When Penelope asks Jack if he’d ever consider opening their marriage, it’s not a dare. And it’s not even about sex. It’s about permission.

Permission to want.

 Permission to be visible again.

 Permission to name a hunger before it calcifies into resentment.

One of the most misunderstood aspects of The Suggestion—and the question that often sparks the most debate—is whether the story is about desire. But the kind of desire I’m interested in isn’t transactional or erotic in a surface sense. It’s relational. Emotional. Existential.

What does it mean to be someone’s wife, partner, co-architect of a life—and still feel invisible in your own home?

Penelope’s question doesn’t rupture the marriage. It reveals the fault lines that have already been forming beneath it. Jack’s reaction isn’t about jealousy. It’s about disorientation. If she’s allowed to want something more, then maybe what they’ve built together isn’t enough. And if it’s not enough, what does that say about who he’s been all these years?

Throughout the novel, characters grapple with this quiet devastation—the feeling of being “mostly fine” but fundamentally unfulfilled. There are no villains in The Suggestion. Just people trying, and sometimes failing, to say what they mean before it’s too late. The loft gatherings, the interludes, the tarot spreads—they’re not plot devices. They’re reflections of a deeper truth: intimacy is rarely about proximity. It’s about presence. Witness. Willingness to stay when someone speaks a truth that changes everything.

One line that stayed with me while writing was this:

“Don’t be gentle,” she once said, “when I mean don’t leave.”

It speaks to the code we develop in long-term partnerships—the half-said things, the unspoken agreements, the careful calibrations of comfort. And what happens when one person stops playing by the unspoken rules.

Ultimately, The Suggestion isn’t about swinging or open marriage. It’s about what happens when silence becomes more dangerous than desire. When staying becomes a kind of vanishing. And when the boldest thing a person can do is speak the need they’ve spent years trying to mute.