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.    

 

Great Sci-Fi Couple: Sarek and Amanda

On Votaries, I am writing about characters: good characters, bad characters...

I have reached "D" and must mention that Diane Duane does a fantastic job with Sarek and Amanda in her Star Trek novels, especially Spock's World.

For all Sarek's gruffness, he belongs in the ranks of notable romantic males because he is drawn to strong, outspoken, direct women. His second wife, Perrin, who appears in Star Trek: The Next Generation, carries herself with the same impressive confidence as Amanda.

His wives are also quite unapologetically friendly and human, precluding the idea that like must fall in love with like. They don't attempt to turn themselves into Vulcans, simply because their husband is rather quintessentially Vulcan.

The actresses are Jane Wyatt and Joanna Miles. Sarek, of course, is played by Mark Lenard, whom I consider the definitive version.  (I am aware that James Frain plays the younger Sarek, which casting choice I considered a vast improvement on Ben Cross. However, I haven't seen any James Frain episodes.)

In Spock's World, Diane Duane goes back before the series to give us readers Sarek and Amanda's courtship. Amanda is a translator and comes in contact with Sarek over the translation of the word that could mean "no emotion" or "restrained emotion." She can get him to laugh! She later becomes head of his House--a large extended family--on Vulcan.

In the Star Trek mystery novel The Vulcan Academy Murders by Jean Lorrah, a woman tries to kill off Amanda because she is smitten with Sarek and thinks she will only have a chance if Amanda is out of the way. 

I so admired Duane and Lorrah's expansion of Sarek and Amanda's relationship, in my own fan fiction (about a different couple) I evoke Sarek and Amanda: a crazy human woman moves to Vulcan, thinking that moving to Vulcan is all she has to do to become another Amanda. Since the crazy woman is otherwise culturally "deaf," she keeps offending people as she tries to snag herself a high-powered Vulcan man.

Hey, Sarek is hot and only has eyes for Amanda. And Amanda is something of a powerhouse!

Instant plot fodder.

Forster's Ultimate Ordinary and Middleclass Couple

On Votaries, I comment about E.M. Forster:

The relationships run the range from bohemian to easygoing to proper, passionate to presumptuous to unrequited.

There are also stale, sweet, odd, jealous, and invented relationships.

He was truly an observer of human nature. 

I consider Maurice and Alec from Maurice to be, ultimately, his most everyday, ordinary couple. Their circumstances make them unusual, not their personalities. Although Forster proposed a kind of D.H. Lawrence-fly to the countryside-ending for them in an earlier draft, he was too good a writer to settle for such silliness in the final draft (published after his death).

The characters are themselves, not icons. Maurice is somewhat literal minded, physically passionate, only introspective by the demands of his experiences, loyal, and a reasonably hard worker. Alec is belligerent, somewhat more reflective, creative and quick on the mark, loyal, and a reasonably hard worker. 

Fast-forward forty years and Maurice and Alec are working in a bank and newspaper respectively, living in a house in the suburbs, getting some dogs, and planning vacations. 

Truths that activists and romance lovers should remember: the stigmatized relationship may be stigmatized because of outside forces. Or, because others are using the stigma to their own ends (to shore up status, for instance). In addition, what constitutes stigma changes. 

Stigma, by itself, is not a marker of personality. Nor is it a marker of artistic achievement. Nor an indicator of where a relationship is supposed to end up (two people fighting the system forever).

So when people complain about the lack of kissing between men in a Japanese film, it behooves them to remember: it could be because of stigma. It could be because the culture doesn't go in for kissing in the same way as American television and film. 

Not every choice is feinted with meaning. And some people truly do want the ordinary life.

Victoria's Counsellors: Romantic Melbourne & Prince Albert

A few years back, Queen Victoria was very popular. Various studios produced movies and shows about her: Victoria; The Young Victoria; Victoria and Albert.

Unlike The Crown, which is faithful enough to bear watching, I gave up on Victoria for its painful inaccuracies. I felt much the same about Victoria as Professor Aldrete feels about HBO's Rome: good in some places but the writers really felt they had to add scandal? To Ancient Rome at the end of the Republic? To the British monarchy? Seriously?

