In the final act, the set mirrors the split space of the terrace in Act 1; Victor and Sibyl blocking the separate bedrooms in the Parisian flat recreates the dynamic of the adjacent hotel rooms. The similarity reveals that little has changed during Elyot and Amanda’s escapades, as they are essentially back where they started—at opposite ends of the stage in bitter enmity. The play ends with them once more united, but the circularity of their relationship suggests that the tempestuous fights from Act 2 will once again transpire wherever they go. Despite their desire to break old habits and make a fresh start, Elyot and Amanda are portrayed as people who can run away from their physical surroundings, but not themselves and their destructive routines. 

Whereas Elyot and Amanda remain unchanged, Victor and Sibyl undergo a farcical transformation. At first, Victor and Sibyl appear as they did in Act 1, eager to absolve their spouses of any marital fault. Rather than chastise Elyot and Amanda, as the exes and the audience expect, the jilted spouses defend them to save face. Victor upholds Amanda’s “high handed manner” (73), demanding that her housekeeper prepare coffee and breakfast before they have their discussion. Sibyl finds Amanda’s behavior appalling, but to Victor, who is characterized as someone equally snobbish, Amanda’s upper-class comforts instill decorum. He asserts, “I don’t see what else she could have done” (70). Likewise, when Elyot insults Amanda and calls her a “slattern” (73), a term that denotes slovenliness, Victor threatens to fight for her honor with old-fashioned chivalry. These scenes comically portray Victor as a man fixedly devoted to the standards of his class and his moral duty as husband, overlooking the fact that his wife has abandoned him to be with another man.   

Sibyl is equally defensive when Amanda attacks Elyot, as she considers a swipe at his reputation an attack on her own. When Amanda insults Elyot’s masculinity for refusing to fight, Sibyl is quick to claim that Elyot is “just as strong as Victor” and declares, “I’m beginning to suspect that he wasn’t quite so much to blame as I thought” (79). Sibyl is eager to live up to the expected gender roles for husband and wife, which means dismissing Elyot’s infidelity and instead focusing on “the depths of degradation to which age and experience have brought [Amanda]” (79). In defending Elyot, Sibyl derides Amanda for The Defiance of Rigid Gender Roles and proclaims herself as the proper woman for Elyot, ignoring the fact that Elyot literally pushed her away when he shoved the sofa she sat on to make his escape. 

Instead of demanding accountability from Elyot and Amanda, Victor and Sibyl become enablers. The play ends on the gag of Victor and Sibyl taking up the baton of Elyot and Amanda’s dysfunctional relationship. Sibyl noticeably adopts Elyot’s position about flippancy: “It must be very sad not to be able to see any fun in anything” (89). Passionate defenses of Elyot and Amanda gradually turn into caustic insults of each other’s personal, annoying habits. Victor considers Sibyl “a malicious little vixen”; to Sibyl, Victor is “an insufferable great brute” (92). As their argument culminates in a physical fight, the play rhymes the end of Act 2 with the end of Act 3. Act 2 ended with Amanda and Elyot fighting viciously, oblivious to the arrival of Victor and Sibyl. Conversely, in Act 3, Victor and Sibyl are so entwined in their physical brawl that they don’t notice Amanda and Elyot leaving. 

Private Lives satirizes the stigma and “mud-slinging” (85) of divorce and pokes fun at the sanctity of marriage, where the serious topics of adultery and domestic violence are handled with the upper-class detachment of deal brokering and damage control. The play ends in ambiguity, as each couple agrees to postpone divorce and live apart for a year, perpetuating the circular pattern of aggression and affection that now extends to Victor and Sibyl’s dynamic. Their unlikely pairing suggests that beneath their conventional exterior are “two violent acids bubbling about” (18), proving Amanda’s assessment that no one’s private life meets social expectations.