How to Stay Married

After fourteen years at home raising the kids, Em Butler is worried she has become boring and decides it's time to go back to work. Her husband Greg is initially hesitant to disrupt the status quo but when redundancies are offered at his job, he starts to wonder whether a change might be good for them. Greg's brother Brad announces that he needs to stay with them for an undisclosed amount of time, throwing yet another spanner into the works.

Greg and Em have planned an evening together at an Ed Sheeran concert, their first night out since Em got her new job and Greg lost his. Greg and Em each harbour little frustrations about the demarcation of domestic responsibilities and despite their best efforts to be romantic, there is friction during the date. Sophie is allowed to babysit for the first time (with Terry and Marlo instructed to keep an eye out from across the road), but things go from bad to worse when the power goes out.

Greg and Em are frustrated by their flagging sex life. Since starting work, Em's sex drive has dropped and the hassle of using condoms isn't helping. Terry recommends that Greg have a vasectomy to simplify the contraception, and Marlo recommends that Em do something dangerous (like skydiving) to kick-start her libido. But as their initial excitement fades, the seriousness of their respective tasks starts to sink in.

Greg and Em become worried about Sophie when she announces out of the blue that she wants to quit her basketball team. Greg, the coach of the team, has been so focused on winning that he has failed to notice that Sophie hasn't scored a single point all season, and resolves that she will score in the next game no matter what. Em regrets that she hasn't been around enough since going back to work and resolves to make it to the game to cheer Sophie on, but gets trapped in a well-known author's impromptu adult fiction reading.

The Butler family is running seriously low on personal space, a problem that becomes impossible to ignore when Brad brings a date over for the first time. Greg and Em decide that Brad needs to move into the backyard cubby house so that the girls can have their own rooms back. With hard rubbish collection coming up, they get to work clearing out the mountain of 'storage' in the cubby - but while Em has no problem chucking stuff away, Greg gets increasingly sentimental over all of their old things.

Greg and Em attend Em's 25 year high school reunion. Greg is determined to 'be cool' with meeting Em's significant high school ex-boyfriend while Em looks forward to flaunting her new job to her classmates. However, Greg is 'cool' with the wrong person, accidentally encouraging the school heartthrob to flirt with Em. When a teacher undermines Em's publishing career by suggesting that a poem she wrote at school was plagiarised, she becomes determined to clear her name.