Couplethinking

[dicentra63 <dicentra@xmission.com>]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "ssk7882 <skelkins at a...>"
<skelkins at a...> wrote:
> That felt good.  I should rant more often.  ;-)

Yes, you should!  It's highly entertaining, if nothing else.

The Elkins (sorry, couldn't resist):
It enforces what has always struck me as a very bizarre and
artificial notion: namely, that the closest relationship in
ones life "ought" to have a sexual element. If it does not,
then it is dismissed as "just" friendship. 

This is a big pet peeve for me, too.  It surfaced during my sojourn in
X-Files fandom, when people kept insisting that there was something
sexual going on between Mulder and Scully--or that there should be.  

"I mean, *look* at them," a friend of mine would say. "They're both
young and attractive, and they spend all that time together.  There's
no *way* they wouldn't have something going on."

Well, that might be a good argument for RL, but this was a fictional
relationship that the writers very deliberately kept platonic. (We
don't speak of series from the sixth-season ender on.)  And it was a
*wonderful* relationship.  It was intimate, they cared for each other
very much--you could even go so far as to say that they *loved* each
other--but there was no sexual element, nor was there any "sexual
tension," as TV Guide and other journalists liked to say.  

Half the intrigue of the series was the dynamic between the two: they
were diametric opposites philosophically, but circumstances made it so
that they could trust only each other.  *Great* fictional device.  It
added an extremely human element to a show filled with inhuman
monsters and other terrors.

But there was still a percentage of people--it felt like the
majority--that wanted them to "get together" because it would be *so
cuuuute!*  Or they figured something was already going on.  Or that
something was simmering under the surface.  But it wasn't.  And it
bugged me no end because I was so afraid Chris Carter would give in to
them and change the dynamic, thereby ruining the show.  <sigh> He did.
When Scully's gratuitous baby turned out to be Mulder's (I think. I
stopped watching.) the show jumped the shark big time.  I'll never
forgive them for doing that.

Gah.

That's why I want to keep the Trio free from entanglements with each
other (or if they entangle, they disentangle rather quickly).  There's
a dearth of intimate, non-sexual relationships between people in
fiction.  As one who has had some wonderful, close, platonic
relationships with guys, I'd really like to see society pull its head
out and give these kinds of relationships more emphasis than the
romantic ones.  They're much healthier, they do less damage to the
individuals, and they leave room for the individuals to grow
separately or apart.

--Dicentra, who agrees with Tabouli about the miserable couples being
more eager to pair others off; of my married sibs, two are happy and
one is not--guess which one signed me up on a computer dating service
without my knowledge or permission?