Wanderlust, and the Places No Agreement Reaches

Joy Richards works from an office in her garden. Couples come to it to be helped to say to each other what they have not managed to say at home, which makes her, among other things, an expert in exactly the conversation this story is about. In Nick Payne’s Wanderlust, a six-part series made for BBC One and Netflix in 2018, she is also a woman in midlife, recovering from being knocked off her bicycle by a car, in a long and affectionate marriage in which sex has stopped.

What happens next happens, at first, almost by accident. Her husband, Alan, an English teacher, sleeps with Claire, a colleague at his school. Joy sleeps with Marvin, a man she has met at physiotherapy. They confess to each other, with what one reviewer of the first episode called “comic matter-of-factness”, and then find out two things at once. They still love each other. And neither of them wants to stop. So Joy proposes an experiment. They will stay married, and open the marriage.

At first, it works. The affairs bring their own sex life back. The new partners adjust. A double date with Claire and with Marc, a younger man Joy has begun to see, goes well. If the only question were whether opening a marriage can wake it up, the series could have ended in its fourth hour with the answer yes.

It does not end there, and the reason it does not is the subject of this essay. Joy and Alan make their agreement the way the most sensible writing on open arrangements says an agreement should be made: out loud, early and in good faith, between two people who can talk, one of whom helps couples talk for a living. It still goes wrong, and it goes wrong at places no agreement can reach. An agreement cannot know what a feeling will become once it has been let out. It cannot know what the wanting it permits was carrying. And it cannot decide for the people outside it, who turn out to have lives and consciences of their own.

The series visits each of those places in turn, and the strangest of them is a room. Almost the whole of the fifth episode is a single session between Joy and her own therapist.

Wanderlust was broadcast weekly on BBC One from 4 September to 9 October 2018, six episodes of about an hour each, and Netflix, which carried it outside the United Kingdom, released it on 19 October. It was the first television series written by Nick Payne, a playwright. Luke Snellin directed the first three episodes and Lucy Tcherniak the last three, the fifth among them, and Drama Republic produced it. Toni Collette plays Joy, Steven Mackintosh plays Alan, Zawe Ashton plays Claire, and Sophie Okonedo plays Angela, Joy’s therapist. When the series was announced in 2017, Netflix described it as looking at how people build and keep happy relationships, and as asking whether lifelong monogamy is possible, or even desirable.

Payne had used the title before. His second play, also called Wanderlust, opened in the upstairs theatre at the Royal Court in London in September 2010, and it too followed a long marriage in which a woman named Joy sets out to bring her desire back. The Royal Court’s own record of the production makes that Joy a GP. The series grew from the play, which Payne adapted himself, and the change of profession is worth holding on to. A doctor treats bodies. A therapist listens for what people’s words are carrying, and it is that profession the series will eventually turn on Joy herself.

In Japan it streams on Netflix under the English title, written in Japanese script, with a Japanese subtitle added that means therapy for becoming happy. A later section comes back to it.

This essay was written without screening the series. Its story is told here as published synopses, episode guides and reviews tell it; nothing a character says is quoted, and lines are paraphrased. Critics are quoted only in words read at their source.

And the essay goes to the end. The last episode begins in the section headed “Where only sex was meant”, which says so in its first line. A reader who wants to keep the ending for the screen can read as far as that heading and stop.

It matters when the quiet began, and the series is precise about it. The sex between Joy and Alan has stalled since her accident. When the series was announced, Netflix’s own summary had the accident causing the couple to reassess their relationship, and the same reviewer of the first episode described the marriage as “plump with affection but starved of passion”.

The accident has a cause, and the cause has a history. It happened partly because Joy was distracted by the sight of Emily, a former client. Emily and her husband, Josh, had come to Joy for couples therapy, and while they were in therapy with her, Josh took his own life. This essay says no more about his death than that. In the series it is the source of Joy’s guilt, and that is the only way it enters here.

