movie: marriage story

On the story of a loving married couple who has a child together, the mum, an actress, and the dad, a theatre director. And after years of marriage, the wife demands for a divorce.

Why?

1. The wife was not being heard. She felt she lost her persona, and she was just part of her husband's. Her identity was lost, her taste, her preferences, what she wanted was lost. She had forgotten what her taste in design was. She moved to her husband in NY, stayed in his house.

In her eyes, she got “smaller” with Charlie, who was unsupportive of her wants, becoming more of an extension of him than a person for herself. She wanted something of her own and not a temporary pipe dream. 

"All the problems were there in the beginning…I didn’t come alive for myself I was just feeding his aliveness….He didn’t see me as something separate from himself.”

She was from LA. She wanted to go back to LA as a family, were her family is, she tried to tell her husband, it was "discussed" but turned down as husband was developing his career in NY. There were chances in which husband could have gone to LA as a family for a year when he did his theatre studies, but he didn't choose that. Even the son prefers LA to NY, but he didn't want that. It affects his livelihood.

To be aware of each ones personal fulfilment.

2. Husband failure to apologise. The pride of man, after having discussed things with his wife, didn't agree with the wife, and he failed to apologise, for choosing what he wanted, or what he saw as better for the family. 

Husband cheated on the wife!!

3. Build within the marriage, the company, the friend, and the history you share.

our relationships are kind of like houses that have a main floor and then a basement. And most of the time we’re up on the main floor, running around and waking up and dealing with our kids and going to work and dealing with family and coming home and arguing with each other and making love, or not making love. We’re often just kind of getting through one day and the next on the main floor of life. But underneath the main floor there’s a basement. Some of our more primal emotions and vulnerabilities and frailties and injuries are down there in that basement, stowed away in a quieter, more vulnerable place.

4. Building emotional connection

Can you imagine how things might have been different if she had been able to turn and tell him, “I am afraid. I seem to be getting smaller. Disappearing. I need you to ask me what I want – to know that the longing in my heart matters to you.”

And if only Charlie, played by Adam Driver, had been able to respond to her plea. Or if Charlie had said to her, “We are so distant. I don’t know how to fix it. I feel alone and a friend is coming on to me – can we talk about what is happening to us? Are we losing each other? I don’t want to lose you. I need you.”