Let’s Fucking Fall in Love

From Heated Rivalry, an unexpected reminder about what’s good.

I’m dusting my blog off today to say something about the television show Heated Rivalry. You have probably heard of it; to keep things concise I won't go into synopsis details. In the most basic sense, it is about closeted hockey players who fall in love and have a lot of onscreen sex.

I watched the show a few weeks ago and enjoyed it. I was surprised I didn't hate it. I’m someone who finds it difficult to accept new television shows into my life. Despite the number of episodes for what constitutes a complete season of television falling into the low single digits, I still find that even the decent shows waste a lot of time and seem unsure about what they're setting out to do in the first place.

Even if I wasn’t a bit of a skeptic I would probably say that, when good television does happen, it’s actually very hard to identify what’s good about it. My suspicion is that the number of truly interesting things a television show is doing at any given time is much lower than the average social media commentator would have us believe. Very often I see people treat a television shows as a sort of medicinal brew, a cause or cure for what ails us, and Heated Rivalry is no exception. I've seen people argue that the show heals wounds left in gay communities by everything from the AIDS crisis to the primetime-TV reign of Ryan Murphy, that it is too subversive or too mainstream, that it is or isn't positive representation, that it platforms or centers women's desires or excludes them, that it's good, that it's fan-fiction, that it's bad, ugly, everything in between.

In all of this, there's the implication that whatever Heated Rivalry is achieving exists firmly outside the frame of the series, that its reception or cultural impact is more interesting than the text itself, and that its relative values are to be battled out in the areas of social influence. Its runaway success, I suppose, lends itself to this approach, but I'm not very interested in it, I'm afraid. I'll leave that to others.

What I'd like to point out instead are two things about the show’s content, things that pleasantly surprised me as a viewer and were a good lesson for me as a writer.

First: the show “works” as a romance in the truest sense. Whether you think romance stories are viable, valuable, etc, is another debate, but that’s what it is. Second: the show is a romance that develops because two people are having fantastic, addictive, brain-melting sex with each other. The characters fall in love because the sex they're having is so incredible; when they find themselves in bed, things just click, in a way that seems beyond words. There is eager consent, but also eager consensus. All the conflicts in the show (and there are many) do not conflict with this basic fact.

This is interesting to me. I truly believe that falling in love is maybe the reason we’re alive; it’s certainly my favorite experience we can have as people, but I really don’t care for a lot of modern-day romance fiction. Maybe I’m too pretentious, too shrewd about “feel-good” content, but I’m in theory very open to romantic stuff. I spent my teens and 20s toiling in the fan-fiction mines until that stopped hitting home, so I don’t think it’s a matter of taste. I think it’s probably something else. I think whatever sold me on Heated Rivalry includes a missing ingredient that’s turned me off to romances, even the sexy ones, in the past, and I think it has to do with sex.

Good sex writing exists, of course. It’s more about what is considered blockbuster-worthy, worthy of hitting the big time. Romance stories that involve a lot of sex often have growing pains when making it onscreen. One of the stock arguments fans of explicit romance stories (not porn, but Erotic Romance, capital R) often make in order to legitimize the genre is that the romance is somehow “transcendent” of the explicit content, that the dirty parts are a bonus and the “real” story is the love story. The people who champion fanfiction’s entry into mainstream channels also tend to do this, or find another way to skirt around the fact that sex is central to their storytelling. This always feels like a sales pitch, and maybe it is. For the handful of these pieces that make it to television, the this emphasis plays out with a Regency-era coyness: love as the story, sex as the subliminal fuel. The fantasy is finding love, finding a match, so you can fuck. The substance of the fantasy involves the waiting; it involves everything one imagines about how good that sex will be. I think my disinterest with the genre has to do with this basic, frustrating principle: a separation between sexuality and love, the idea that you can fall in love with someone and then fuck them.