So the quiet in this marriage is not simply the slow quiet of a long marriage. It has a date. It began with an injury, and behind the injury stands a death.

The distinction matters because there is a persuasive account of long marriages going quiet, and it describes a different thing. This Library’s essay “The Fading Was the Plan Working.” argues that early desire runs partly on uncertainty, that a long marriage spends that uncertainty on purpose, because security is what the two people were building, and that the fading is therefore not a failure of effort but the cost of success. It is a strong argument. It may describe a great many marriages, and part of this one. But Joy and Alan’s quiet came after something happened. The arrangement they are about to make is designed for the first kind of quiet, and the series slowly shows that they were also living in the second.

Notice who proposes. In a familiar version of this story, the husband strays, the wife finds out, and the drama is what she will put up with. Wanderlust gives the straying to both of them, and the confessing to both of them, and then gives the next move to her. It is Joy who says what she wants, and Joy who designs the arrangement.

She is a woman in midlife who wants sex and says so, and the series does not make the wanting a joke, a crisis or a punchline. Its first episode was much discussed for its frankness about sex, and the frankness serves a purpose: it lets a woman’s desire be ordinary, something she has and names, rather than something that happens to her or is discovered about her. Keep that last phrase in mind. The series will come close to doing exactly that, and the case against this reading, near the end, asks whether it goes too far.

And she is the one in the marriage whose work is talk. That is not decoration. Joy spends her days helping couples say difficult things to each other, and her proposal comes in the register of her work: let us be honest, let us name what we want, let us try something and see. It is the proposal of someone who believes, with reason, that much of the harm in a marriage grows out of what is not said. The series will test that belief on her.

Set her beside the wife in Hope Springs, who pays for a week of intensive couples counselling and takes her reluctant husband to a counsellor in a coastal town in Maine. There the professional who asks the hard questions is a man across the room, and the wife sits beside her husband, being asked. In Wanderlust the professional is the wife. Who, then, asks her?

It is fair to say that Joy and Alan make their agreement well. This Library’s essay “When One Person Is Not the Plan: Open Arrangements, and What They Actually Require” argues that the open arrangements which last are distinguished not by the values of the people in them but by a skill: stating terms explicitly, revisiting them, and saying an unwelcome thing out loud before it becomes a situation. Its most useful warning concerns a failure mode, in which a couple in trouble open the relationship so that nobody has to say what is actually missing.

Measured against that, the Richards marriage does better than most. They tell each other what they have done. They say what they are agreeing to, instead of assuming it. The arrangement is meant to be about sex and only sex, and both of them know that this is the term. When it starts to spread into the rest of their lives, they deal with the consequences in the open.

And yet the failure mode is not absent. There is a conversation being avoided in this marriage. What the series shows, and what this essay takes from it, is that the avoided conversation was not between Joy and Alan at all. The skill that essay describes is real, and necessary. It works on what two people know. It has nothing to work on when what matters is something one of them does not yet know about herself.

Before the series goes there, it lets the arrangement do real good. The sex that had stopped comes back. The double date is a pleasure. It would be dishonest to write about Wanderlust as if the experiment were a mistake from the start. It gives the Richards something they had lost. It simply cannot reach what neither of them had named.

An agreement is made between two people and lived among many, and the Richards learn this quickly. They tell their children about the arrangement. Alan has to explain it to his head teacher. Their terms were about sex, not about who would have to be told or what the telling would cost, and yet the telling is where the arrangement stops being theirs alone.

This is where the competing values the series takes seriously come into view. There is honesty, which the Richards prize, and which is why they tell. There is privacy, which is also a value, and which every telling spends. There are the children, who are told rather than asked, and the colleagues, whose school the arrangement reaches. There is the freedom Joy asked for, and the security a family was built on. This essay does not rank them. It is enough to see that an agreement between two people cannot settle them, because most of the people with a stake in them were not there when it was made.

The terms were written for two. The consequences were not.

