Think of Pride and Prejudice. The high points of that story are (are least to me), those moments when the characters actually manage to express themselves and confess their feelings honestly (which goes very badly the first time), and the second time when, after thinking through what the other person said they are able to communicate again and resolve their inherent conflicts. One meeting is a fight that leaves both angry and separated further apart than ever before, but having had their conflict and themselves properly revealed. The second meeting is a reconciliation, a love scene, an engagement, the birth of harmony and understanding. It’s beautiful.

Sadly, that never really happened in this movie. The characters were never able to fully articulate what was bothering them and causing the trouble on a deep and honest level, and so the conclusion and reconciliation rang false and hollow and far too easy. It was a collapse back into the status quo from the beginning, instead of an arc of progress and enlightenment and growth.

For the record, what the struggle was actually about was an undiscussed renegotiation of the terms of the distribution of labor and individual roles in the marriage. Married life with kids is pretty complex. There’s a lot to do, and a lot that can be done. And people negotiate and specialize. In this movie, being an older movie, the men make sacrifices in their careers and the women make sacrifices of their careers in the home, so both can maximize the value of the home and family through their vocations. Both enjoy the fruits of the other’s specialized labor, and both are reasonably happy with their work, although both types of work are inherently challenging and annoying impositions as well as rewarding. And both are equally important and would be felt as a dire impact on their shared happiness if one or the other were removed.

Doris Day kind of falls into the working world, being seduced by the promises of providing for the family (although her husband is a doctor), without being quite aware of how much it will actually demand of her. It ends up disrupting their lives quite a bit, makes finding mutual time for the family much more difficult, and upends a lot of the dynamics they had established. That much is simply natural, it would be a challenge for anyone. The structure of their lives has been radically upended, without either of them really knowing what they were getting into or having thought and talked through how to manage it.

If the movie had properly addressed just the achievement of a victory over that structural difficulty, it would still be a triumph of practical marital adaptation, people learning to adapt as a couple to shifting conditions. But that never really happened. Or at least to the degree that it did, in the middle of the movie, it happened offscreen. But the characters never seemed to really turn their attention to it and become active, conscious agents of their shared life. Seeing people do that together in large and complex endeavor like a family would be interesting. The foibles, the mishaps, the false starts, the maladaptations, the tricky situations, and then finally getting on top of it and seeing peace return. That could have been fun to watch. And the elements were there, it just never came together as a coherent narrative arc.

There were instead some larger, more complex and psychological issues that were there, and those were the primary focus. The real issue, the real question, was what the change in gender roles and the distribution of labor (altered suddenly and without much understanding of what that meant or would entail) meant for the characters. The question of gender roles per se and the distribution of labor in the home, and how each spouse felt about it, what having the wife enter the working meant for for and what it meant for her husband.

The real mistake that the movie made is that it never really articulated those questions properly or answered them meaningfully. We knew the husband was upset. And the wife was upset in return. There was a real conflict under there. But they never expressed or resolved it. The wife just sort of realized that working as a TV star was kind of demanding and annoying and disruptive in way that negated its monetary and status value, and she realized that she was happy getting those things from him and didn’t need more (which, frankly, is putting it with much more thought than the movie ever did). But because the conflict was never properly articulated, the solution felt cheap and hollow. The conflict was removed rather than solved. Things just went back to how they were at the beginning, all in a moment. It was a shallow solution. Remove the problem. The conflict shouldn’t exist. And now it doesn’t.

A modern movie, maybe, would make a similar but inverse error. I expect a modern movie would just assume that there never was a problem with the wife taking on a career, that the conflict shouldn’t exist. And then it wouldn’t. The husband would just be fine with it. There would be no costs, no tradeoffs.

Neither kind of dissolution of the conflict would do the characters justice, in my opinion. One simply assumes that the woman is wrong for reacting how she does, and the other (theoretically) assumes that the man was wrong for feeling how he does. Each would pick different sides. But in my opinion merely picking a side that’s right and ending the conflict with victory is shallow, dishonest, and doesn’t really teach anyone anything.

This movie took for granted that the husband had good reasons to be upset. A modern movie would take for granted that the wife had good reasons to be upset. I take for granted that both do. That life is complicated and marriage and sex are solving complicated problems. But since we are moderns and are more likely the take the wife’s position for granted, and since it’s the husband’s concerns that were focused on (but poorly explored), I think it’s worth talking about what a better version of this story could have looked like.

The fundamental question of the movie was stated, but shallowly. So I’ll ask the underlying questions better. Why was the husband upset by his wife becoming a TV star (outside the usual disruptions such a change causes)? Why was it hard for him as a husband and father? What did it mean to him, why did it threaten him? And why was pretending to be having an affair his idea of a solution? Had it been a real affair, the movie would probably have ended in their separation. But since this was a comedy it ended in reconciliation.

For the sake of argument, like a therapist, I’m going to assume that there was some sense to the husband’s feelings. And the problem wasn’t the sort that could be solved simply by dismissing his feelings as invalid.

