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Making Couples Happy

It takes bravery to expose your relationship to a national television audience, as ABC's doco series demonstrates.

6mchIt takes bravery to expose your relationship to a national television audience, especially when it is one already in freefall.

That’s not quite the case for all four couples in ABC’s documentary series, Making Couples Happy, but there’s no getting away from the fact that one of them is apparently beyond repair.

Wife Alison, can’t even bring herself to look at her husband, Paul, despite having been married to him for 29 years and still sleeping in the same bed.

Where did it all go wrong and can it possibly be remedied? It sounds like the teaser to a drama but this is the very real four part series, a follow-up to Making Australia Happy.

The four couples range in age from married-of-5-years to middle-aged.

Paul and Alison are the most extreme in their distance, with most of the resentment coming from one side. Then there is 25-year-old Carla who moved from Italy five years ago to marry Domenic, but feels isolated without any family and dependent on her husband.

36-year-old Paula feels like she is married to her kids while her husband 40-year-old Steve throws himself into his work. The fourth couple, Laney and Darren, work together running a plumbing firm but have difficulty leaving their work roles at work and it impacts on their domestic life.

The couples are invited to a weekend retreat to address their problems. Dashboard cameras capture the first signs of communication problems as all four struggle to navigate their cars to the destination. It’s symbolic of much deeper issues.

Relationship experts John Aiken and Desiree Spierings test the temperature of the relationships with a score out of 50 (it isn’t quite clear how this is determined, but you trust them because they’re the experts).

The experts provide plenty of fundamental feedback on where the couples are making errors. Blame, resentment, inability to listen, mocking -it’s all therapy 101 stuff, but sometimes we can’t see the wood for the trees. There are a number of exercises that help the couples to identify their shortcomings. Ever written an obituary to yourself? And you’ve certainly never wandered through a paint store like this, or had a cartoon so succinctly visualise your problems for you.

Airing ironically on Valentine’s Day, Making Couples Happy draws you into the bare world of these four couples so that you are sympathising in no time at all.

It’s a shame there is little differentiation in the relationships. All four are Sydney couples. None are gay, none are living de facto, but I can imagine casting this would be incredibly hard. There’s no denying the honesty the 8 participants bring to the table and ultimately this overrides any shortcomings.

I hope they make it.

Making Couples Happy airs 8:30pm Thursday on ABC1.

7 Responses

  1. Very interesting and at times gutwrenching series. 4 episodes just didn’t seem enough. Would be interesting to know how the couples are going now. Hopefully there will be some kind of update.

  2. @Pertinax – Over that 5 year period. Whilst 1/3rd of the de facto partnerships have married in that time, the reality is that 75% of couples marrying co-habited prior to marriage in every year since 2007.

    Marriages and Divorces, Australia, 2011 (ABS cat. no. 3310.0)

    The concept that these couples “just split up” is nonsense. That’s why the Family Law Court adjudicates for de facto couples (including same gender couples).

  3. Looking at the Melbourne Institute analysis of HILDA data between 2002-7.

    91% of married people in 2002 were still living with the same person. And the largest change in status was widowed 3.2%.

    Only 75% of de facto couples in 2002 were still together in 2007. And under half were still de factos were still in a de facto relationship after 5 years because 1/3 of them married.

    So the break up rate for de factos was approximately 8 times that of married couples.

  4. They all have to be in one location for logistic reasons and they had to want to air their darkest secrets on national TV.

    Them all being married couples with different common relationship problems was a deliberate strategy to highly a range of marital problems.

    In defacto relationships with such problems people are more likely to just split up.

    There were 33,714 same sex couples in 2011 who were prepared to declare so in the census making up 0.7% of all couples living together.

    A large proportion, 10,032, were in the greater area of Sydney. But how many had serious relationship problems and would be prepared to appear on TV?

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