Then, in its fifth hour, the series stops. A drama named for the urge to roam, which has spent four episodes following an arrangement out into the world, sits down in one room and stays there. Almost the whole episode is a single session between Joy and her own therapist, Angela, played by Sophie Okonedo.

What happens in the room is simple to say. The woman whose work is listening is listened to. Over the session Joy comes to see that her restless search for sex has been a way of not facing two things: her grief for her mother, who has died, and her guilt over Josh’s death. The series reaches that point not by argument but by staying in the room.

It matters that the series puts its turn here. The arrangement was built in the open, between two people, by talking. What it could not reach turns up somewhere else entirely: in a room with one other woman, who is there to hear rather than to agree. No term of the marriage’s agreement could have covered what was said there, because until it was said, Joy did not know it.

To be plain about it: this essay does not offer that session as a method, and nothing here is advice about therapy. The series is a drama, and the session is written to deliver a drama’s discovery within an hour; the case against this reading, further on, takes that seriously. What the essay takes from the episode is narrower. It is the form the series chose. When it needed to find out what the arrangement was carrying, it did not stage another negotiation. It stopped moving.

This is easy to put badly, so it is worth putting carefully. None of this means that Joy’s desire was false, or that she did not really want sex, or that her wanting was only grief in disguise. What the session finds is narrower and more interesting. Her search for sex had become restless, and the restlessness was doing a second job. It kept her moving, and as long as she kept moving, two things could stay where she had left them.

Wanting and running can look exactly alike from outside. Both reach for the next person. Both are hungry. The difference may show only when the running stops, which is what the fifth episode makes her do. Here is the heart of what this essay takes from Wanderlust: a desire can be real and carrying something at the same time, and an agreement can only ever govern the desire, never what it carries.

Their terms said what Joy could do, and with whom, and on what footing. They could not say what the doing was for. No terms can. That is not a flaw in this couple’s negotiation; it is a limit of negotiation itself. Two people can agree about acts. They cannot agree about meanings that one of them does not yet know are there.

This takes the failure mode described above one step further, without contradicting it. The warning was against opening a marriage so that nobody has to say what is missing. Wanderlust shows a harder case, in which the person who opened the marriage could say anything she knew, and did. What was missing was not something she was keeping from her husband. It was something she was keeping from herself, and no skill in the conversation between them could have brought it into the room.

It takes the account of long marriages going quiet, set out above, one step further too. If a long marriage’s fading is the cost of the security it built, an arrangement that brings novelty back in may be a reasonable answer. But the Richards’ quiet was not only that. It began after an accident whose cause leads back to a death, and it sat beside a grief for her mother that Joy had not faced. The answer designed for the one quiet worked, and the other quiet went on. That is how the experiment could succeed at what it was for and still leave the marriage where it was.

From here, this essay describes the last episode.

The series is plainest about what a feeling becomes. Alan falls in love with Claire. The arrangement had been about sex, and the feeling did not read the terms. In the last episode he moves into her flat, which is untidy, and he cannot stop tidying it; he wants an iron; he cannot settle. It is a small, exact portrait of a man who has carried one household’s habits into another and found that love does not bring its own furniture.

Then Claire does something the arrangement never imagined. She loves him too. She finds she cannot go on at another woman’s expense, and she ends it.

Look at where the ethic in the story comes from at that moment. It does not come from the terms. Joy had agreed that Alan could sleep with Claire. The terms were about sex, and only sex, and what the arrangement had become was something else: a husband living in another woman’s flat while his wife is at home. Joy’s consent had been given to something, and it did not stretch to this, because consent never does. It covers what it was given for, when it was given, and nothing an arrangement grows into afterwards can borrow it. The person who sees that is not a party to the agreement at all. It is Claire, who was never asked to sign anything, and who brings to the absent wife a care the terms did not contain.

Joy, meanwhile, has taken up again with Lawrence, the old flame with whom she once cheated on Alan and whom Alan detests, and in the last episode Lawrence turns her away. The arrangement had opened a door, and some of what came through it was the past, which had limits of its own. He too was outside the agreement, and he too decided.

