The big idea: is couples therapy a waste of time?

Should we all be taking a leaf out of Arnold Schwarzenegger's book?

Something interesting happens in the first few pages of Arnold Schwarzenegger's recent memoir-cum-self-help book Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life. It opens on a moment of weakness, as he describes his lowest point: the day he told his wife that he'd fathered a baby with their housekeeper. No failure has ever felt worse than that," he writes.

But that isn't the interesting part. I won't be rehashing that story here," he sniffs, refusing to dwell on it for even a sentence longer. Instead, he instructs readers to Google the story if that's the sort of gossip that happens to get them going. The rest of the book continues at the same sort of clip, with Schwarzenegger wresting away any looming hint of introspection that might impinge on yet another anecdote about the time he cut the legs off his trousers to remind himself to work on his calves.