I watched The Invite the other evening, Olivia Wilde’s dinner party film about two couples and one invitation with an ulterior motive. Four sharply drawn characters carry it: a man who has been quietly miserable for years, a woman who put her art dreams aside to raise a child, a man who changed his name after his wife died of cancer, and a psychotherapist who has perhaps misjudged her own relationship as thoroughly as she assesses everyone else’s. The plot turns on the real reason for the dinner: one couple is angling to draw the other into a sex party, and once that is out in the open, each of the four gets dragged into a raw accounting of their partner’s failings, and then, worse, their own.
None of it resolves neatly. Most of the arguments stay exactly where they ended - unresolved. One couple simply vanishes at the end, and the film closes on the other couple, together twenty years, playing their piano together.
I will point out there are some laugh-out-loud moments in the film!
But it’s a reminder that any couple who says they’ve never had an argument is probably lying. There are loads of curated social media couples who espouse the notion that they are authentic with each other, without friction, because two people who have found the right fit should not have much to fight about. I just don’t believe this.
American psychologist John Gottman has studied the arguments of thousands of couples, and his findings are instructive - and make sense to me. He found that couples who stayed together over time weren’t avoiding conflict, but finding ways to resolve it together. He calls the mechanism a repair attempt, which he defines as
“any statement or action — silly or otherwise — that prevents negativity from escalating out of control.”
Repair techniques include using humour, validating your partner’s feelings, asking if you can both take a break, showing empathy, and explaining how you were triggered. Surprise, surprise, notice how this is all about communication!
How often do you stage your relationships for an audience? For your family? For your friends? For your Instagram followers? What sets The Invite apart is that couples openly fight in front of others at the dinner party. The conflict reveals truths they’ve hidden for years. Ruptures otherwise kept private come out into the open. It’s rare to see this. We instead put on our brave faces in front of guests, even if we’ve been at it hammer and tongs just before our visitors ring the doorbell.
Unless one or both of you honestly try to repair it, constant conflict is exhausting; it wears you both down over time, resentment builds without resolution, and it leads to more arguments.
There’s another side of the coin: when constant calm might not seem genuine. If disagreements are rare and resolved quickly, maybe it starts to feel like something is missing - is the lack of conflict a signal of something? The psychologist Mark Travers has looked into why this happens:
“When someone used to high emotional salience meets a calm, stable partner, they may mistake consistency for dullness simply because there are fewer emotional clifftops to grab onto.”
When your partner doesn’t have blow-ups, it’s not evidence that your relationship is less than strong; it means you’ve repaired things in a timely way, and it may have become so smooth and automatic that you don’t even notice anymore.
I know my relationships have become less dramatic and grown more honest. Conflict is rare, and I’d like to think it's resolved quickly. I don’t believe an argument today threatens the whole connection; rather, it’s proof the connection is worth fighting for. If you think a frictionless relationship is an indicator of a strong relationship, then you likely are looking for the wrong signal. Instead, watch how you dissipate that friction, and celebrate that you both have embedded repair techniques in your relationship, rather than letting something fester quietly with neither of you prepared to reach out.