What Splitsville & The Invite Have to Say About the Ethical Non-Monogamy Trend

In recent years, people have gotten a lot more open-minded about sex and relationships.

Polygamy has long been associated with Mormonism, but polyamory is secular and more modern. The idea of 'swinging' has arguably been replaced by the concept of open relationships. While polyamory involves having multiple romantic and sexual partners, open relationships mean sleeping with people who aren’t your partner. These terms all come under the umbrella of ethical non-monogamy, which, in all honesty, is pretty much everywhere at the moment.

Whether you’re scrolling through TikTok or swiping through Hinge, the term is almost guaranteed to come up, and is often portrayed as a more enlightened way to live your life. ENM couples abide by a set of rules that keep their dalliances respectful in the eyes of their partner, and this online exposure has become a huge part of the cultural zeitgeist. It makes perfect sense that it is being portrayed in more films. 

As of now, the most notable portrayals of ENM are, in my opinion, Splitsville and The Invite, both of which were released in the UK this year. But what do these films actually say about it?

How Is Ethical Non-Monogamy Explored In Splitsville And The Invite?

Splitsville, as the name implies, focuses on Carey (Kyle Marvin) as he navigates life after his wife, Ashley (Adria Arjona), asks for a divorce. When friends Julie (Dakota Johnson) and Paul (Michael Angelo Covino) reveal they are in an open marriage, Carey and Julie sleep together. Ashley agrees to stay with Carey in an open relationship, sparking a chain reaction of chaos.

The Invite also closely focuses on two marriages: Angela (Olivia Wilde) and Joe (Seth Rogen), and Pina (Penelope Cruz) and Hawk (Ed Norton). After Angela invites the effortlessly cool couple to dinner one night, they make a stunning proposal, exposing a lot of home truths about Angela and Joe’s dynamics.

On the surface, these two initially ‘open’ couples are quite similar. Julie and Paul and Pina and Hawk all project a sense of relaxation, modernity, and, most importantly, enlightenment. However, it is later revealed that the former’s dynamics are actually a smokescreen for their insecurities: before Carey, Julie had never actually slept with anyone outside her marriage, while Paul hadn’t at all. Instead, ENM serves as a smokescreen that seems to cover up an extremely dysfunctional relationship. It helps keep up appearances and makes them look interesting and mysterious, but that’s about as far as it goes. 

As for Carey and Ashley, who later try to explore ENM together, things go similarly south. Carey ends up catching feelings and repeating the same monogamous patterns with Julie, while, despite her revolving door of lovers, Ashley is left feeling dissatisfied and desperate to win Carey back. 

However, it is Angela and Joe who are the real shitshow. Once they realise ENM is on the table, they scramble to appease Pina and Hawk with an embarrassing amount of desperation. But their relationship is so dysfunctional that Pina and Hawk end up taking it off the table again, leaving Angela and Joe to confront some hard truths about their fractured partnership. They might be smug and a little bit pretentious, but of all the couples in these films, Pina and Hawk are the only ones with a healthy relationship. Still, their relationship isn’t healthy because of ENM; it’s healthy because they communicate and respect each other like actual adults.

Both Films Are About the Importance of Healthy Relationships - Whatever Their Type

Those key qualities are what the other three relationships are lacking. Arguably, each of them sees ENM as a means of saving their relationships. But as these two films aim to show, ENM isn’t a middle-ground between a ‘real’ relationship and breaking up, nor is it something that can be used as a last-ditch attempt to avoid ending up alone.

It’s interesting to note that Pina and Hawk are the only ones to maintain this partnership. Angela and Joe presumably break up; Julie and Paul remain single while having casual sex, while Carey and Ashley seemingly run back to a presumably monogamous, white picket fence-type dynamic. 

Ultimately, by highlighting the complexities of ENM, Splitsville and The Invite add important nuance to this public discourse. Both films hammer home the crucial fact that a relationship has to be happy and healthy for it to work, and in the process, quash a lot of the stereotypes and misconceptions that are part of the parcel of this kind of arrangement. If a relationship is broken, ENM won’t fix it. And if the relationship isn’t right, no amount of modern buzzwords or arrangements will change that fact.