Earlier this week, the internet found out that the rumored romance between BJ Novak and TikTok star Delaney Rowe is apparently not a rumor but a real, live relationship. And while not everyone seems to be happy about it, pretty much everyone seems to be talking about it—which may come as a surprise to those not familiar with The Lore. Sure, an age gap is always going to get people talking (Delaney is 29 to BJ’s 45), but frankly, there’s no way this relationship would be attracting the attention it is if it weren’t for two other high-profile relationships: the real one BJ maintains with long-time friend and one-time lover Mindy Kaling, and the imaginary one we’ve all projected upon them.
The collective consciousness has long cast BJ and Mindy in the real-life rom-com role of two best friends destined for each other but doomed to stay apart—star-crossed lovers stuck in an eternal situationship à la Carrie and Big. Despite zero confirmed evidence to suggest the stars have been romantically involved since they actually dated for a few years back in the early 2000s, this narrative persists, usually painting Mindy as the one who’s still secretly in love with her ex-turned-bestie and BJ as the situationship final boss who keeps her at arm’s length but will always secretly regard her as “the one that got away.”
While, if I were Mindy, I would be pretty annoyed if everyone assumed I was heartbroken every time a friend I briefly dated 20 years ago got a new girlfriend, I’ll admit I’m not immune to the allure of this imaginary love story either. It’s a fantasy both friends and foes of the would-be couple just can’t seem to let go of—you don’t have to like either Mindy or BJ or even want them to end up together to believe that they should but never will. And whether you find the idea of this perpetual situationship frustrating or fascinating, it’s clear we can’t look away. So what is it about this (imagined) dynamic that continues to prove so compelling?
For one thing, it’s a tale as old as time. This collective Mindy/BJ delusion reflects not one but two popular romantic tropes that have dominated media for eons. On the one hand, there’s the friends-to-lovers of it all—two best friends who won’t admit they’re perfect for each other. It’s a plot that’s fueled rom-coms for years, one Mindy herself once parodied in her show, The Mindy Project, casting BJ in a guest-starring role as a short-lived romantic interest of the self-titled protagonist who ultimately realizes he’s been in love with his female best friend the whole time. (Perhaps in a nod to the real-life rumors, Mindy cast her own character not as the friend-turned-lover BJ rides off into the sunset with, but as the secondary love interest who makes him realize it’s been his best friend all along.)
Of course, real-life Mindy and BJ never completed the friends-to-lovers arc. If anything, they became the opposite, making them ripe for another romantic trope: the ill-fated lovers whose bond was simply too much for this world. The twin flames who burned too hot, too fast and ultimately had to cool off and settle down with other, more practical partners. It’s Cathy and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights—a love so intense it was destined to implode, leaving two tortured souls doomed to pine after each other for all eternity. It’s Carrie and Big in Sex and the City—or so Carrie decides in the season 2 finale, comforting herself in the wake of Big’s engagement to Natasha by comparing their thwarted romance to that of Katie and Hubbell in The Way We Were, yet another classic tale of a love so great it could never be.
Meanwhile, we eat that shit up. Why? Because like Carrie, we want to believe that our own failed romances only failed because they were too perfect—because we were too in love. We want to believe that deep down, the one who let us get away was the one, and that secretly they’ll always believe it too.
There’s comfort in this for the recently heartbroken, but there’s also a reliably intoxicating tension for everyone. The driving force that propels pretty much any romantic narrative is the question of whether the two leads will end up together. Once they definitively do or don’t, the tension dissipates and the story is over. But as long as you keep them just out of each other’s reach, you keep the story alive with the possibility that they may, someday, find their way back to each other. For better or worse, the preservation of romantic potential often proves more alluring than its consummation.
This is as true in real life as it is in fiction. It’s what keeps us hooked on the Mindy/BJ fantasy and it’s also, I’d argue, what keeps us in our own situationships. A situationship is rooted in avoidance—of commitment, labels, etc.—and that avoidance has a tricky way of suspending that intoxicatingly unresolved romantic tension. As I’ve previously written, situationships are about avoidance, yes, but they’re also about preservation—about preserving the romance and possibility of the will they/won’t they and “preventing it from turning into something that can break or sour or evaporate into the mundanity of a sexless weekday morning scrambling to get the kids to school. Something that can disappear. Something—or someone—you can fall out of love with.” Staying in a situationship is a way of indefinitely living, as Taylor Swift put it, “for the hope of it all.”
We want to believe in the Mindy/BJ almost-love story because we want to believe that our own romantic highs can be preserved in this way—that even if we can’t have the object of our affections, maybe the not-having them is the very thing that’s keeping the love story alive. It’s a delusion, of course. But isn’t it, as Hemingway once mused, pretty to think so?
