Hornby, Nick – State of the Union

The protagonists are Tom and Louise, a couple in marital crisis, perhaps due to a betrayal. They have decided to turn to a marriage counselor and every week before the session they meet in a pub to have a drink and talk for a while, sitting opposite each other, exchanging inquisitive glances and sarcastic words waiting for the therapy, observing other couples and imagining possible stories, talking about oneself and one's life, reconsidering its contents and meaning, that precocious sexual encounter from which everything began and resulted in marriage and filial joy.
Tom and Louise have aged so differently, with different visions and works, he was a music critic, she is a geriatrician.
They would have a lot to talk about, their respective jobs, their son's academic difficulties, his mother's death, but they always end up discussing the same things.
Louise continues to observe Tom, remembers that betrayal justified by sexual boredom, the specter of depression and unemployment persists in him.
Both want a marriage that looks like a marriage, even if it doesn't work, a truth enclosed in boredom and in an ever less important bond, until Tom gave up certifying the certainty of an end. But boredom, after all, would not be the worst thing if life were not so long and the two protagonists in the middle of their journey, perhaps they could be content to make it, as happens in most marriages.
This weekly ritual continues to accompany a presession therapy in which Louise confesses the sense of her betrayal when, alone and unwanted, she did not feel in tune with the world.