The clues to the meaning of what was happening were hidden in the movie. At the end, the wife said “I need you, do you need me?” And that is the closest the movie came to explaining what was at the heart of the conflict. Marriage is a tricky business.

You give up a lot and risk a lot of live in a partnership. This being a traditional partnership, that meant that the husband was making his contribution to value in the family by working outside the home. And the wife making hers by working inside it. And together they were covering the bases of how to deal with the world, which includes attention and effort that needs to be applied both close in and at a distance, narrow and wide focuses. When the wife took the soap job, it did two big things. First, it destabilized the ability of the wife to contribute in the way she had been contributing. And here’s the kicker, those contributions of hers had real value and meaning for the family. They were important, especially to her husband. And they were a large part of what made it possible for him to accept and accomplish his own contribution to the family through his work. Her work made his work possible. And the wife had underestimated, because of inexperience and undue optimism, just how much such a position as a TV and advertising star can demand of a person. She thought it wouldn’t impact her existing contributions to the collective good and her husband’s good, but they did. That’s fair enough, that falls under what I would call the problem of structural difficulties. How to handle a disruption of circumstances and arrangements in a way that preserves the function of the family.

But the second big thing that happened from the wife taking the soap job is that it threatened the husband’s actual sense of self, his value as a husband. And, to be honest, that’s a very reasonable concern. Because to a very large degree, when women choose a mate, they marry the career and the status. Women practice hypergamy. They like to marry up (or across) in economics and social class, in education, even in height. That’s what they look for, that’s how they choose mates, and that’s how they reject potential and even existing mates. Men establish rank through achieving status and wealth, and women assess that as a sign of mate quality. A woman will rarely choose or be happy with a man who is shorter, less educated, of lower social standing, poorer, or earns less. It’s what women want, and it’s what men have to offer. Yes, there are all kinds of individual preferences and tastes, but these prejudices are nearly universal.

But there is no correlation between those same factors and mate choice for men. Whereas they tend to be absolute deal breakers for women, men don’t use them as a matrix for mate selection. Men don’t care if you’re poorer or earn less, shorter, or of lower socioeconomic standing. They’re just interested in you. If you’re beautiful, charming, kind, caring, neat you seem very attractive. And men are particularly visual and sensitive to physical traits like symmetry and body proportions, which have been shown to be accurate measures of health and reproductive fitness. But the truth is that men aren’t really that picky. They’re ambitious, they hope that high value women will consider them to be high value and deem them worth their attentions. But even when it comes to physical attractiveness men are much less judgemental about women than women are about themselves and each other. They aren’t exceptionally picky about mates (and can’t afford to be, because women are).

If you’re looking for an amusing example of this asymmetry, consider some statistics compiled about tinder. Researchers found that “The bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men.” So there’s a huge imbalance in terms of attraction and attractiveness, interest and selectivity. A woman of average attractiveness tends to be “liked” by the majority of all men. Whereas a man of average attractiveness “will only be liked by approximately 0.87% (1 in 115) of women on Tinder.” If Tinder was an economy, it would be among the 5% worst in the world for inequality. Women are simply much more picky matters than men, so what they prefer really matters for men.

Of course both men and women can have shallow and short-sighted and uncomplex version of their respective prejudices, and both can have more complex and developed and far-sighted versions of these prejudices. It depends on the person and their maturity and also their available options. But these values are pretty much always down there as part of the basic structure of sexual selection. On the most absolutely basic level, it’s what men and women are looking for and what each will contribute as value to meet the value of the other.

The husband in this particular movie is a pretty lucky guy. He’s married to Doris Day. Smart, frugal, confident, capable, skilled, beautiful. She’s got it all. And he’s a pretty good catch too. He’s a doctor, a good one, even one that’s skilled with women and children, and he’s pretty good looking on top of it. So they’re well-matched.

So what happens if suddenly his wife has all that she already has innately, and also has what he was bringing to the table, and maybe now has even more than him? More status, more income. Suddenly, there’s an imbalance. She’s outclassed him. She doesn’t need him any more. She could either get by without him and not bother making the compromise of martial cooperation, or she could upgrade to someone more at her current assesed level, at the level of a wealthy and famous TV star. And her husband instinctively sense that. He’s worried that his wife doesn’t need him any more. That he has nothing to offer, that he’s useless and valueless. That his contributions are no longer needed and have, with little effort, been radically outclassed. He’s become a kind of vestigial organ in his own family body.

By the same token, he’s not only seen the collapse in value of what he had based his identity and role and work and sacrifices on, he’s also seen a significant erosion in the value that his wife was contributing to the relationship that was sustaining him and contributing to the shared quality of life. Money and status might be useful, and might be useful to men as ways to attract women (since they care about them), but he doesn’t want more money or status from his wife, he wants her. Her care, love, affection, attention, support, and admiration.

