two-part thing. Like, one, don't be so certain about your reality. Your reality is created by, or mediated by, a very particular kind of environment that we're living in, technologically, news-wise. We're all really in the grip of very manipulative systems that are making us see only a slice of the world, all of us. Be a little bit less convinced of your reality. Step one, like hold your reality lightly and open yourself up to listen with a lot of care and empathy to the person that you're disagreeing with. You're having a hard time understanding someone else. Try to ask them, what matters to you? What in this matters to? What are you afraid of? What do you care about? I mean, I have really, quite profound conversations with people that I fiercely disagree with, sometimes people who really threaten my existence. And I find those conversations the most meaningful, right? If I can get them to talk to me about what matters to them, right, if we're not trying to convince each other or not trying to impose my reality, but we're trying to actually understand each other.

'That was Orna Guralnik, a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst known for her work on the docu-series Couples Therapy. New episodes of the show drop on Showtime on May 23rd. This episode of The Assignment, a production of CNN Audio, was produced by Grace Walker and Kyra Dahring. Our senior producer is Matt Martinez, our technical director is Dan Dzula, and the executive producer of CNN Audio is Steve Lickteig. We also had support from Dan Bloom, Madeleine Thompson, Haley Thomas, Alex Manassari, Robert Mathers, Jon Dianora, Leni Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nicole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. I'm Audie Cornish and if you enjoyed this show, please go ahead, hit the follow button, definitely share. We love getting new listeners and I want to thank you for being with us this week.