The Invite Asks Who Finds Infidelity Funny

"The Invite" is a film about a married couple who attend a dinner party where partner-swapping is proposed, treated as a premise so inherently amusing that the humor practically generates itself. The film is good. The performances are sharp. The direction doesn't stumble. A Guardian review calls it timely, smart, entertaining.

But the review's confidence depends on something it never says out loud. It assumes that monogamous anxiety has become provincial enough to be funny without qualification. That a spouse's fear of infidelity reads now as quaint, a relic, something silly enough to mine for comedy. The film works, the argument goes, because the audience accepts this premise already.

That's the ground the review stands on. And it's not universal ground at all.

In the United States, roughly 88 percent of people believe monogamy is important for a successful marriage. That number has held steady for decades. It doesn't move much. Among people making their first real commitments—buying a house together, choosing to build something with another person—the appetite for sexual exclusivity remains the default assumption about what partnership means. Not because people are unsophisticated. Because they've made a wager about what they want their life to be.

A film can certainly mock that wager. Comedy often challenges what we take for granted. But "The Invite" only registers as hilarious if you've already decided that the wager itself is funny. That the couple's panic about infidelity is irrational rather than the sound anxiety of someone who has chosen a form of life that depends on a specific kind of trust. If you haven't made that decision—if monogamy still feels like the architecture of your safety rather than a punchline—then the film's comedy becomes something else. It becomes a satire of your own uneasiness. It becomes the world laughing at what you've built.

The review praises "The Invite" for being entertaining without ever interrogating what kind of person finds this particular entertainment self-evident. It's not a small thing, what that reveal tells you about who the film was made for. Who it wasn't.