‘White Lotus’ Has an Old-School View of Relationships

The hotly anticipated final episode of the third season of HBO’s hit “White Lotus” airs Sunday. The show has earned a reputation for revealing the sordid emotional lives of the 1 percent, the types who regularly vacation at five-star-resorts like the White Lotus on fabulous Thai islands.

No matter who on the lavish grounds is sacrificed tomorrow night for our entertainment, I predict that if all of the couples literally survive, their relationships will probably survive, too. And the traumatic events they endure will only bring them closer, no matter how much they’ve previously lied to each other and themselves.

In many ways, married couples and nuclear families are the two pillars of society that the show’s director and creator, Mike White, doesn’t want to blow up.

In spite of the more provocative, sexually transgressive plotlines Mr. White has explored — this season’s Ratliff brothers’ incestuous three-way comes to mind — ultimately, the show has its own old-school view of marriage: ‘Til death do us part.

If the pop cultural vogue in relationships emphasizes radical honesty, and talking through feelings in a therapeutic environment, in all three seasons of the show, marriage is about loyalty, strategic deception, and keeping up appearances. This is true even as the characters individually dabble in new age wellness practices like meditation that are meant to get at deeper truths and self-knowledge.

The show has a satisfying honesty about the role money plays in marital cohesion, even as we like to pretend that modern marriage is built on love, fidelity and compatibility. As the historian Stephanie Coontz explained in her sweeping 2005 book “Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage,” for millennia, marriage for the upper crust was not about affection, it was a financial and political arrangement meant to consolidate power. “The marriages of the rich and famous in the ancient and medieval worlds can be told as political thrillers, corporate mergers, military epics and occasionally even murder mysteries.”