Waiting to Exhale (1995)

and the Friends Who Were the Love Story

Four women waiting for the right man before they can breathe out. The first film in the series about friendship: a married lover's future that never comes, a wife whose eleven years went under his name, the anger that was her first honest feeling, and a table that holds while the men come and go.

Waiting to Exhale (1995). Directed by Forest Whitaker, screenplay by Terry McMillan and Ronald Bass, from McMillan’s 1992 novel. Whitney Houston as Savannah Jackson, Angela Bassett as Bernadine Harris, Loretta Devine as Gloria Matthews, Lela Rochon as Robin Stokes, with Gregory Hines as Marvin King, Dennis Haysbert as Kenneth Dawkins and Michael Beach as John Harris.

Four women, waiting for the right man so they can finally breathe out.

It turns out they had been breathing together the whole time.

This page belongs to Plot Twist. It is a refusal, and the gentlest film after the hardest one: it follows Mommie Dearest. It is also the first film in the series about friendship. Almost every film on this page taught a woman that her way out was a man. 9 to 5 got three women out together, at work. This one puts four friends at the center of a romance film and, almost without meaning to, makes them the love story.

Like every entry on the Plot Twist page, it reads a story for the pattern it teaches, and makes no claim about anyone’s diagnosis. The men in this film are not monsters. Some of them are careless, one is cruel with money, and one of them turns out to be the best man in the film. The pattern here belongs to a promise the film’s women were all raised on: that life starts when the right man arrives.

The Story

Four friends in Phoenix meet often to hold each other up and to talk about life and love. Each of them wants to be in a relationship, and each of them is having trouble finding a good man.

Savannah is a successful television producer. She believes her married lover, Kenneth, will one day leave his wife for her. Her own mother wants her with him. When Savannah realizes he never will, she decides to find a man who loves her for who she really is.

Bernadine gave up her career and her dream of a catering business to raise a family and help her husband, John, build his company. After eleven years, he tells her he is leaving her for a woman he works with. In a rage, Bernadine burns his car and his clothes and sells the rest of his things for a dollar each. John drains their bank accounts. It ends in court.

Robin is a high-powered executive and the long-time mistress of a married man, Russell. She leaves him and has trouble finding anyone better.

Gloria owns a beauty salon and is raising her teenage son alone. Her ex-husband tells her he has realized he is gay. A new neighbor, Marvin, moves in across the street.

By the end, all four are better off. Savannah leaves Kenneth for good. Bernadine wins a large settlement, and meets a civil rights attorney who encourages her to start her catering business. Robin, pregnant by Russell, leaves him and decides to raise the baby on her own. Gloria apologizes to Marvin for snapping at him when he said her son needed to see the world, lets her son go on a trip to Spain, and learns to take care of herself instead of giving everything away.

Waiting to Exhale opened at number one at the North American box office, and its soundtrack, sung entirely by Black women artists, went to the top of the album charts. The Los Angeles Times called the film a “social phenomenon.”

The Story Before the Story

The film came from Terry McMillan’s bestselling novel, and McMillan co-wrote the screenplay. It was a Hollywood film built around four Black women, their careers, their friendships and their choices, with an all-Black cast, and it found an enormous audience. Its title is its thesis, and its argument with itself: the women are waiting to exhale, to breathe out, when the right man finally arrives.

What It Gets Right

The friendship. The film’s most reliable scenes are the four women together, talking, laughing and telling each other the truth. Whatever happens with the men, the table holds. The film also takes Bernadine’s anger seriously, gives Robin an ending with no man in it, and lets Gloria’s story be about learning to receive care, which is a lesson this series has almost never taught.

What It Teaches

1. Life starts when he arrives

The premise is the lesson. Four successful women, with careers, homes and friends, are waiting for their lives to begin. Every one of them believes the missing piece is a man.

This is the promise at the root of almost every film on this page, from Mannequin on: her life starts when he notices her. Waiting to Exhale shows grown women living inside it, and slowly finding out that the life they were waiting for was already happening, at the table with each other.

2. He’ll leave her, one day

Savannah believes Kenneth will leave his wife. Her mother believes it too, and wants her to wait for him. The day never comes.

The Decoder calls this Card 42, Future Faking: “Promising a future that never comes.” What keeps a woman waiting is rarely the man she has now. It is the man he keeps promising to become, next year, after the holidays, when the kids are older. Savannah’s refusal is the simplest one in the film: she stops waiting for a future he was never going to deliver.

3. She built his business, and he left with it

Bernadine shelved her own dream to build her husband’s company. Eleven years later, he leaves, and when she fights back, he empties their bank accounts.

Two Decoder cards meet in her story. The first is Card P-2, Ownership Entitlement: “Claiming what isn’t theirs,” the work of eleven years absorbed into his name. The second is Card 8, Financial Superiority: “Using money as control and leverage,” including “controlling access to money.” A woman who gave up her own income to build a shared life can find, overnight, that the shared life was his. The film makes her win it back in court, slowly, the unglamorous way.

4. Her anger was the first honest thing

The scene everyone remembers is Bernadine setting fire to her husband’s car.

The fire is a fantasy, and this page doesn’t recommend it. But the anger in it is real, and the film is right to honor it. For many women, rage is the first feeling that isn’t about managing someone else’s. It is the moment Bernadine stops being the good wife and starts being a person who has been wronged. What she does next matters more: she goes to court, she wins her settlement, and she gets her catering dream back. The fire gets remembered. The court case is what actually freed her.

5. The friends are the love story

Watch who is there. The film keeps coming back to the four of them together, holding each other up through every breakup, lawsuit and bad date. The men come and go. The table stays.

The series has one standing lesson it has almost never been able to turn: her escape is another man. This film half turns it. Bernadine and Gloria end with new men, and the film is honest enough to make one of them, Bernadine’s attorney, a married man whose wife is dying, which complicates the fairy tale. But Savannah leaves without one, and Robin chooses to raise her baby alone. Two of the four endings have no man in them, and none of the four has no friends.

6. She learns to be taken care of

Gloria gives everything away, to her son and to her salon. When Marvin says her son needs room to grow, she snaps at him. Then she apologizes, lets her son go, and learns to let someone look after her.

It is the quietest lesson in the film, and one many women need most. Some of us were trained to be the one who gives, until being cared for felt like a threat. Gloria’s refusal is not to a man. It is to the idea that she has to earn her place by never needing anything.

The Friends Who Got Them Out, Side by Side

	9 to 5 (1980)	Waiting to Exhale (1995)
Where	An office	A table in Phoenix
What kept them apart	A boss, a rumor, a rule against comparing pay	Waiting, each one alone, for the right man
What changed it	They compared notes	They told each other the truth
Who got the credit	The boss	Nobody needed it

Two films fifteen years apart, and the same discovery: the way out is often already sitting next to you.

If You Grew Up on This

Many of us know every word of the soundtrack, and remember exactly where we saw it, and who we saw it with. Nothing on this page asks you to stop loving it. The useful thing is to look at it clearly from where you stand now.

Some questions to sit with:

What have you been waiting for a person to arrive before you start?
Has someone promised you a future that keeps moving just out of reach?
Have you ever built something that turned out to have someone else’s name on it?
When was the last time you let yourself be honestly angry, and what did you do next?
Who is at your table? When did you last tell them the truth?

Four women waited to exhale. It turned out they had been breathing together the whole time.

You’re the audience now. You don’t have to wait.