If you’re wondering why men feel the need to be admired, I’m afraid you’ve got sexual selection to thank for that. Because women have been consciously choosing to mate specifically in a hypergamous manner for quite a while, with extreme prejudice, so that you have only half the number of male ancestors as female, the simple fact is that men who weren’t willing to care about pursuing status and achieving the admiration of women, are all dead. Lost from the gene pool. Women won’t choose them. That’s a deal breaker. Men are under a greater selective pressure to prove their value as mates. So much that the command “prove your status to women” has become baked into their genome. You either do it or you vanish. Women worry about making the best choice, while men worry about success.

The husband won’t be worried or threatened, his wellbeing won’t be endangered, and his personal value won’t be compromised, if his wife loses her well-paying and high status job. He’s happy to give her his money and status. Frankly, that’s what he got it for. But, had the movie begun with him losing his job, the wife would have been worried, her wellbeing would have been healiy compromised, and the loss of his income and status would have mattered to her. Maybe not too much in the sort term, but possibly more and more in the long term. Women don’t like being with low status and low income men. It’s hard for them not to have it nag at them. It’s hard for them to not wish for better alternatives. And if their own star begins rising, maybe they will. If you don’t need the man any more, and he isn’t producing the thing that gives him value in a relationship, you won’t keep him around as an ornament. A man who isn’t useful isn’t husband material. Failure to succeed as a man matters a whole lot more for a man than it does for a woman.

Women are, I think, on the whole very loyal and patient. But they also feel the threat and anxiety that such a loss presents very strongly. They demand more of their environment, a consequence that possibly emerges as a consequence of higher negative emotion (neuroticism), which is likely a kind of nesting adaptation. Women are, statistically in their expressions on the Big 5 personality scale, more orderly, while men are more industrious, which simply means that in the same domain (conscientiousness), women tend to focus more on having things just right while men focus on visible achievement. Again, selectivity vs success.

So, next, why did he focus on an affair (or pretending to have one), as the best way to proceed? Because, from his perspective, it raised the same concerns for his wife that he was having about his own value. He was feeling not needed, replaced, surpassed. Like his value had been deflated, bypassed, and his wife was getting what he had to offer from another source. So he raised the same specter for his wife. What if she were being bypassed, replaced? What if he didn’t need her and could get what she had to offer somewhere else?

In a relationship of mutual dependence in which the way each spouse meets the needs of the other is deeply essential to their happiness and stability, what happens if you shift the balance by introducing a direct alternative to your partner’s basis for their contribution? The husband was feeling jealous and threatened, so he made his wife feel jealous and threatened. If both partners don’t actually have any mutual need for one another, what is the basis of the partnership? It’s like imagining a restaurant that doesn’t need business catering to customers who don’t need food. There’s no economy there. You’ve already got so much you don’t really require a partner, so why seek it out; why introduce a partner you don’t need? Why carry around the costly demands of another person if they’re merely as a redundancy that could be eliminated? In fact, a large part of the terror and the glory of forming a partnership is the idea that you could be something more together than you are alone. That your union isn’t merely additive, that it is exponential, that you plus me equals more than just us.

If your partner didn’t provide something you genuinely needed then you wouldn’t put up with them, because all partnerships come at a cost. I know that I am often a burden and an annoyance to my wife and make all kinds of demands of her she would often prefer not to have to bother with or think about. But we are partners because I am not merely a burden. I also contribute something valuable. And in return I derive something valuable from her.

This doesn’t mean that relationships are merely transactional or merely mutually exploitative. It just means that there is something real going on. A real, living, dynamic exchange; a chemical reaction, an active economy, a living respiration, a functional metabolism. Something is actually happening. It’s not just the case of two perfect crystals sitting inert next to one another in the same case. There is a living dynamism and mutualism Independence and integration taking place. The heart and liver aren’t fully independent entities with a thin sack of skin stretched over them it makes them look like they’re part of the same thing. They’re actual functioning and essential parts of a greater, complex organism.

None of this means that the actual solutions the movie reached for the characters’ problems were the right ones. Or even the wrong ones. Because the real problems were never properly understood or talked about, they were never really addressed. Part of the freedom of being in an individual marriage partnership is that you have the ability to figure out between the two of you how to negotiate your problems, once you’ve understood them. But I’m not convinced that either the husband or the wife got a fair shake in this story. And they didn’t just need that for themselves, they needed it for one another, for the two of them together. The wife deserved to be understood and she deserved to understand her husband. And he deserved to be understood and to understand his wife. And I don’t think either of them got that.

Even from the perspective of the husband, who essentially got his way in the end, it was a completely unsatisfactory outcome, a pyrrhic victory. It perpetuated the status quo without understanding why. The one good thing I could say about it was that it did ask the essential question that really was what the whole thing was all about. I need you. Do you need me? If the answer is no, then there isn’t any relationship, there isn’t any need for a partnership. There isn’t any romantic economy. The couple at least realized that. They needed each other. They just could have spent more time exploring how and arriving at that conclusion and how best to maintain it.