It’d be easy to say that this is just a trickle-down of purity culture, or a result of most of these stories being period dramas, or simply a writing problem, that stories need conflict. But I’m not so sure. This mechanic, this split between love and sex, is not unique to romance writing. A lot of books that simply mention love, or hinge on conveying to us that two people are in love, seem to insist on it as well, regardless of how realistic it is. It’s all over the world of legitimate literary fiction. In those contexts it appears not so much as a plot device, but as an observational reality, as a sign of our times. I wonder how much of this is the clear-eyed human insight we think it is, how much is social conditioning, and how useful it all is to a sense of realism or fantasy in romantic stories. We’re receiving a lot of cultural pressure from all sides telling us that to fall in love with the person you’re fucking is a fantasy situation, a virtual impossibility bordering on the unnatural. Whether it’s because we’re living chastely in Bridgerton or waiting for our moonstruck fairy prince to hormone-imprint on us or because we’ve made the more realistic mistake of being A Young Woman in The Big City, we seem to be told that great sex with someone you love is elusive, something reserved for complete projects or special cases, achieved by a person who is special, or emotionally ready for love, or whose partner is already known to be their perfect match.

And I think that’s strange. I don’t think we, as people, usually need to achieve that level of emotional maturity before we can fuck in a way that rearranges our brain cells. I think it’s a very human thing to learn through doing; sometimes we don’t know why we love someone until we fuck them. Feelings, in my experience, are not something you catch as a dangerous side effect of good sex. They’re the point. And, with apologies to Constance Chatterly, I don’t think that most of us ever truly wait for a sexual love and cerebral love to shake out into neat categories before we decide we’ve found someone worth building a life around.

It’s strange that this television show understands that, and a lot of other, better-funded projects that hinge on convincing us that two people are in romantic love (whether to sell romance fiction, a narrative, a movie, whatever), do not. I know the critique of purity culture is ongoing, but despite being familiar with the complaints, I find it’s often hard to identify in positive terms what’s missing as a result of this culture until I see it somewhere. When I do see it, it often doesn’t look transgressive. I think sometimes it just feels real.

I found myself, as I watched Heated Rivalry, impressed by the fact that despite being sexy little piece of pulp television released into the wilds of our fraught cultural landscape, most of the emotional beats land, and the show does not seem particularly interested in making strict distinctions between sex and love. I doubt the source text achieves this; I think it has to do with the skill of the adaptation. The series doesn’t seem to be a thesis on how gay men should fuck or love, either: it’s just how that story is being told. Not only does this work, it is, in fact, why the show works. Heated Rivalry works as a piece of pretty-good romantic television because the in-narrative sexual content is the tether to what makes it human, genuine.

Onscreen, we’re seeing hunky gay hockey players and their crazy Russian families and being asked to believe that the Raiders are from Boston and the X-Men movies are filmed in Canada, sure. But who cares! When we see the characters fuck, we’re seeing two people create a shared sexual world that transcends language, and we see them live in that world together until language finds its way back in. That’s so real! That’s so good! I’ve done that. You, perhaps, have done that. Even if you haven’t experienced it firsthand, I’d guess that it feels real to a lot of people who know or want to believe that this is possible for them. It won’t mean that to everyone–it’s not for everyone. This romantic sexuality is not the only way to live, fuck, fall in love, be a person. But many, many people, gay and straight, far more than the romantasy and literary fiction genres combined would have us believe, fall in love through their sexual encounters every day, and not only is it natural, it is easy.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m stating the obvious. I’ve seen the show discussed from every which-way, but not so much as a sort of direct, simple interpretation of sex and love. Very few people have noted that the amount of sex that happens on the show is, in reality, a pretty normal amount of sex for two young lovers to be having.

In a world where sexuality and romance are viewed as separate entities and audiences tend to pick at "plot holes" like so many scabs, I think there's an expectation that we'll be eventually be reassured a couple onscreen have something else in common “besides just sex.” Yet the young men of Heated Rivalry talk about sex, having it, wanting it, and little else for the majority of their time knowing each other, and when the romantic feelings finally arrive, it is believable all the same. It is narratively satisfying, even. Beyond what the series might achieve in terms of shaping mass culture, I'm delighted by its insistence that having undeniable, unbridled sexual chemistry with someone is enough of a reason to love them, that even if there are external stakes or difficulties in forming a relationship, love is made by making love.

A nice reassurance, and, all told, a pretty good show.