Before Midnight: Men and Women Don't Speak the Same Language

Last night I watched Before Midnight, the final installation in Richard Linklater's Before trilogy. The saga spans eighteen years in the lives of Celine and Jesse, a French woman and an American man that meet on a train. While the first two movies are decidedly optimistic and romantic, the third takes a turn: for most of the movie, our romantic heroes are embroiled in a heated argument that culminates in a conversation in an open air cafe, where they make up without resolving anything.

The movie has 98% on Rotten Tomatoes. I found it to be a jarring resolution to the trilogy, especially after my husband and I applauded from our couch after finishing the second film, Before Sunset. I wondered whether there might be something that I was missing, an underlying thread or plot that went over my head, something I may have been blind to in the same way I was unable to understand the praise for Marriage Story. It had nothing to do with the film itself; I found the story to be just as grounded as the previous two installations, just as visually stunning and well-paced. But unlike the other two, where I felt as though I fell in love with the characters as they fell in love with each other, I found I could not love, care for, or relate to any of the characters in the final film. It isn't the point of the movie-- many films don't ask you to relate to every one of their characters-- but I couldn't understand why so many people would pour such endearing praise on a movie that felt, to me, like bashing my head in with a frying pan for almost two hours.

I read essays and comments and forums and the universal agreement seems to be that Before Midnight is as beloved as its predecessors for the same reasons: people see themselves in Jesse and Celine, they recognize the gritty reality of loving someone in the mess of life, and they feel heartened by an ending where our flawed heroes make the active choice to continue to love each other despite the messiness of their love.

I found that to be even more difficult to understand than the movie. I think the reason is the evolution of our gender norms. In my view, understanding Before Midnight helps us understand young men's shift to the political right and women's increasingly common choice to remain unmarried and put off having children. Why love at all if this is what we have to look forward to?

If you, like me, have never watched the Before trilogy, let me get you up to speed. The first film, Before Sunrise, was released in 1994 and follows Celine and Jesse. They meet on a train and decide to get off together in Vienna, spending the night walking around the city before Jesse has to catch an early flight back to the States, and Celine has to get back on the train to return to Paris. Most of the film follows the pair as their conversations grow increasingly more intimate, covering everything from superstition to death and the reality of our own existence. They return to the train station, exchange no information and decide to meet back there exactly six months later, on December 16th.

Before Sunset, 2004, picks up nine years later. In this film, Jesse has been propelled to fame with the publication of a book that covers a man and woman that meet on a train and spend the night together in Vienna. While he is promoting the book in Paris, Celine finds him and the pair finally reconnect. We learn that Celine never made it to the train station because her grandmother died, but that Jesse did go. He spent a handful of days in Vienna but eventually left when he realized Celine would not come. He returned to the States, got married, and had a son. As a viewer, you slowly connect the dots: both of these people are flawed. They are flirtily recounting the night they spent together as they learn that both are in committed, long-term relationships. They do not kiss, but after Jesse insists on walking Celine to her door, and then asks her to play him one of the songs she mentioned writing on her guitar, Celine sings about falling in love with the boy she spent a night with in Vienna. When the movie fades to black, the conclusion is unspoken but undeniable: neither of them will ever let the other go again.

Before Midnight was released in 2013 and takes place eighteen years after the pair first met in Vienna. At this point, they are co-parenting Jesse's now fourteen-year-old son, who visits from the U.S. for summers and holidays. They also share seven-year-old twins Nina and Ella. The film takes place on the last day of a vacation in Greece, after Jesse returns his son to the airport. Unlike the first two films, Before Midnight includes characters other than Jesse and Celine; in fact, much of the first half of the movie is a conversation between them and a handful of other couples as they discuss the ways in which they navigate their own relationships, the expectations they have of each other, and the biological differences between men and women.