So the people outside the agreement turn out to be among its most decisive participants. The children were told. The head teacher was told. Claire decided. Lawrence decided. An arrangement between two people is also, whether they mean it to be or not, a proposal to everyone it touches, and everyone it touches can answer.

What Joy does in the last episode, after the session, is go back. She meets Emily. Then she rides her bicycle along the route of her accident.

Set those two acts beside the beginning of the story and the shape of the series comes into view. It begins with an accident that happened partly because the sight of Emily took Joy’s attention. Near its end, Joy meets Emily and rides that road again. Between the two, the arrangement has run its whole course: the proposal, the success, the spread, the love that grew where only sex was meant. The series seems to suggest that all of it happened between one sight of Emily and one meeting with her, and that the way out ran back along the road. What passes between the two women is the series’ to show, and this essay does not report it.

Then Alan comes home. He has been sleeping in a friend’s spare room; now he is back, and the two of them hold each other again. This essay reads the ending as a return rather than a verdict: the marriage chosen again, after an experiment, by two people who know more than they did when they began. The Arts Desk’s review, published the day after the last episode, thought the finale left open whether the marriage would truly mend. That seems right.

It would be possible to read the return as the lesson: they tried an open marriage, it failed, they went home. The same reviewer drew exactly that lesson, in a closing memo: “you can’t have your cake and eat it”. This essay reads it differently. The arrangement did not fail at what it was for. It brought sex back into the marriage, as it was meant to. What it could not do was reach the places the series went next: a love nobody had agreed to, a grief nobody had named, a road Joy had to ride again. The return is not the punishment for having tried. It is what became possible once those places had been visited.

In Japan the series streams on Netflix under a title that keeps the English word and adds a Japanese subtitle meaning therapy for becoming happy. The English names a restlessness, the urge to roam. The Japanese adds a treatment, and a destination.

Read quickly, the subtitle seems to call the open marriage itself the therapy: an experiment the couple undertake in order to be happy. On this essay’s reading, the series declines that. The arrangement does what it was for, and happiness is not what it produces. But the subtitle is right in a way it may not intend. There is a therapy in this series, and it is not the arrangement. It is one session in the fifth episode, and what it gives Joy is not happiness. It is her grief, at last.

A Japanese reader might reach for another word to describe the Richards marriage at the start: sekkusuresu, sexless. The word has a formal definition. In 1994 the Japan Society of Sexual Science defined it as the case in which, although no special circumstances are recognised, a couple have had no agreed sexual intercourse or sexual contact for a month or more, and this is expected to continue for a long time. It is a careful definition, and the clause about special circumstances is sensible. It separates a quiet that has a reason from a quiet that has become a condition.

Wanderlust is about what happens when the two are tangled. The Richards’ quiet began with a special circumstance, an injury, and behind the injury stood a death; it went on long enough to become the other kind too. By the time they design their arrangement they are treating it as the second kind, and the series slowly shows that underneath it was still, in part, the first. This Library’s essay “Why Japan Counts Sexlessness, and What the Count Hides” argues that the count measures a real absence, and that most of what matters about desire lives in what it was never designed to capture. The clause about special circumstances is one exact place where that happens: for good reasons, it sets aside the part of a quiet where its story often is.

The Japanese series 1122: For a Happy Marriage, released in 2024, starts close to where Wanderlust starts: a married couple, fond of each other, who no longer have sex, and a rule that permits love outside the marriage, which at first only the husband uses. This Library’s essay “1122: For a Happy Marriage, and the Sentence the Rule Stood In For” argues that the couple’s rule stood in for one sentence neither of them could say, and that each workaround sent its bill to somebody, often not the person who chose it. Wanderlust is, in a sense, the other case. Here the sentences were said, frankly and early, by a woman whose profession is saying them, and something still was not in them, because she did not yet know it. Side by side, the two series mark two different limits. A rule can stand in for a conversation. A conversation can hold only what the people in it know.

