Time & Perspective Quote by Neil LaBute

Hope is the bait word here, dangled just long enough for LaBute to yank it back. “More than open” performs generosity, even optimism, but the sentence quickly pivots into a grim diagnosis: men and women “have a difficult time dealing with each other” and, worse, “often take the low road.” That last phrase is doing heavy cultural work. It suggests that cruelty isn’t an accident of miscommunication; it’s a chosen shortcut, a kind of moral laziness we reach for when intimacy asks more of us than we want to give.

As a director known for staging relational warfare with a straight face, LaBute isn’t offering a therapeutic take about “communication.” He’s describing a marketplace of power where romance becomes negotiation, sex becomes leverage, and vulnerability is treated like a liability. The line splits the difference between confession and indictment: yes, he wants to believe in better outcomes, but his experience of human behavior tells him that people, especially across gender lines, default to tactics that protect ego and punish exposure.

The subtext is less “men are like this, women are like that” than “we’ve been trained to treat each other adversarially.” In a culture that romanticizes connection while rewarding dominance, the “low road” can feel efficient: ghosting instead of honesty, contempt instead of curiosity, winning the argument instead of understanding the person. LaBute’s intent is to keep hope on the table without letting it absolve anyone. If things stay ugly, it’s not fate. It’s choice, repeated until it looks like nature.