However, Victoria, like the other productions, uses the well-known historical relationships, including, specifically, the relationship between Victoria and Lord Melbourne (prime minister at the time of Victoria's accession); Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert. All productions present events and characterizations that correspond to what historians know about those relationships.  

The stunningly handsome, charismatic, and gently wry Rufus Sewell plays Melbourne in Victoria, and he plays him as a contender for Victoria's heart, only he is too upstanding to go down that path. The relationship is plausible. Melbourne's usurpation by Albert is also plausible. 

Albert, played by Tom Hughes, is played as very moody. His youth (he and Victoria were incredibly young, being both 20!), his good looks, and his sex appeal overwhelm Victoria, which reaction is, in in truth, quite accurate. 

In The Young Victoria, Paul Bettany plays Melbourne as clever with an eye for the long game, exactly like a politician. Victoria does rely on him, and they flirt, but Albert, Rupert Friend, has already captured her heart. The movie plays up the developing relationship through letters between Victoria and Albert when they are apart. Melbourne is a distraction, not a rival, since Victoria and Albert are very much in love.

Victoria and Albert strikes me as the most accurate overall. Melbourne, played by Nigel Hawthorne, is an entirely avuncular father figure, a Winston Churchill to Victoria's Elizabeth II. 

From a romance point of view, this last series may disappoint since Albert is presented as not being entirely sure whether he loves Victoria when he marries her. He does his duty. But he isn't sure what he feels about her.

Whether or not the inner workings of the Prince Consort's heart can ever be entirely known, I consider Jonathan Firth's Albert the most accurate in terms of his behavior and attitudes. Albert wasn't broody; he was smart, well-organized, and, uh, proper--far more proper than Queen Victoria was when she became queen. She was the product of Regency England. He had witnessed aristocratic shenanigans growing up and found them all rather appalling and tacky. 

He was, in essence, a middleclass guy, the guy who organized the queen's staff, held a Great Exhibition of scientific advances, and expected people at the palace to behave themselves.

Victoria was arguably lucky in her first prime minister and her husband. Melbourne took her side on a number of court issues, including her decisions regarding the detestable Conroy. And some scholars think that Prince Albert saved the British monarchy, much the same way that Elizabeth II and Kate Middleton have saved it in the twenty-first century. See, the royal family isn't just a bunch of freeloading reprobates!

Some scholars contest that both men's agendas pulled Victoria in directions she didn't necessarily wish to go, with Albert, in the long run, obviously having the greatest influence. But Victoria didn't lack in strong opinions and was capable of forcing an outcome despite others' protests. With Melbourne and Prince Albert she achieved supporters of her role, men who wanted something from her but wanted her to be the one to deliver it. They took Victoria seriously.

Put all three Melbournes together as well as all three Alberts and one achieves a fairly accurate portrait of both men! 

Relationship Advice for Fictional Couples: Perry and Jordan Cox

So regarding the problem of two critical alphas going at each other, can this type of relationship work? 

Sure!

Gottman points out that "critical resolution" techniques, so praised by marriage therapists, largely don't work because successful couples don't actually solve their troubles that way (and most troubles are, in fact, unsolvable). 

Referring to one exchange, he points out, ["Charlie and Belle] have been having similar in-your-face discussions for years. They don't end angrily, either...There's a lot of affection and laughter as they hash this out...Clearly, there's something very positive going on between them that overrides their argumentative style." (13). 

In other words, rather than contempt, the couple fall back on affection and laughter.

Between Dr. Cox and his wife/girlfriend/ex-wife/wife Jordan, (1) Jordan's no-nonsense attitude means she is more likely to tell Dr. Cox to cut his crap than to challenge him to death and (2) they both have a sense of humor.

Romance novels throughout the 20th century are surprisingly lacking in humor (I exclude Heyer). I think part of this was the writers, but I think part of it was the industry. Romance readers nowadays pretty much expect humor in their romances from Family Ties cuteness to hilarious banter of Powell as Loy as Nick & Nora.

And it is far, far easier to take pushiness when everyone throws up their hands and laughs at the end of the day.