The first scene of the new movie Splitsville starts with a hand job and ends with a car crash. Carey and Ashley (played by Kyle Marvin and Adria Arjona, respectively), who have been married for a little more than a year, are driving to visit their also-married friends Paul (Michael Angelo Covino) and Julie (Dakota Johnson). Ashley decides it’s the perfect time to, um, connect with Carey—but his resulting erratic driving leads another car on the road to swerve and flip. One of the passengers in that car dies. As Ashley and Carey eventually drive away, she tells him she’s been sleeping with other people and wants a divorce.
It’s a jarring opening, especially in what is otherwise a goofy comedy. I was still galled by it at the end of the film, and stuck on it the next morning, when I woke up and Slacked my colleague who’d seen it: “why the hell does splitsville start w someone DYING?” Since then, though, I’ve come to think that a death is a fitting way to set the movie’s events into motion. Carey ends up going to Paul and Julie’s house alone, and during his stay, they tell him that their marriage is open. (They are “realistic” and “self-realized,” they explain.) Carey pitches that setup to his wife, hoping it can save their relationship; she accepts. And the four, lurching and stumbling, all take a very messy stab at nonmonogamy: yearning for freedom when they’re feeling constrained and for stability when they’re feeling unmoored, pining for whoever represents what their current partner doesn’t, almost always appearing antsy. But that constant itch isn’t unique to them; it’s a byproduct, that brutal crash scene suggests, of the fact that their time on Earth—everyone’s time—is terribly limited. They’ll never get to have all of the experiences they want to, or try on all of the versions of themselves that different partners could bring out—even if the norms of modern romance curse them with the illusion that maybe they can.
Splitsville reflects a simmering cultural anxiety about romantic commitment. Choosing a partner (or partners) has become, in many ways, a more confusing task than it used to be—and that reality is the water this film moves in. For a long time, many people had little choice at all; a match was typically arranged as a matter of family business. Even as people gained some romantic agency, partnership was usually based in pragmatism. Women, denied career opportunities and the right to open their own bank account, tended to depend on men financially; men relied on women for child care and housekeeping (even more than they do now). Today, though, marriage has become less and less necessary for more and more people: Women have gained economic power, and singlehood stigma has weakened. What, then, is the purpose of such a union? For some, of course, the practical benefits are still motivating. (“We have money and a kid,” Paul says soon after Carey’s post-crash arrival. “We can never get divorced.”) But for many, romance has become something less utilitarian, or perhaps utilitarian in a new way: a path to self-actualization and discovery. “I don’t want to exist,” Ashley says to Carey in that initial breakup. “I want to grow.” She can’t afford to be constrained when she has “only been with seven people.”
In her book The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity, the psychotherapist Esther Perel argues that humans are naturally torn between two opposing psychological needs: security and freedom. This, she says, is why happy people cheat: because even when they’re enjoying the safety of couplehood, they chafe against the possibility that this might be it—not only the last person they’ll sleep with but also the last partner they’ll learn from and change in reaction to. “We are not looking for another lover,” she writes, “so much as another version of ourselves.” A sense of limitation—even more anxiety provoking in the age of dating apps, when prospects can seem plentiful—is the bogeyman of Splitsville. But the movie also knows that limits can be helpful, that having to decide which romantic partner to settle on—or whether to settle on one at all—can be more stressful than liberating. Having a choice means you can make the wrong one.
This specific dilemma has become a major theme in pop culture. Just think of the many dating shows that revolve around the question of whether two people will end up engaged or married. Contestants are drawn to each other, then to other people, then sometimes back to each other again, torn between familiarity and novelty. The indecision is the drama. Splitsville, in fact, is just one of a handful of recent movies that use romantic commitment as a source of terror, comedic discomfort, or both. In Oh, Hi!, a film released last month, Iris (Molly Gordon) and Isaac (Logan Lerman) are two lovers getting away for the weekend. They’re having a lovely time, at least until Isaac says he’s not looking for anything serious and Iris responds by keeping him chained to the bed. Together, a body-horror flick that hit theaters at the end of July, literalizes the tension between giving yourself fully to one relationship—with all of the coziness and claustrophobia that can bring—and preserving your individuality: Tim (Dave Franco) and Millie (Alison Brie) are partners who begin to physically, grotesquely meld into one person.
Splitsville’s characters hope that nonmonogamy can save them from having to choose. But—of course—jealousy and chaos ensue. The partners pretend they’re fine with things that they’re clearly not fine with. (“It’s really not that big a deal if you think about it,” Paul says, sitting calmly at a broken table after learning that his wife slept with Carey and picking a fight with Carey that leaves the house destroyed.) They use language that sounds enlightened but doesn’t really communicate what they need it to. (Paul and Julie are open because they’re protecting their “emotional and spiritual” bond by being “a little bit more flexible with the physical.”) Instead of enjoying freedom and security at once, they bounce destructively between the two, always wanting what they can’t have.
All of this might sound like a roast of open marriages—and the movie does poke fun. But ultimately, the villain isn’t monogamy or nonmonogamy; the characters are their own worst enemy. Whether monogamous or not, the film suggests, humans will be humans. They will always be haunted by the path not taken; they will strive, ceaselessly, against the laws of nature and time, against mortality; they will never have it all. If they’re doomed to dissatisfaction, though, at least they’re doomed together.
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