
Hall Pass is a film about a struggling couple that agrees on a mutual 'hall pass.' Having watched the process of a 'hall pass' unfold I feel it is my ethical duty as a clinical psychologist to write a post that relentlessly attacks the idea. It's like kryptonite for couples. Don't do it. There isn't a single situation or dynamic for whom I could imagine this working successfully.
So, what is a hall pass? It is what it sounds like. One partner gives the other partner permission to temporarily feel free to have sex (which I guess makes this different then an affair) with other people - it's physical liberation without any kind of emotional permission, but we'll get to that last part in a bit.
In the film, Maggie and Rick, represent a young, healthy, 30-something couple. But they have one problem, they aren't having any sex. Rick really wants sex and Maggie seems disinterested. They don't know what to do. Then, one day, a friend of Maggie's introduces her to the idea of a hall pass, and the cliché that 'if you constantly tell someone they can't do something, they want to do it more than ever - but if you remove the taboo, you remove the obsession.' This conversation propels Maggie into broaching the hall pass idea with Rick and right away it seems like a bad idea.
In a subsequent scene when Maggie proposes the idea she seems angry. She's angry in one of those vague, subtle and underlying ways where she says she's not angry but she definitely looks like she's actively suppressing it. She outlined the instructions, he seemed hesitant and surprised, she put on a smiley face and pushed it, and he eventually acquiesced because that's what he thought he needed to do.
What is going on here? Well, for sure there's bad communication. They aren't talking about what really needs to be talked about (why Maggie feel's disinterested in sex), and they aren't even being straightforward about their views of what they are talking about (why Maggie seems conflicted, and Rick seems downright confused).
But now they have this hall pass for the weekend and if they don't communicate then they only thing that is going to change is that the pressure is going to mount to use the hall pass because Rick and Maggie are going to increasingly feel resentful that the other is sticking with it. This hall pass is a divider not a unifier.
The story goes through its stereotypical motions and, in the end, there is a breathless race toward each other as both Maggie and Rick come to understand that all they really needed to do was remember why they loved each other to begin with. That, and they needed to sit down for an honest reckoning.
Here's why all this happened: In the beginning of the movie Rick had demonstrated a fairly pronounced tendency to think about sex. He wanted sex with his wife, he hadn't gotten it in awhile and instead of calmly and persistently communicating his unmet needs to Maggies (flowers is always helpful, a candlelight dinner would be nice, a 'talk to me, babe' conversation wouldn't hurt anybody), he reroutes all of his sexual energy into immature behavior. He incessantly evaluates the asses of other women on the street and talks in excruitiating detail about vaginas with his equally horny friend (who is horny for much more dysfunctional reasons). His indirect communication fuels the fire as his sense of rejection and disappointment go unnoticed by Maggie, because she's too busy picking up on how he seems like a sexual predator.
Well, that's a little harsh. She didn't think that, but she did start to wonder if he was thinking about other women when he was with her. That's not what he was doing, and isn't even the most likely explanation given the kind of person that Rick clearly seems to be, but that's the insecure, overly-personalizing place that her mind went because that's the kind of person she is.
She started to feel rejected herself (perhaps that's where the underlying anger came from as well), which turned her off of sex in a very immediate and understandable way.
In the end all is made well as Maggie listens to Rick explain that all he wants is to feel wanted, and Rick see's how all Maggie wants is to be clearly reassured that she is wanted. Because this is a movie made in Hollywood where life is so simple and sweet the conflict ends here. That's a wrap. In reality, there are lingering questions and unresolved issues, such as why can't Rick simply come out and say that he wants to be the object of pure desire (he did seem to be doing a nice job making her feel that way) and, perhaps more concerning, why did Maggie misunderstand Rick so severely and view him with so much mistrust so quickly? Well, anyway, the movie didn't roll up its sleeves on those complicated dynamics, but it did leave a lesson for the idea of a healthy hall pass.
For a hall pass to be healthy it has to involve approach not avoidance of things like a no-sex problem.
A healthy hall pass might include the following instruction: Openly discuss the no-sex problem and don't stop discussing it until you can accurately verbalize the partner's perspective about why the problem exists. Then take a weekend vacation where you and your partner return to a place that conjures the period of time when you were first dating. This will help set the mood and counteract some of the conscious and unconscious impediments that have slowly begun to set in and create the no-sex problem in the first place (i.e. I'm too tired from raising children, we haven't had sex in so long that I wonder if everything still works, etc.). Then, you spend the whole weekend treating the other person well and patiently looking for opportunities for sex, staying single-mindedly focused on this goal and only this goal. I call it the romance refresher.
Please email with additional thoughts/ideas for healthy and effective 'hall passes.'