This is where it gets interesting-- at least for me. Both of the previous films have briefly touched on the subject of gender roles. In the first film, Celine vents about gender expectations but chooses not to keep pressing the subject because it made her sad. Jesse lets it go. In the second movie, the subject is broached briefly as Celine mentions feeling an irreconcilable attachment to all the people she had slept with, noting it may be because she is a woman. However, in the last film, we see Celine and Jesse, now both forty one years old, discuss multiple times the way in which Jesse essentially "ogles " women ( "I do not ogle. I make love to them with my eyes," he says jokingly). There is a scene where the women are in the kitchen while the men sit around outside (not exactly revolutionary, but definitely realistic) when the youngest couple appears outside, returning from the beach. They tease each other, and we see Jesse's eyes follow the younger woman as she disappears inside the house. Later, as the couples sit around a dinner table, they discuss the ineffable differences between men and women: men yearn for sex, women yearn for nurturing and attachment.

In one of the more uncomfortable parts of this scene, Celine laughingly recounts the way that Jesse is attracted to young, dumb women. She takes on this role. She pouts her lips, sticks her chest out, and looks up at him with big, blue eyes as she pretends to ask silly questions about Romeo and Juliet, stroking his ego when she proclaims that "You're a writer? You must be really, really smart." She stops, and they turn back to the table. "Why am I so attracted to this?" Jesse says, as Celine, and the rest of the table, laughs.

It might not have been a very big moment. But later, when the pair find themselves in a long and sticky argument generally centered around Jesse regretting leaving his son at the airport and wishing he lived closer to him now that he's about to enter high school, it is shakily revealed that Jesse cheated on Celine with a younger woman that she described as "That young Emily Bronte girl." Along the same vein, we learn that Celine likely cheated on Jesse herself. It adds an extra layer to one of the threads of the film that appears to imply that Jesse has a wandering eye.

However, Linklater is more a documentarian than a filmmaker. He isn't here to cast any judgment on his characters; he didn't do so when Celine, in the second film, notes that her photojournalist boyfriend approached a homeless man on the streets of Mumbai and, without ever asking his consent, adjusted the man's clothes as he took multiple photographs. He didn't judge when Jesse pulled Celine into his lap in the same film, moments later revealing that Jesse is married with a child. He didn't judge when, in the first film, Jesse was patronizing and condescending toward the work of a street poet and a palm reader. Linklater is committed to reality, and in reality, people are not the flawless heroes we see on film. They make mistakes, they cast judgment, they hurt others and themselves. Celine and Jesse aren't flawless heroes and they aren't meant to be-- they're meant to be real people. In that sense, Linklater hits the nail on the head. He just also, maybe, casts light on an issue that does affect all of us, because it could explain the reason why it feels like men and women are currently speaking two completely different languages.


A few months ago I decided to dip the tiniest millimeter of my pinky toe into the manosphere. I was writing a story and wanted to learn more about how men get pulled into it, and how they get out (because there are some who leave-- their stories are documented in the subreddit r/RedPillExit). I found a podcast, read some foundational texts, and lurked in post after post as I realized that taking the red pill is not about women. It's not even about men. It's about meaning.

I was really hunting for some disgusting, exploitative posts about the worthlessness of women, and I hungrily scrolled, expecting at any moment to find the rotten apple at the loose core of the manosphere. But I didn't find it. Sure, there were plenty of posts that very casually mentioned manipulating women into relationships, but often, the post was not about getting women. This is because there is a specific corner of the manosphere dedicated to the art of getting girls: they're called Pick Up Artists, or PUA, and often men start there before they transition into some of the other, darker corners of the manosphere. Funny enough, the further you get from PUAs, the further you get from posts that discuss women. I never really found the ugly, exploitative posts-- instead, I found post after post of men giving each other advice on how to improve themselves; their mental health, their diet, their physical fitness. As it turns out, taking the red pill is not about realizing that men are superior to women-- it's about realizing the truth. And for the red pill community, their truth is simple: sex is a market and you must enter as a rational and unemotional player. This is the description for the red pill subreddit: " Discussion of sexual strategy in a culture increasingly lacking a positive identity for men."

It's sad. Many of the posts are. It's full of men rejecting love and intimacy in order to elevate their perceived social standing and increase their value on the sexual market. It's men spending hours and hours alone, obsessing over their physical appearance in order to attract a mate. It's men rejecting their own value and the value in other men (because believe me, no one is making friends on these subreddits), all in desperate pursuit of an idealized Ȫlpha male" status.

