One of the things many people don’t ‘get’ about the appeal of reality programming is its seeming focus on the mundane or even unpleasant aspects of everyday life, but tuning in to Bethenny Frankel’s Bethenny Ever After , one might think average middle-class housewives would be exposed to an hour of a rich lady doing rich lady things because isn’t that what it’s about, or something?
Apparently, even the well-heeled of Manhattan have their marital woes, and Bethenny and husband Jason Hoppy are no exception. But while you or I might go to marital counseling in a sad little industrial park with sad fake-wood paneling and sad indoor-outdoor carpeting, Real Housewives combine their marriage therapy with rich people activities like boating. And the metaphors !
Frankel and Hoppy got hitched and knocked up in rather quick succession, probably not entirely because at 41, Bethenny would want to get on the baby-making train before it leaves the station. (She expressed as much after revealing that she’d recently had a miscarriage .) But the Skinnygirl cocktail maven now admits that perhaps the race to the altar didn’t entirely make for a solid marital foundation, and on the “counsel-boating” episode, she explains:
“We’re off course… That’s what we’re doing in our lives: we keep having the same argument over and over again. Jason thinks that it is a metaphor for the fact that we keep going around in circles in our relationship that we keep having the same argument over and over again.”
Whoa, deep. However, Hoppy said of their “off course” pairing:
“Where do I want to be in 10 years? Married to her. Whether she believes it or not!”
No word on whether Frankel and Hoppy have planned a skydiving counseling session for their next bout of therapy. Bethenny Ever After airs Monday nights on Bravo at 10PM.
