Is she really going out with him?
How do our amazingly intelligent and fascinating friends end up dating total duds? Meet the all-too-common "unequally cool couple."
By Curtis Sittenfeld
June 22, 2004 | Ah, June -- the kickoff of the wedding season, the time to raise a glass to your beloved friends while secretly pondering some of the enduring connubial mysteries: Why do bridesmaids exist anyway? Why does anyone think it's a good idea to write their own vows? And most important, why are you -- my clever, edgy, ambitious, kindhearted friend -- marrying this total dud?
Yes, with 2.3 million marriages occurring in the United States every year, there are bound to be some mismatches. But we're not talking here about slightly imbalanced couples, where she's lively and he's quiet, or he's a great cook and she can't boil spaghetti to save her life. We're talking about really cool individuals -- our closest friends -- and the pathologically lame men and women they date, have relationships with and even marry.
Take Angela's friend Eric (names have been changed to protect the back stabbing), whose girlfriend came to a party at Angela's apartment, gave her phone number to other men, and threw up on the rug. Or Hillary's friend Kate, whose boyfriend Miguel knows that Kate hates when people are late so, just for yuks, he'll call her from the parking lot of a restaurant she's waiting inside to tell her he won't be there for another half-hour. Or Charlotte's friend Scott, married to a woman who, says Charlotte, "if we're just sitting around playing a game, she either is really into it and will cheat, or she's not into it and will go into the other room and talk on the phone or read magazines. She's always really particular about what she's eating, or it's too cold and can you get her a shawl?"
Dud-ish significant others are everywhere, crying at someone else's birthday party, asking you intrusive questions, making uncomfortable jokes, and underpaying when the group check comes. They're good for gossiping about, but not for much else. Luckily, the unequally cool couple -- that is, the UCC -- has an inverse: the equally cool couple, also known as the ECC. ECCs are rarer than UCCs, which only enhances their value. An ECC comes into being when your friend finds someone who is his or her equal, whose company you actually, voluntarily enjoy.
An ECC isn't a couple with matching megawatt résumés (it can be, of course, but often those couples are kind of nauseating, too). Rather, it's a couple you feel just as comfortable and happy around both halves of -- if you go with a group of people to a bar and you're in the corner of the booth, your heart doesn't sink if you end up next to one rather than the other.
Hillary, a 28-year-old who just graduated from business school in Boston, met her first ECC last year. Alex and Eva, business school classmates and newlyweds, "are both smart, attractive, dynamic and like to laugh," Hillary says. "They like to collect people and bring them together." Though Hillary met Eva first, she says, "I rarely spend time just with her. I'll go hang out with them as a couple and it's my first experience of there not being tension around that. In my life, there's a pattern of resenting that I have to give up a certain intimacy in the friendship when someone brings their partner around."
Even when you don't actively dislike your friend's significant other, you rarely feel for him or her the fondness you do for your friend. When she meets up with most couples, Hillary says, "It's not like having dinner with an old friend. It's like having dinner with an old friend and someone you kind of awkwardly know and often don't like as much. I'm viewing that as a cost where my friend's seeing this advantage to including her partner in her life. What I love about Alex and Eva is that [hanging out] doesn't come at a cost. I get excited about the friendship with both of them."
Next page: What happens when you like your friend's partner even more than you like your friend?
