Bear with me
In which I answer the existential question of our generation: can hot people ever be just friends with other hot people?
This week, The Bear is out on Hulu (no spoilers because I haven’t watched it yet). The cast is delightful and charming and, led socially by Ayo Edebiri, very young and hip and everywhere. Ayo plays Sydney and Jeremy Allen White plays Carmy, both leads with undeniable chemistry. The showrunners keep saying they’re not endgame but, like How I Met Your Mother, it seems inevitable (Name me a tv show that starred a man and a woman who don’t eventually end up together).
But what is interesting is watching that on-show chemistry—the fraught tension between leads dueling it out, sharing screen time, only and forever in each other’s orbit—so quickly morph into real-life rumors.
This video of them at the baseball game went viral. I mean, that’s the female gaze right there: a man playfully tugs on a braid and we’re thrown right back into our tween years watching Anne of Green Gables. They’re hot, they’re friendly, they’re together all the time. And so we want—we need—them to be dating. It’s the literal rules of attraction.
Watching the press tour and the fervor around the célebre of it all, it makes me wonder if friendship is just a lost cause. Every time there are hot people in a show/movie/experience together, the news starts analyzing the actors too. It’s a game, of course, often rigged.
Sydney Sweeney and Glenn Powell tried to convince us they actually were hooking up and destroying their long-term relationships cuz it was just too damn hot. But unlike the latter, they had zero chemistry IRL and the story fizzled almost as quickly as the movie itself.
In a more successful and now brutally awkward example, Nicola Coughlan and Luke Newton rocked their PR, laughing and joking and touching each other throughout their international tour for Bridgerton, now people are determined to see them wed. There are still edits being made of them secretly dating or Luke pining for Nicola. He had to respond to all this by being papped with his actual girlfriend. Nicola has to constantly field questions about if they’re really just friends. Even the snipped she posted of The Eras Tour led to news stories and reddit threads about how it must be a statement about how she was feeling about Luke.
Lupita Nyong’o and Joseph Quinn have been soft launching their A Quiet Place prequel and there were whole articles dedicated to a moment he fixed the strap of her dress. Admittedly, a very sexy move. Because the bar for men is basically subterranean.
All this to say, men and women (especially hot, talented, charismatic men and women) star together and suddenly we want them to be the It couple. But does sexy energy automatically mean romantic interest? Is there no room for people to just be friends?
I’m mesmerized by what stories we choose to call romantic. What celebrities must be dating and what we must see to believe it. People insisted Harry Styles and Taylor Swift were never a real couple just as fervently as they believe Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt must still long for each other. How do we decide what is chummy vs what is flirty? Because the press definitely seems to have a bias.
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“Shipping” people is the most normalized part of modern-day parasociality. We feel an understanding of or intimacy with people we’ve never met. And so we assume we know more than they publicly declare. And we project our state of delusion with glee. Never mind if a person has a partner. Never mind that work friends are rarely romantic ones. Never mind that it is their job, after all, to be charismatic, to have chemistry. The question that has haunted humanity for a millennia remains unanswered: can women and men be friends?
Of course they can. Anyone uncomfortable with the idea is uncomfortable on a personal level. Which is fair and valid. Have boundaries and expectations for yourself, your relationships. But let us please, publicly (especially when it comes to celebrities selling us on something) let’s normalize friendship.
Some people are touchy. They’re physically affectionate. Or doe-eyed. Or naturally whimsical. Or charismatic. All of these can lend themselves to chemistry but chemistry does not have to lead to sex.
In her Vanity Fair cover story this year, Ayo—ever one for the people—understood what the public was reading into.
“Work can be a very intimate thing and a very personal thing and a very emotional thing, and I think when you’re also in industries that are creative or creative adjacent, I think there’s something that also invokes feelings of passion,” she said. “Also, boy’s got some beautiful blue eyes. You know what I mean? Those are eyes you want to project onto.”
I mean, exactly. I want to be in their group cuddle any day of the week.
I like the idea of the cast of The Bear all being friends. And I like the idea of them feeling safe enough to be physical, touchy, flirty—whatever you want to call it—without that immediately asserting romantic love. Let’s bring back (find for the first time?) a belief in lower-case love. Because I do feel (not to take this too deep) like we’ve stepped away from community. And chosen family. And supportive friendships. And intimacy outside of romance.
I can’t pretend I really care about the “ethics” of commenting on public figures. I just think there’s a line where it becomes an unhealthy obsession for the individuals doing the commenting. Especially when it’s real-life people. Hot people have chemistry with other hot people. It’s a risk of the job. And people cast to have chemistry probably will have chemistry. But that chemistry is just as likely to turn only into friendship. After all, this is their job.
I love a good ship. I was champing at the bit for Nick and Jess to finally kiss. I watched so many edits of the Castle-Beckett ship before I knew they were called edits. I’m right here waiting for Buddie to officially set sail. But can we stop assessing strangers’ glances and touches and phrasing to insist they must be as in love with each other as we are with them? To make that the thing they have to talk about on the press tour? The thing people are taking photos to assess? The comment under every post, every press stop, every promo? If you’re unlikely to date a coworker while maintaining an intimate understanding of them/your shared experience, maybe Ayo was right to remind us: it’s never that deep.
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