Tommaso and Alice have been a couple for fifteen years – unmarried and childless, he a musician, she an actress, both unsuccessful. They live in Rome, where they have bought a house thanks to a mortgage that has been the only real assumption of responsibility in their history. When they are invited to dinner for an announcement, their friends think it is marriage. Instead, Thomas and Alice announce that they have decided to break up: but they want to do it gradually, without breaking up, remaining friends in a natural way. Their ambition, legitimate but naive, ends up clashing with the reality principle: stories end because people change. And no change is, nor can be, painless.