Honeymoon Tragicomedy I Really Love My Husband Revels in Throuple Trouble
The opening moments of I Really Love My Husband, the newly premiered (at SXSW) debut of writer-director G.G. Hawkins, plants a flag firmly on the satirical but all-too-recognizable boundaries of messy relationship tragicomedy: A bride, in her wedding dress, ducks away from the ceremony to a powder room to dig out her phone and call her ex. She’s not having second thoughts; no, far from it! She just wanted to make sure the gentleman in question is aware of how very happy she is in this moment, and how much she loves her brand new husband. “Also, I forgive you,” the bride is sure to add, seemingly expecting praise for such a magnanimous olive branch.
And really, that is Teresa (Madison Lanesey) in a nutshell: Performatively affable, open and self-aware, while in reality a slave to the indignation, inadequacy and resentment she can’t help but feel toward everyone in her radius. Teresa can’t let things go. She relitigates past arguments and perceived slights that any healthy person would be able to simply forget or dismiss. She steeps her interactions in passive aggressive ichor, while cloaking herself in new age psychobabble and loudly letting anyone in earshot know how much she’s prioritizing elements of mindfulness like “being in my body” and “being close to nature.” Most of the time, she succeeds in fooling herself, even when she’s taking offense at people being gullible enough to take her statements at face value. When her clueless husband reminds her that he did something because she said she wanted him to do it, she tells him, “I don’t mean every single thing that I say.”
Said husband is Drew (Travis Quentin Young), a man who genuinely is affable, to a fault and then some. Painfully sincere but simultaneously unfulfilled, he’s a stymied musician stuck in a career he doesn’t care about, with the face (and especially hair) of an aging indie rocker clinging to a more hopeful past self. A people-pleasing pushover, his sincere and good-natured dope routine seems uniquely suited to pushing Teresa’s buttons, and he irritatingly lacks the dignity to push back in any substantive way. You get the sense that Drew would probably have married just about anyone who offered to be his bride, because the alternative would be disappointing someone. Now these two find themselves stepping off the boat at a remote, romantic oceanside cabin in Panama, having embarked on a belated honeymoon where their inherent friction will finally become too much to smile and ignore.
That is, unless they can distract themselves by focusing on a shiny new romantic object, in the form of their nonbinary host Paz (Arta Gee). Unfettered, honest and straightforward in a way that neither Teresa nor Drew has ever been in their life, it’s no wonder that both husband and especially wife are instantly drawn to Paz–they represent genuine self-secureness in a way that Drew and Teresa can only pretend toward. Paz doesn’t need to practice intermittent fasting–with carve-outs for piña coladas, naturally–or grounding routines to be “present in the moment.” They simply are. Paz isn’t stuck in their head all day. Paz doesn’t care what others think. Paz doesn’t hold things against people; they just amble along at the oft-referenced “speed of nature.” They represent everything that Teresa in particular wishes she was, a far more authentic, satisfied self that wouldn’t engender the self-loathing she clearly struggles with. So it’s no surprise that Teresa sees a dalliance with Paz–for both herself and her husband–as the kind of liberating adventure that could help both their relationship and her own self image. It’s also no surprise that someone as selfish as Teresa phrases that proposal as “What if we seduced Paz?”, speaking of the person she just met like some kind of new car on the lot she’d like to test drive. Husband and wife act with a role-reversal of stereotypes: Teresa targets Paz with very little respect for how this person might actually feel about the idea, while Drew (though intrigued in his own way) is clearly uncomfortable with the implication that his wife, on their honeymoon, has already grown bored with him.
Even if your relationship hasn’t been built on such flimsy foundations, there are moments of I Really Love My Husband that will likely resonate with most any viewer–especially those of the millennial generation, who are being satirized most strongly here as they travel to an exotic locale to take carefully staged Instagram photos of “paradise”. Teresa and Drew both have that particularly millennial desire to be seen by the world as upright, urbane, self-secure, mentally healthy individuals who have come to terms with their own shortcomings, which leads them both to delude themselves in their own way. They both look to Paz as a salve to slap on the festering wound that is their relationship, something to paper over the gaps between their obvious incompatibility. They’re simultaneously bright enough to see and occasionally acknowledge the problems with their dynamic, and foolish to the extent that they think they can fix those problems with pop psychology platitudes when they rarely try to get honest with one another. “I see you,” Drew assures his wife. “I see you seeing me,” Teresa replies. Wow, sounds like a breakthrough, guys.
If the economical, brisk screenplay of I Really Love My Husband (less than 80 minutes!) has a stumbling point, it’s failing to really flesh out the perspective of Paz, beyond what Teresa and Drew think about them, and what we hear about Paz from Kiki (Lisa Jacqueline Starrett), their other island lover. As another potentially jealous and self-serving figure, Kiki’s account can’t really be trusted, which threatens to leave Paz feeling primarily like a Manic Pixie Dream Person, someone only there to facilitate the relationship evolution of our husband and wife. To G.G. Hawkins’ credit, though, Paz is given clear agency in choosing to simply wash their hands of Teresa and Drew when it becomes clear the pair can’t handle the emotional entanglement and jealousy that the temporary throuple unearths. Despite a lack of scenes explicitly from the perspective of Paz, we can deduce that these events ultimately don’t mean much to them: They’re just living their life as they see fit. Paz will be fine, even if Drew and Teresa won’t. Next week, some new vacationers will arrive; maybe Paz will choose to fool around with them as well if the mood strikes them.
At such a brisk pace, I Really Love My Husband makes its point with admirable swiftness and sharpness, becoming an often quite funny tragicomedy of romantic disaster, illustrative of what happens when two people with deeply unrealistic expectations collide and rely upon a lack of communication to avoid conflict. Madison Lanesey’s performance as Teresa is the straw that stirs the drink: She has crafted a detestable but deeply recognizable archetype of a self-loathing woman who has put so much hope and faith into Cosmopolitan-style relationship patchwork that she’s never managed to have a frank conversation with herself about why she is the way she is, and how her deep-seated feelings of inadequacy and bitterness have so often driven her to make rash decisions that she hopes will alleviate them. At one point, she chuckles at Drew doing what she assumes is something silly to lighten the mood, only to be horrified by the realization that he had no intention of being silly. Tragically, she can see her faults when she strains hard enough to make the effort, but feels powerless to address them: To Drew, she at one point finally asks, “What is wrong with me, that I cannot figure out a way to love you when the rest of the world can?”
Lady, what is wrong with you is going to be the stuff of not just one but many therapy sessions. But at least you won’t have to keep repeating “I really love my husband” in the mirror any more. The rest of us will simply hope that Hawkins’ well-crafted indie satire functions as a cautionary tale for our own relationships, rather than an unavoidable prognostication.
Director: G.G. Hawkins
Writers: G.G. Hawkins, Madison Lanesey, Scott Monahan
Stars: Madison Lanesey, Travis Quentin Young, Arta Gee, Lisa Jacqueline Starrett
Release date: March 7, 2025 (SXSW)
Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.