Why aren't they together yet?

Beware: spoilers for Bones, Castle, Dark Angel (season 2), Friends, How I met your mother (the finale), Psych (season 5), Sex and the City.

[unless pointed otherwise the spoilers apply for the relationship of the main characters during the whole series]

Kate: "I am telling you. Something happened. Something changed. It's been weird between us lately."

Lanie: "Lately? Kate, it's been weird for four years"

(Castle 4 x 20)

It’s the oldest story in a book. You know it, and I know it. These two were meant for each other?. From the very first moment they laid eyes on each other their hearts started to beat faster, and they became obsessed with the other person. It’s the Holy Grail of the heterosexual script, the ultimate dream – to find the One True Love™ and Live Happily Ever After™. Let's not dwell too much on what I think about that and whether there really is something like a love from the first sight. For all intents and purposes, let’s pretend that we all believe in a fairy tale, just like the tv-series producers seem to. Because love, pretty much like sex, is the thing which drives humans, which means, taken more materialistically, that people are going to watch these series which have a touching love story and they are going to invest more into the characters who struggle to get their precious someone.

The longer the suspense and the more cruel the clifhangers, the more viewers and more money for the people responsible for the title. Sad? Maybe. But if it wasn’t exactly what we want, there wouldn’t be so many of those we-love-each-other-but-can’t-be-together-because-of-reasons couples! And while almost every title has some kind of love story, majority of these are One True Love type.

It all usually starts with the characters meeting in the first episode, which is followed by way too many seasons of them chasing each other. The poor bastards sometimes don't even realise they like each other until their cosy existence is threatened by some Big Event™ (like being threatened by death of the other one, new rival or some other generic Plot Twist™). They grow closer and fall apart and then again grow closer just to drive each other away, but no one fools the audience who quickly falls in love with them (even if sometimes the line between love and hate becomes too thin). They are our precious little babies, and we enjoy that vague chemistry they have going there, but on the other hand could they bang already, jeez, how hard that could be? Sometimes you just want to smack them in a head with something hard.

OK. So we got used to that situation, and we even can admit that we enjoy watching characters torturing each other. But we want them to end up together, right? That’s the whole point of waiting, after all. But here appears the biggest problem. The tensions, the struggles, the perfect mixture of “oohs”, “aahs”, “awws” and eye-rolling was the best fuel for the series, and once that is over, so is the show we loved. The on-screen chemistry totally changes, and the series does as well. After that we might not even recognise it a s series we loved to begin with.

Let’s take a closer look at The One True Couple syndrome and the types of shows that can be diagnosed with it.

First genre is of course that type of comedic series which focuses on romantic and sexual part of life, which usually includes a bunch of close friends who all hang together. I will write some other time about how similar these series really are, but what is important to us now is that there is always one character who can be labelled as “main” and who is cursed with the task of pursuing the perfect Woman/Man: Ross loves Rachel (“Friends”), J.D. loves Elliot (“Scrubs”), Carrie obsesses after Mr. Big (“Sex and the city”), Leonard crushes on Penny (“Big Bang Theory”), Ted dreams about Robin (“How I met your mother”). In the meantime their friends have their own emotional struggles which usually are much more interesting or at least more surprising (we knew all about Ross and Rachel, but Chandler and Monika, that one we didn’t see coming).

If we were judging how melodramatic our main couples can be, we could count the number of times they were involved. Then we would give the first place ex aequo to Ross and Rachel ("Friends") and Carrie and Mr. Big ("Sex and the City") with 5 hook-ups and 4 break-ups.

Because the latter had a long time of being friends with benefits rather than a couple, I decided to count how many times they’ve been involved rather than how many times they had sex. Both winners end up together at the very end of the show, though Ross and Rachel cheated with the classical order: got married first, then divorced, then had a kid together and finally hooked up in the last episode. I guess that shows how desperate they are about each other and how horrible at relationships, at the same time.

While writing the first draft of this article, I pointed out that “How I met your mother” was an interesting exception from the rule, because while Ted and Robin meet all the criteria of being a proper True Couple, we all knew Ted was going to end up with someone else. But that was before the finale in which the lovely Mother gets killed off and Ted ends up wit his dream girl, just like “it should be”… I guess. One of the very few positive voices about this ending is that “we would all be disappointed if they didn’t end together” and maybe though the disappointing for many ending just shows how strong is the need to have this one True Love Pairing.

The second genre which loves to deny it's characters the emotional satisfaction are crime/detective/police/FBI series. In this case the series concentrates on the more morbid part of life, and it tries to avoid the topic of love so they don’t have anything in common with a mushy chick-flicks. The women working with the polices, secret services etc. usually have more guts than an average man, so they can’t play the stereotypical role of a emotion-driven soft female. And when both sides are “manly”, then there is no one left to pursue the love. So it just lies somewhere in the corner, waiting for a miracle.

Don't get me wrong, I love detective series a lot, but the main love affair tends to be so horrible and so unnaturally prolonged that after some time I can't stand it, rolling my eyes every couple of seconds. I am exaggerating maybe a little, but let’s look at few of the main couples and how obvious they are.

Sociopathic Bones IS going to end up with Booth ("Bones") even if the show doesn't throw it on us with such an intensity as the romance series,

                             

while Castle and Beckett ("Castle") themselves know that they love each other but just can't start dating for some reason.

Interestingly enough there are slightly different rules for the Main Couple in crime series than they were in the romantic ones. In the latter the characters were getting together and splitting up, but their final hook up was happening around the very end of the series, providing a happy ending. Here there is one major hook-up, which changes everything. Therefore we have to deal with the effect I mentioned earlier, which causes the series to loose it's rhythm and character - it is especially visible with Bones, because the creators of the show worked very hard to show her as a sociopath who doesn’t really get emotions. So when suddenly the need for love kicks in, it’s impossible to keep both her sides balanced and when she becomes a different person, she changes the series as well.

Love didn’t work on the advantage on the series in “Psych” too. I’ve never been a fan of Juliet, so I wouldn’t care about Shawn finally winning her over, but when he did, he deprived the show from one of it’s most important gags. I miss the awkward and absurdly funny ways in which Shawn was trying to flirt with her.

At the end I need to mention one more genre, in which the love affairs usually go more smoothly and the separate rules of the dating are not shown as explicitly, but when it comes to creating obstacles for the couple, there is nothing worse. I am talking about s-f, which unfortunately gives the authors the very powerful weapon of “do what the fuck you want, it’s all made up after all”. Now they can keep the love-birds apart for really absurd reasons. So you are not only rolling your eyes, you are screaming at the computer. Yes, I am thinking about you, “Dark Angel”. SERIOUSLY though, a virus that attacks ONLY Logan and is transmitted ONLY when he touches Max? I am not going to calm down about that, because that was some serious line crossing and for me it really ruined the otherwise enjoyable series: in the second season the couple’s problems became unbearable to watch.

One True Pairing is just one of many, many relationships we see in tv-series, but it’s probably the most annoying one. In the same time, just because of the intensity of emotions it brings, it’s the one type that always has the most followers, and the biggest number of fans. Let’s face it though: we are hardly watching their struggles to learn how it’s gonna end, we just like to watch them torture themselves to prove to ourselves that it’s not only us who is not able to handle that thing called “relationships”. 

 by Aga