I found a podcast about the red pill. It was from a therapist. I was genuinely surprised by some of his videos because I couldn't find the call for sexual violence that I was expecting-- instead, I found a man who talked about the ways in which men should find inner strength, focus on self-development and put to the side the immediate desire to "get" women. It wasn't flawless-- there was a healthy amount of biological normativity, including, at one point, an implication that men should be allowed to have sex outside the marriage because their sex drive cannot be supported by a single woman-- but it surprised me that some of the things they were suggesting made a lot of sense. It felt like they were really, actually close to good advice, but still failed to stick the landing.

Eating healthy is good advice. Doing exercise is good advice. Prioritizing your mental health and spending time getting to know yourself is good advice. Suggesting that you have earned the privilege of being an asshole to single mothers you choose to date because they are close to worthless on the sexual marketplace is bad advice.


I don't think it's controversial to say that currently there is a vacuum of meaning in men's lives. In a post-#MeToo, Time's Up, Fourth Wave Feminist world, masculinity is a bad thing. The Patriarchy is bad, and men uphold the patriarchy, so men are bad. Men ain't shit. Fuck men. Men are trash. It's time for the girlies to girlboss all the way to breaking that glass ceiling.

It isn't 2016 anymore and nobody wants to be Hillary Clinton, but the general idea of promoting women's autonomy outside of relationships with men has stuck. We chose independence and work and for women to have a seat at the table. We don't have many of those things yet, but many young women in the West grew up with the belief that women are able to chart their own lives in the same way men can. Importantly, the conversation never really extended to the new roles men would play in the lives of these empowered women.

While many young men were never explicitly sat down and told that they had to marry a woman, make her a mother and provide for his family (this isn't to say this doesn't happen-- some certainly were), the message is received loud and clear anyways through examples in their own families, media, and our collective social culture. What roles are there, really, for men outside that of the strong provider? If they're not a provider then they're a loner-- or rather, a lone wolf. There isn't a template for how men balance their own masculinity in relationships with women that are their equals; no template for how to divide labor (including emotional labor), for how to argue and speak to each other. For men of the red pill community, anything less than a lone wolf or a provider is a beta male, worthy of nothing but derision and disdain, less than a man because he chose a role for himself that is closer to that of woman, and women are weak, which is something that is disgusting and worthless.

I see this conflict rear its head in Before Midnight. Celine isn't a fourth wave feminist but the third wave came for her just as hard anyways: she values her career and her independence and she fears that all the agency she worked hard to achieve will disappear if Jesse were to whisk her away to Chicago so that he could be close to his son, making her a housewife. She doesn't use these words-- instead, she explodes when Jesse briefly suggests the idea of moving his family closer to his son-- but as their argument progresses it is clear that the issue at heart is the ways in which their gender impacts the roles that each of them perform in their relationship. Again and again, Celine discusses the weight of looking after not only the twins, but also her husband, while balancing her responsibilities in a job that she cares about. Jesse doesn't address these concerns when he tells her that he isn't saying they should move right away, but rather open a potential conversation because he has a very valid concern about not being sufficiently present in the life of his son. The argument meanders as Jesse and Celine become emotionally agitated, able to see nothing but their own red hot anger. The fight reaches its apogee when Celine looks Jesse in the eyes and says "I don't love you anymore." She steps out the door. It's the third time she's walked out during the argument, but this time there is a finality to the slam of the door. She isn't coming back. The ball is in Jesse's court.

I'll pause here for a second. By this point in the movie I was already emotionally exhausted by the fight and had spent much of the scene arguing from my couch with both of the characters. Why did they keep leaning on such thin, strawman arguments? Why the personal attacks? Why are they just now broaching the topic of the division of labor in their relationship when they have been together for nine years?

