*This post contains spoilers*
You all have been telling me to watch One Day (2024) for weeks. I won’t summarise the plot because I’m assuming every single person on Earth has seen this show by now. So here goes nothing.
The trials and tribulations of Emma and Dexter’s love story is basically my worst nightmare come to life.
Emma (played by Ambika Mod) lives through all of the things I’m most anxious about, the things that keep me up at night. Having no savings, living in a shitty apartment, being stuck in a toxic relationship because I’m lonely — all while holding romantic feelings for your friend who has zero capacity to love you back.
Dexter (played by Leo Woodall) is the future partner I do not want. I do believe in people’s capacity to change, but I view their love story as a cautionary tale. As revealed via Dexter’s flashback in the final season of the show, Emma and Dexter didn’t leave Edinburgh as just friends, but as almost-lovers.
This revelation made me even sadder for Emma, because it becomes clear that we’ve witnessed almost two decades worth of scenes of Dexter being emotionally unavailable, taking his friend for granted knowing that they have feelings for each other. As soon as he’s ready to settle down, she dies in a car accident.1
Prior to watching One Day, I had been exposed to social media discourse surrounding Emma’s ‘annoying’ personality, with audience members tweeting and starting Reddit discussions proclaiming Emma was unlikeable and “foolish.”
Now having actually seen the show, I’d like to pose an alternative perspective: is it possible we find Emma so annoying because we see so much of ourselves in her? Do we find her so frustrating because she’s holding up a mirror for us to confront all the horrible decisions we’ve made in the past and will probably continue to make in the future?
I would 100% sit across my hot single friend in Greece and lie to his face that I don’t have feelings for him. I would absolutely utter nothing but words of encouragement if he told me he was getting married and I knew it was a bad idea. I would without a doubt pretend that I’ve moved on from our one passionate night together and relocate to Paris to find a new boyfriend.
Ambika Mod did a wonderful job at portraying a character who was fundamentally messy and insecure, as we all are, whose decisions were often influenced or constrained by her family’s socio-economic status.
One aspect of the show I really enjoyed was its representation of South Asian women. It was wonderful none of the characters ever referenced Emma’s cultural or racial background. In a lot of ways, it felt restorative to see a normal Brown girl just exist as a messy love interest without explanation or justification as to why she’s even being pursued by a White boy in the first place.2
Even so, One Day still reinforces the trope of the woman of colour wanting to be ‘chosen’ by the Sexy Popular White Boy. It’s a classic example where showrunners want to denote ‘racial progress’ through an interracial relationship between a White man and a woman of colour. Once Sexy Popular White Boy truly loves me, I’ve made it.3 Racism is cured.
This trope can be seen in Bridgerton (2020), Never Have I Ever (2020), The Mindy Project (2013) and countless others. It’s still uncommon to see people of colour be both protagonists of a story and each other’s love interests.
Personally, I’m a bit tired of navigating desirability politics. But in the age of online dating, it feels inescapable. Emma Tessler, founder of online matchmaking service The Dating Ring, affirmed that “90% of her clients confess to racial preferences in their partners, and 89.9% of them prefer White people.”
Habiba Katsha in Gal-dem even reported on her painful experience watching Samira be constantly turned down on Love Island because of her race. Katsha’s research on OkCupid “found that Black women received the fewest messages out of all its users. The 2014 study also found that men were less likely to respond to ‘likes’ from Black women.”
It’s undeniable that film, television and culture influence our desires, decisions, and how we see the world. Ali Barthwell in this Vulture article similarly speaks on the powerful sociological impact of television, writing that “when television spread through Brazil in the mid-1960s, bringing massively popular telenovelas with it, researchers found that areas of the country with access to TV showed greater fertility drops, which they attributed to the fact that most female characters in the shows had no children.”
It’s safe to conclude that a lot of our racial preferences stem from the media we consume on a daily basis — media which continuously perpetuates White supremacy through its storytelling, casting choices, post-production editing and more.
I don’t think anyone could have played Dexter in all his complexity better than Leo Woodall, but I can’t help but fantasise about what shape the story would have taken if both the actors were people of colour.
If you need a cathartic cry, I’d definitely recommend giving this a watch. But I caution against romanticising Emma and Dexter’s love story, though I guess there is something we can learn from them: If you love someone, tell them. If they don’t love you back, move on, because you deserve to be loved in all the ways you want and need — without complication or having to wait twenty years for your happily ever after.
To borrow the words of my friend Teresa, it seems the years Emma and Dexter spent as ‘friends’ may be better classified as years spent in a “demonic situation-ship.”
Let Brown women be messy! We’re allowed to be fucking annoying too.
Are there elements of internalised racism in this fantasy, too? Probably.