Each film is highly selective about such backdrops, using only the well-chosen minor players and precise details that its director wants the audience to see. Each film is also set up as a quasi documentary, so that characters can tell the camera things they won't tell one another. And each follows a handful of well-defined characters who brood endlessly about the difficulties of romantic love. But the ones in Singles have only begun casting about for some kind of permanence. Gray hats are everywhere in Husbands and Wives, as the characters drink too much, tell half-truths and occasionally lash out at one another.
Singles is set well before the gray hat stage, but compromise is still an issue.
In their first attempts to settle down, its characters have to decide just how badly they want to accommodate one another. Real concerns about her identity and self-worth are not obscured by the ostensible silliness of the episode. Singles is serious in understanding how scary and tempting the idea of change for change's sake can be, especially during one's 20's, and how much newly independent young people both want and fear commitment. A couple of decades later, in Husbands and Wives, new experience is no longer easy, and it has thus become wildly desirable. So the two long-married couples in the film yearn for adventure, no matter what the cost.