I grew up with fourth wave feminism. I was born in the new millennium to Gen X parents that grew up in the transition between second and third wave feminism. My mother is one of three sisters in her family, and her mother, my grandmother, is one of four sisters. I have the privilege of being the fourth generation of women to go to college in my family-- my great grandmother was part of the first class of women chemists in Puerto Rico. My grandmother also became a chemist, and both her sisters studied a hard science as well. My mother studied archaeology, and I went to school for political science. My mother and I both had unique upbringings; for much of my mother's life, she lived on a farm in the mountains of Puerto Rico. Her siblings and my grandmother relied on my brilliant, eccentric, and often enigmatic grandfather as a sole provider, and for several years were homeschooled by my grandmother. They were country hicks that read Paolo Freire and Noam Chomsky and sheltered social activists during a time when the independence movement in Puerto Rico was heavily persecuted. My grandmother and grandfather set the example and my mother and aunts became women with strong feminist convictions, even though they would never describe themselves as feminists.

I grew up around women who believed in the power of their own bodies, in their ability to chart their own lives, women who cared about their careers as much as they did their familial responsibilities. It was these women who assured me I was just as capable as any man of accomplishing my dreams, who nurtured my passion for justice and equity. It was very strange then when, as I got older, I noticed patterns in these women's relationships with men that seemed at odds with their beliefs or at the very least a surrender to gender norms that I had been assured of were a thing of the past.

There was a lot of yelling in my house. It was often my mother. It would be very easy to say she simply was and is an intense and demanding woman unable to effectively communicate her needs to the people in her life. And maybe part of that is true-- she was recently diagnosed with ADHD and I don't doubt that her neurodivergency made this aspect of relationships even harder. But often that wasn't the case. The dynamic became easier to understand as I learned words for it, and I was able to identify much of it within the argument between Jesse and Celine in Before Midnight. There are roles that we occupy within our relationships that we often learn by watching others. Often, there is no conversation about what a romantic relationship will look like before it happens-- it happens, and then we do what we've seen everybody else in our life do before us. My mother took care of the children because that is what her mother did. She is the one who took us to all our doctor's appointments, organized playdates and birthday parties, bought all of the Christmas and Three Kings presents, made all of the food and packed all of our snacks for school, dropped us off and picked us up from school, watched us after school, took care of our emotional development, would comfort us when our dad would get frustrated and yell, nursed us when we were sick, bought us all our clothes and almost exclusively cleaned up after us-- all while either working full time or being in graduate school full time. My father went to work and tried to stay out of my mother's way.

I know my mother tried to communicate to my father that she was drowning because it was very loud and difficult not to hear her. When she was in a good mood, my mother would ask nicely: Could you do these dishes? Could you please clean the bathroom? Could you do the laundry? Would you please feed the dogs? Often, she had to ask more than once. Luis, take care of the bathroom. I've asked you twice, have you fed the dogs? And when she had gone through the first attempts at asking, as nicely as she could, she would yell. When she was in a bad mood there was no first and second question-- only yelling. How many times do I have to tell you to do the dishes? Does no one hear me? It's like I'm alone in this house-- goddamnit Luis, what did I just step on?! Did I not tell you to walk the dogs? Why the fuck are the backpacks still here in the living room? My mother would fly into a rage, slamming doors and tripping over dogs. We would try to get out of the way.

At this point my dad would stop yelling back-- sometimes he would, but often he would get quiet. Then, if either me or my brother happened to come across him, he would unload his anger at my mother on us and yell at us to take care of things that my mother had asked him to do hours or days ago. My parent's lives were often in survival mode; my mother was completing a Master's degree when she found out she was pregnant with me, and it was never either in her nature or intentions to abandon her career because she had children. We would simply come along for the ride. My mother and father were not officially together when my mom found out she was pregnant, so they hadn't spent any time living together and setting their own boundaries before they had to be parents together. My father at the time was working at a casino, so my mother spent most of the daylight hours working as director of the Cultural Center in Puerto Rico, leaving her Master's degree halfway done as she raised me and two and a half years later had my brother. Around four years later, we moved to London for my mom to complete her graduate school. We were there for five years while she completed a Master's and PhD, spending summers in Puerto Rico where she completed her field work. We lived off of grants and funding she would receive as a student at one of the most prestigious schools in the country, and the income my dad made as a mechanic. Two years after we moved to the UK we were hit by the Great Recession, and for ten months my dad worked as a waiter, later finding a job at a Saab dealership two hours away from us. My parents never really got a chance to breathe, and the survival strategies they'd developed were the ones they leaned on for most of my childhood.

