Why Amy & Sheldon Are Such a Good Couple

Here's your cat. Here's your $20.

I had my doubts about Amy and Sheldon at first--then, I became entirely invested. 

I consider all the Big Bang Theory couples fairly strong--but not for the same reasons.

Amy and Sheldon are so fantastic because they remind me of manga couples. They are slow-burn but not the type of slow-burn one sees on Hallmark and many sitcoms where the couple seem stuck on a circular reasoning hamster wheel: together, apart, close, not quite there, together, apart.  

Amy and Sheldon, however, continually move forward. Like with manga couples, the slow-burn isn't an excuse to keep the audience in suspense. The slow-burn is a way for the couple to figure out what a relationship is all about. 

Amy and Sheldon figure out what it means to compromise over careers. They learn what it means to apologize. They learn how to break up and be friends and get back together. They learn they ARE friends (not simply each other's last resort). They learn how to share interests and support each other's interests (Fun with Flags! Little House on the Prairie! Professor Proton's show!). They even learn how to be intimate. 

The attraction for viewers is that every human, no amount how sophisticated, finds relationships as confusing and complicated as do Amy and Sheldon. Like manga couples, Amy & Sheldon put into words and actions what the rest of us find so confounding.

A great deal of this "putting into words" is helped by Amy (Mayim Bailik) matching Sheldon in terms of desired intimacy (mostly matching) and also, remarkably enough, by Jim Parsons being able to convey Sheldon's enlightened yet old-fashioned Texas boy chivalry. At heart, he is a guy who knows that he is supposed to woo and admire his lady.