For a reader in Japan in a marriage that has gone quiet, the arrangement at the centre of Wanderlust may be the least familiar thing in it, and the quiet the most familiar. The question the series keeps asking underneath the arrangement travels without any of its British furniture: when did the quiet begin, and what else happened then?

There are at least four ways this reading could be wrong, and the first deserves to be put at full strength.

First, it may take her desire away from her. The frankest thing about Wanderlust is that it lets a woman in midlife want sex and say so, without apology and without punishment. Then its most unusual episode sits her down and finds that her wanting was covering grief. Alan’s outside desire becomes love, and a move into Claire’s flat. Joy’s becomes material for a session. That is a familiar move in stories about women: the woman who wants turns out, in the end, to have wanted something else, and the discovery returns her to the marriage. A reader who feels that the series lost its nerve in its fifth hour, and that this essay has followed it, is not misreading either. The best answer available is that what the session finds is restlessness, not falseness, and that her wanting does not end with the session: in the last episode she still reaches for Lawrence. That is an answer. It is not a refutation.

Second, the ending may be a moral in disguise. After the experiment the couple come back together, and a critic who admired the series drew the obvious lesson about cake. If that is what Wanderlust finally says, its good faith toward the open marriage was a long preparation for a return to the fold, and an essay about the limits of agreements is being kinder to it than it deserves. This essay’s answer is that the arrangement did not fail at what it was for, and that the return comes after the places it could not reach have been visited, not as a penalty for the attempt. But the series does end on the couple, not on the arrangement, and a reader who takes that as its verdict has the ending on her side.

Third, the fifth episode is a device. The same critic called it “a daring choice which didn’t quite deliver”, and thought the therapist talked a good deal more than a real one would, to keep the drama moving. Payne is a playwright, and two people in a room for about fifty minutes is a playwright’s form. Grief rarely gives itself up in a single hour, and a discovery delivered on schedule in the penultimate episode is a writer’s answer before it is a truth about anyone. An essay that rests its central claim on that hour rests it on a structure built to deliver a result. The claim here is about what the structure shows, not about how grief works.

Fourth, this essay may be doing what it praises the series for not doing: moralising, by other means. To say that an agreement cannot reach grief, or love, or other people, can sound like a reason not to make one. It is not meant as one. The same limits hold for every agreement two people make, including the most conventional. A wedding vow is also a promise about feelings that do not exist yet, made by people who do not know everything that is already there. Wanderlust tests those limits on an open marriage because an open marriage shows them faster.

Three things, none of them a rule.

An agreement governs what people do. It cannot govern what the doing will mean, to them or to anyone else. That is true of the agreement Joy and Alan make, and of the vows most people make without ever calling them an agreement.

A quiet has a date. Before asking what arrangement might answer it, it may be worth asking when it began and what else was happening then. The most careful terms in the world can be written to the wrong quiet.

And the people outside an agreement are not its furniture. They are told, and they answer. Some of them, like Claire, bring to it a care the terms did not contain.

So, once, to you, if you are the one in your home who is good at the talking: the one who names things, proposes things and explains them to everyone else, and is relied on for it. Being good at saying is not the same as knowing everything there is to say. If there is something under your wanting that you have not yet looked at, finding it would not make the wanting false. You are allowed not to know yet. You are allowed to stop moving long enough to find out.

If this story touches thoughts of dying, your own or someone else’s, or a death like the one beneath it, that is for a person to hear rather than an essay. In Japan, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare’s page “Mamorouyo Kokoro” lists telephone and chat lines.

When did the quiet in your own life begin, and what else was happening then?

If you have made an agreement with someone you love, what did it cover, and what did it leave to chance?

Is there a want of yours that is also carrying something? Would knowing change the want, or only what you do with it?

Who stands outside your agreements: who would have to be told, and who would get to decide?

If you are the one who is good at the talking, who listens to you?