My father grew up in, from what I gather, an abusive household. His father was an alcoholic and his grandfather was an alcoholic, and urban legend says his great grandfather killed his wife with a brick when he flew into an alcoholic rage. My paternal grandparents separated at some point and my dad spent much of his childhood with his grandfather and grandmother. To him, his parenting was ten thousand steps removed from his own parents because he was present, he was more emotionally available than his own father, and because he never beat us. He was a feminist because he respected women and believed in their agency. There was no talk about therapy or generational trauma. That was exclusive to women and homosexuals. Despite being a sensitive and passionate man, social pressures forced my father to ignore his own feelings and let them turn to anger, the only allowable expression of male emotion.

Neither my mother or my father stepped into their relationships and said, with conviction: "I want to take on the majority of the mental burden of running the house because I am a woman," or, "I want to financially support my family while ignoring my own needs and interests, and I will take on the exclusive burden of taking care of all cars, burying dogs and killing bugs, because I am a man." They took on these roles the same natural way that I let my hair grow long while my brother cuts it short without paying much attention to whether those are our own independent decisions or if they are shaped by social expectations.

The thing is, my mother spent so much of my life speaking about this independence, this freedom, this feminism that creates space for women, that I turned my eye to my home life and became frustrated. When my parents had my youngest brother I was thirteen years old. My middle brother and I were excited at first-- We have build-in babysitters for this one, my mother would joke. But it wasn't a joke. The only joke part of it was the plural of babysitter, because in reality, it was only me. I started learning to cook for a family of five when I was around twelve, and by the time my little brother was born I was learning to change diapers, warm bottles, feed the baby, and later independently watch him for entire days over the summer or weekends. When the food I cooked did not turn out well my mother tutted, and I tried harder. With the yelling I learned to hide from my parents, but when I was asked to do something, the only way to hide was to do it well-- that way, I would get neither approval or disapproval. I got good grades in school, took care of my brother as best I could, cooked, and often, cleaned. I became a third parent, and I hated it beyond belief.

This expectation was not placed on either of my brothers, and for a long time I believed it was simply because I was the eldest. But my aunt had three boys, and her eldest son was never burdened with the responsibility I had to care for his two younger brothers or cook or clean for his family. I had two female cousins, both of them middle siblings, with similar responsibilities to me within their household: we took care of the younger cousins and siblings. We cleaned. We went to school and got good grades.

There are two different responses we can have based on the kind of parenting we experienced as children. We can replicate patterns (parent hits their child as discipline, and then the child hits their child as well); or, we can reject patterns (parent hits their child as discipline, child renounces physical violence and adopts a different approach, such as gentle parenting). However, I think there can also be a mix; for most people, our parents did some things well, and other things not so well. We can take the good, leave out the bad, and try something new.

When I met my now-husband, I didn't set out to chart what our relationship would look like from the get-go. I didn't even know what I wanted it to look like; I just knew what I didn't want it to look like. We worked from there, and it turned out what we didn't want was often a map for what we did. Over almost six years of arguments we have established boundaries, discussed our wants and needs, learned how to communicate our love for each other in a way the other person understands and made familiar territory out of each other's triggers and childhood traumas. One thing that worked best for us in navigating these conversations and setting these boundaries was going to couple's counseling.

At first, it was difficult to convince my husband that couple's therapy didn't mean our relationship was doomed, that in fact it could make it stronger and more stable over time. Of course, my husband hadn't been in therapy before-- not even individual therapy. By this time I had been in individual therapy for several years, and had realized the benefits of learning to recognize patterns and triggers. At last my husband agreed and commenced individual therapy, after which we started couple's therapy.

It goes like this: most arguments, especially the most heated ones, are not about whatever is being discussed at surface level. When we are most emotionally aroused during an argument what has happened is that some trauma has been triggered, and we have entered fight or flight mode. There is no rational, unemotional conversation during fight or flight. There is only danger.

