Among all kinds of screenplays, stories built around a major life shift may be both the easiest and the hardest to write.

What makes them difficult is not simply convincing the audience that the change is genuinely hard to survive. The real challenge is sharper than that: the audience must clearly see an obvious truth that the protagonist alone refuses to understand.

That truth can be reduced to one line:

Only by embracing pain can anyone be free of it.

Take a familiar kind of life transition often seen in fiction: a married couple in the middle of a midlife crisis. Both of them avoid the real work of repairing their relationship, but each does it differently.

The husband uses work as an excuse to stay away from home. The wife is trapped in the endless trivia of domestic life and gradually loses any sense of self. Then, by chance, each encounters what feels like the "right person" for the second half of life. The husband has an affair with a young, attractive secretary and tells himself it is nothing more than sexual release. The wife begins an affair with a man who seems to understand every grievance she has, who validates her existence, and she sinks into the illusion that this is comfort, recognition, even rescue.

At this point, anyone can see where the problem lies. Their marriage is already unstable, and both have stepped onto the road of infidelity. It seems simple enough: stop now, turn back immediately, and the problem is solved.

But is it?

That is where the audience starts bringing in their own experience—current relationships, marriages, maybe even one that has already ended. What does "going back" actually solve? Even if the couple could return to the state before the affairs began, they would only be returning to a relationship that was already hollow, already estranged, already without a real answer.

So the couple enters an even more painful stage.

The husband realizes he was caught in sexual temptation and wants to pull back. The wife falls completely into the fantasy of the other relationship, while the husband slowly begins to notice her changes. He wants to stop, but the secretary—who gradually reveals masochistic tendencies—threatens him with pregnancy and demands that he leave his wife. The wife, meanwhile, discovers that the man she met is a dangerous lover who starts threatening her family in order to force her to continue a BDSM relationship with him.

Their affairs are finally exposed during a New Year's family gathering.

By then, the audience is ready to rush into the story and slap both of them: See? You should have stopped when there was still time.

And then comes the real question: what now?

The happiest answer would be for the couple to return to how things used to be. The saddest answer—and probably the one closest to real life—would be for them to separate, while each remains trapped in another destructive relationship that keeps getting worse.

This particular story was never fully written out. By conventional plotting logic, it should still have more twists, more conflict, more reversals. It could even move toward an absurd ending that masquerades as a solution—for example, the husband and wife might try to free themselves by pushing the masochistic secretary and the sadistic lover together as a pair.

But in real life, stories like this often end much earlier: the moment both spouses learn that the other has also cheated. They do not think about saving the marriage, and they do not know how to save it anyway. A film script can raise that question and leave it unresolved, sitting in the audience's mind long after the story ends.

For film and television, though, embracing pain is the only real antidote.

Maybe the couple faces literal danger together, fights back side by side, survives the crisis, and in doing so discovers something truer in their bond. If that happens, the relationship may deepen rather than collapse.

Or maybe they finally release each other, choose divorce, cut themselves free from the affairs as well, and start over by learning who they are outside the wreckage. That too can be a form of liberation.

Whichever ending you choose, the same fact remains:

A life transition itself cannot be changed. What can change are the people inside it—whether they are the characters on the screen or the viewers watching them.