On November 9, 1995, millions of people around the world screamed and cried at their TVs as Ross and Rachel kissed for the first time in the dimly lit Central Perk cafe, after two agonising seasons of slow burn.
Three years later, audiences were similarly, but happily, caught off guard when Monica was revealed to be the woman in Chandler’s hotel room the night before Ross and Emily’s wedding.
Funnily enough, the showrunners built the Monica-Chandler relationship arc off of live audience reactions to the hotel room hookup scene, as well as the natural chemistry between Courtney Cox and Matthew Perry.
In this Entertainment Weekly article, executive producer Scott Silveri is credited with saying “the thinking was, if the show’s going to be entertaining for years to come, it can’t simply rest on this one [Ross and Rachel] relationship… if another pair got together, that would be fun and provide more story. And it’s organic: If you get six friends together, all around the same age, there’s gonna be a little mixing and matching as time goes on. It felt real.” As the years went on, the showrunners also ended up experimenting with the possibilities of a Rachel-Joey and Phoebe-Joey pairing.1
Despite what was, or wasn’t, planned in the Friends (1994) writer’s room, Monica and Chandler quickly became the epitome what millennials wanted their late-20s romantic life to look like: someone you trusted with your life who had been at your side for decades, but that you now suddenly saw in a completely different light.
While sat watching Friends on the dark wooden floor of my parents’ Bangkok apartment, I would imagine what my life would look like in my twenties: I would be smart and cool, maybe a little bit pretty, but definitely with a boyfriend by my side who I’d been friends with for years. It would only be natural, inevitable even, because that’s what always happens on TV. Of course our friendship would develop into something more, there’s no other way it could go.
Flash forward almost two decades later, my friends-to-lovers fantasy that I now credit largely to Monica and Chandler never really panned out. I do not, and honestly never really ended up having, many heterosexual dude friends. My friend circle today mostly consists of the girls and the gays — friendships I never take for granted and wouldn’t change for the world.
I do however, wonder if the friends-to-lovers fantasy is a reflection of what actually happens in real life, or a TV trope we willingly choose to replicate.
For me, the best friends to lovers duo that started it all was Lizzie McGuire and David ‘Gordo’ Gordon.
After two seasons of watching Lizzie, Gordo and Miranda navigate middle-school as a trio, the Lizzie McGuire (2001) audience, mostly comprised of impressionable tweens, watched the last four episodes with wide-eyes as the showrunners honed in on the romantic elements, that for some reason, was laying beneath the surface of Lizzie and Gordo’s friendship.2 The inevitable was happening: two straight friends of the opposite sex were looking at each other through romance-coloured glasses.
I resented these last four episodes as a child, but I didn’t completely understand why until I grew into my adulthood.
Alok Vaid-Menon recently wrote that their greatest wish is for “a world where when people ask if we are seeing anyone, we can list the names of all our best friends and no one will bat an eyelid… I want a world that doesn’t require us to be in a sexual or romantic relationship to be seen as mature (let alone complete).”
I’m inclined to agree. It fundamentally boils down to the cultural belief that platonic love isn’t as valid as romantic love, or that romantic love is somehow deeper than friendship. Which is a notion I wholly reject. I hate that the only way the writers could make the plot interesting after Miranda left was to shove two teens in a room together and introduce a romance arc.
Don’t get me wrong, my twelve-year-old self was living for possibility of a Gordo and Lizzie love story. But looking back, it wasn’t necessary and it was poorly executed. The tone of the show shifted dramatically once Gordo and Lizzie became aware of their feelings towards one another. The episodes lost their whimsical charm, and instead became angsty and stressful. Ultimately, the introduction of a romance arc undercut how genuine their friendship actually was.
The socio-cultural myth that ‘men and women can’t be friends’ is what’s driving your toxic boyfriend to tell you in the middle of the night that he wants you to “stop hanging out with your guy friends”. This myth still fuels office gossip when people see colleagues giggling together in the break room, or when your friends are just unable to grasp the fact that Rishi is just your friend, and nothing more, and that no, it won’t ever turn into “anything more”.3
“Anything more”. As if your friendship wasn’t already a valid and complete relationship dynamic to have.
Of course, friends turn into lovers all the time offscreen. But not always, and not for everyone, despite this being all I was taught growing up.
In a stark contrast to Friends, One Day at a Time (2017) is one of the first TV shows I’ve seen where a healthy friendship between a heterosexual man and woman is depicted. Through its explorations of queer love, PTSD and divorce, One Day at a Time proved that there are cleverer ways to boost critical acclaim without adding a romantic storyline between two heterosexual protagonists.
Schneider, the building’s superintendent with a history of abuse and addiction, finds chosen family with newly-divorced Penelope, her mother Lydia (abuelita) and her two children.
Schneider is portrayed as a reliable and supportive friend to Penelope, offering to drive her son to baseball games, teach her daughter how to be a handy-woman and help bring Penelope out of scary depressive episodes.4 Penelope similarly isn’t afraid to call Schneider out when he begins to lie to her about breaking his 8-year sobriety streak, or be a source of comfort to him when his abusive father re-enters his life.
Their scenes together became so sweet and intimate that mid-way through season two, even I started to suspect if the writers were preparing us for a greater love story between the two.
I sat corrected, however, when I read that showrunners Gloria Calderón Kellett and Mike Royce revealed they had no intention of ever writing romance into Penelope and Schneider’s dynamic. In fact, they grabbed the ‘will they won’t they’ trope and threw it straight into the bin.
Some part of me needed to be healed by seeing these two characters support and love each other unconditionally within a dynamic entirely separate from romance and sex. I don’t think it’s healthy for me to think my dude friends could eventually become my romantic partner. It shouldn’t be a thought that always lives in the back of my mind. People are a lot more complicated than that. My life isn’t a romantic comedy, being planned out on a whiteboard by writers and network executives in a conference room, figuring out how to keep ratings stable.
So, can men and women just be friends? Yes and no, it seems, according to all the TV I’ve consumed. Now that the television and film industry is back in full force, I hope we get more stories which continuously seek to diversify, and push the boundaries of, how friendship between men and women are portrayed.
Which was a dumb move, by the way.
My roman empire is the fact that Disney+ shelved the Lizzie McGuire reboot because the writers included too many PG13 plot points in the script. We were absolutely ROBBED.
This sentence was written for dramatic flair. I don’t actually know anyone named Rishi.
A part of me also wonders if straight men on TV are only capable of seeing women as fully-formed human beings if their characters are being written and moulded inside a writer’s room that consists mostly of women and marginalised genders. But I’m not sure I want to open that can of worms just yet.