Here, for example, is an argument my husband and I rehashed many times before we went to therapy and were able to put it to bed. I would ask my husband to please do the dishes. My husband would tell me he would. An hour later, the dishes aren't done. He tells me he will get to them. I do the dishes. He gets frustrated that I did not let him do the dishes. I tell him it's okay. Rinse and repeat until now the argument we are having is that I am the only one who does dishes. My husband is frustrated that I did not let him do the dishes or voice my concern about doing them the last five times I did them in a row. Part of me wishes he could read my mind and understand that the sight of unwashed dishes simply makes me uncomfortable. Rinse and repeat.

Through therapy we were able to understand and break down the anatomy of our dishes argument. The reason I couldn't stand to leave the dishes in the sink longer than an hour was because I had grown up in an unsanitary home and the sight of the dishes made me feel unsafe. The reason my husband didn't want to do the dishes right away was because he valued his independence and felt as though his freedom and masculinity were threatened by being told to do something he didn't want to do at the moment. After working with our therapist, I learned to be okay with the dishes sitting for longer than an hour once my husband demonstrated that they would always be washed within a day-- they would never turn into the rotting rice and beans I had spent my childhood scrapping from sealed thermoses that had sat for a week on the kitchen counter. I was safe.

We did this for most of our arguments and through this work were able to learn each other's triggers. It made it far easier to work through arguments because we learned to communicate how we were feeling at the moment, even if the feeling was that we were triggered and didn't know why. It took a lot of hard work. And eventually, we reached the difficult and unenviable argument of the mental load. See, for years now I had taken on the responsibility of being Head Manager of our household. This meant coordinating major purchases, taking the dogs to the vet, organizing trips, planning meals and cooking, and even the planning of chores, which I would then ask my husband for help with. But having all of this in my mind? It was exhausting.

I learned from my parents that yelling wouldn't get me anywhere. So I did my research on the way the mental load affects women in heterosexual relationships, took my research to my husband and said listen. I feel this way. Look at my research-- I'm not alone. I would like your help.

I really thought it would work, too. Can't you see my shiny graphs? My empirical data? Study after study that demonstrates again and again that women take on or are put into the role of Manager in their relationships with men?

My husband did not like my graphs or my data, because relationships aren't logical, unemotional and rational beasts. He didn't like the implication that other relationships could in any way reflect our own, because ours was a special little thing that we had made ourselves. There was no way he could be replicating patterns of harm, because he didn’t feel like that's what he was doing. It took a few sessions in couple's therapy for this one. What my husband eventually explained was that the graphs and discussion of the mental load felt like the straw that broke the camel's back. "Why is it that every time we argue, I’m in the wrong?" He said. I had no answer for him. He felt as though I was looking for something to complain about, a new thing to ask him to do, and this time I had found something so abstract I needed graphs to explain it. But as we kept digging, we realized his fundamental fear was that I was taking advantage of him-- that if he wasn't on guard, I would slowly pry his masculinity from his hands and put it in my pocket.

Once we realized that, it was much easier to have a conversation. I told him we could play everything by ear and find something that worked for us. I asked if he could help me with planning. If we could find certain chores and relegate them to each other so the other person doesn't have to worry about it. If we could both take care of often looking about the house and wondering what needs to be taken care of-- and taking care of it.

It wasn't solved overnight. It's a problem that will likely never be solved. My husband still doesn't cook much but he cooks much more than before, and has started baking. I do the bulk of the cooking and grocery planning, while he exclusively takes care of the laundry and almost all dishes. My husband plans all our special events. We plan and buy presents together, we troubleshoot taking care of the cars, we switch on and off scheduling the dog's vet visits, buying concert tickets and planning trips. But now we’ve opened the line of communication, and when we feel as though the burden falls too heavily to one side, we have the words with which to talk about it.

I yelled at the TV as I watched Before Midnight because I'd had that argument before. The one where you're trying, fruitlessly, to explain how tired and drained you feel at the hands of a system that is indescribable and that some people don't even believe exists. I wished I could reach through the screens and tell them Hey, slow down. You're feeling triggered. Think about what you want to say, and then regroup. Listen with empathy. Then speak honestly and with "I" language. But it's not just Jesse and Celine-- the widespread appeal of this movie, its relatability, means this is a problem that we all come to terms with in the privacy of our own homes. We do not often discuss with others the ways in which we have handled the baggage of gender norms in our relationships in light of fourth wave feminism. The arguments of a couple are to be hashed out behind closed doors, in private. But how much is then lost? Where one couple succeeds, dozens fail because we refuse to learn from other people's gains and pitfalls because of the taboo of discussing arguments of a more intimate nature.

