4 min read“There’s been some drama…” So says Robert Pattinson in the aptly titled new film The Drama. His words are something of an understatement. His character Charlie has just found out some incredibly shocking news about his fiancé Emma (Zendaya) and the wedding is less than a week away. The revelation—which is nothing short of controversial and will spawn a million reactions, from appalled to merely slack-jawed—comes when Charlie and Emma and their friends Rachel and Mike (played superbly by Alana Haim and Mamoudou Athie) play a game of “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” None of them suspect the atrocity Emma reveals.
What the film—via Charlie—then attempts to do, is reconcile our revised view of Emma with what we knew of her before. The subject matter of her disclosure aside, it asks a fascinating question: would a revelation about your partner be a deal-breaker, or could you practice radical acceptance? Would your relationship survive finding out the worst thing your partner had ever done? Or are there some things that are, simply, unforgivable?
I asked Natasha Tiwari, a psychologist and psychotherapist at The Veda Group. She tells me that the initial reaction to a bad revelation about your partner tends to cause an irrevocable destruction of the existing “psychological architecture” of the relationship. “We hold internal narratives about who our partner is, their values, morals, their sense of integrity, their place in the world; and we build emotional and psychological safety in the relationship, based upon those assumptions,” she says. “When something emerges that contradicts that narrative, the rupture is philosophical as much as emotional.”
It also causes a huge sense of revisionism. In The Drama, Charlie finds himself revisiting all his memories of Emma; did he miss something that he should have spotted? Or worse, did he ever really know her? Tiwari tells me that, with patients who experience such ruptures, it is about reconciling the past with a now radically altered present. “The work is less about the ‘event’ itself and more about meaning making,” she tells me. “What does this now represent, what has it disrupted, and crucially, can a new understanding of the relationship be constructed that still feels psychologically safe and emotionally coherent? Can we put the pieces back together and land in a place which feels stable, and optimistic again?”
The questions are seismic—namely if you can move forward with this arguably ‘new’ version of your partner, one imbued with new associations and, potentially, one who feels radically different to the person you knew before. Often it is too much. If the revelation has fundamentally altered your understanding of the person you love, it may feel like you are now in a relationship with a total stranger. Tiwari says that people should not feel that this is a failure, or that the decision to walk away is defeatist. There may simply be admissions that are irreconcilable. A couple must feel “aligned” and sometimes this makes this impossible.
“Equally, there are couples who choose a form of radical acceptance, but this concept is often misunderstood as passive tolerance,” she says. “True radical acceptance is an active, conscious decision to engage with reality as it is, and to determine whether one can remain within it, without compromising one’s sense of self and one’s own values. Clinically, this is challenging and deliberate work for those who engage, requiring honest conversations, accountability, and a sustained commitment to the rebuilding of trust. Acceptance is only viable when it is aligned with one’s sense of self outside of the relationship; the moment it requires self-abandonment, it ceases to be healing and instead becomes harmful to the one self-abandoning.”
Our understanding of our partner has been, after all, crafted from the narratives we ourself have built about them through our own experience with them. There may still be, evidently, parts of them we cannot access, or have not had access to before. A shocking admission reminds us of this deficit in understanding.
“You do not need to know everything about someone to love them, but there must be a sense of trust, and also coherence between who you believe them to be and what you come to learn about them, to maintain the foundations of a relationship which can move forward.” says Tiwari. “The question then becomes whether a more complex truth can be integrated. Love can hold complexities. Some individuals are able to expand their perception, to hold both who they believed their partner to be and who they now understand them to be, allowing love to reorganise itself around a more nuanced reality. For others, the dissonance is too great; the new information sits outside of what is tolerable, and it is impossible to reconcile.”
You will have to watch the film to see what Charlie decides, but what this dark and admittedly shocking film has exposed is a painful question few couples may ever have to ask themselves: can you still love someone once you know the worst thing they’ve ever done?