If we broaden the boundaries of the root of the argument between Celine and Jesse as an argument that exemplifies all men and women in heterosexual relationships, I believe the fundamental fear of both is losing their freedom and agency. For women, that loss is manifested in a fear of losing their careers-- of being locked in the home subservient to someone who could at any moment abandon them. For men, the loss is manifested in a fear of losing their very masculinity and thus sense of self-- it threatens their fundamental beliefs of what it means to be a man. For Jesse, this was expressed through his refusal to even consider working less, and his repetition that the conversation should be rational and unemotional (manly, and therefore dismissive of Celine, who he views as emotional and dramatic). For Celine, this was expressed through her complete refusal to even consider moving to the U.S., because of the risk this poses to the career she has spent years building.

These conversations become more difficult to have in a climate where men are asked to relinquish more and more of their perceived power to women. Feminist groups seek to advance women's opportunities by ȫreaking the glass ceiling"-- but for men, this feels as though they are standing on a glass floor about to be broken, desperate to prevent this from happening, to prevent the cuts from the glass, the long fall down, and the danger of potentially being perceived to be equal to a woman.

The conversation between Jesse and Celine would be dramatically different between a Gen Z couple that grew up with fourth wave feminism. We're in a strange spot-- some of us might try to chart new paths, territory untouched by our parents and grandparents, while others are falling back on relationships that resemble something closer to the kinds of traditional dynamics exhibited by our grandparents. In a world where men feel as though they have no place, it makes sense that they would seek to turn back to a time where they did feel as though they had a very specific part to play in the world, and making meaning was as easy as going to work and coming back to a loving wife and children. What we need to understand is that this return to the old is an inherent threat to women-- a loss of agency and freedom and all of the gains of the last hundred years. So if the present is a destabilization of the power of men, and the past is a reprisal of the disenfranchisement of women, then we need to collectively broaden our imaginations to create relationships where both men and women play a part; where masculinity isn't a bad word and neither is femininity; relationships genuinely built on respect, trust, understanding and empathy.

There's no real resolution. The resolution was putting all the words out before each other, all of their feelings-- the resolution was to vent. It's good that they feel safe enough to argue in this way and know that there is no real, fundamental threat to their relationships. But what if they actually did take the time to pay attention to the other person's concerns? What if the argument was constructive instead? Otherwise, the same concerns will bubble up again in the future. They'll continue to have the same argument until they either make peace with their respective realities, or decide to leave.

I'm not personally privy to my parent's personal relationship, but I get the feeling they've been having a very similar conversation over the last year. As me and my older brother have left the house, they've been confronted with the reality that the person they've spent the last twenty five years with is little more than a stranger. By living in survival mode, each argument was nothing more than an opportunity to blow off some steam, reduce the pressure, without actually removing what created the pressure in the first place. My parents have both started going to individual therapy and couple's therapy. They've decided to open their relationship after realizing both of them are polyamorous. They're trying new things that you simply do not have the time to do when you're living in survival mode-- which is what Jesse and Celine were doing. They hadn't had a break in seven years since they had the twins; my parents hadn't had a break in twenty five. Maybe, like my parents, the argument in Before Midnight was really the beginning of a conversation, not the end. Perhaps deciding to continue to love each other is a constructive realization that despite the hard work needed, both of them are willing to labor for the love.

I wish it was clearer, but that wouldn't be realistic. It isn't what Linklater set out to do. He won't cast a normative judgment, but I can. As someone who's creating a relationship that doesn't look like anything I've seen before, I realize it requires a lot of time, patience and empathy. But it can be done. The conversation will happen sooner or later-- seven, nine, twenty five years in. But the sooner we start talking about our expectations and boundaries, the better the relationship can be in the long run. We need to do that interpersonally and we need to do that socially. We need to ask what we're willing to give, what we can expect from each other, and we need to have those conversations without feeling like we're in survival mode. We can do better.

It's worth doing better.