It seems to me that our culture puts a lot of emphasis on finding love, but it’s absolutely perplexed about what to do when you find it. We have an entire genre that’s funny attempts to procure a partner, and vast amounts of the rest of our comedy are based in how miserable people are once they’ve committed to one.

Now, I grant you that it’s more fun to complain, and that quite a lot of the nice parts of a relationship are also the dull bits. There’s no drama in lying in bed, watching To Catch a Thief. Which is what we’re doing right now. There’s humour in our life, goodness knows, but not a whole lot of the kind of complication that drives plots. Any plot featuring a relationship like ours would have to be about something else.

There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. We’re boring enough, but interesting things do happen to people in steady, happy relationships. I’ve got friends who own a game store together, and goodness knows they’ve got enough going on in their lives to make a movie about. The plot could be about the trials of the business itself, or the people who come and go in the store, or all kinds of things, and there they’d be, happy with each other and deeply in love. It could be quite nice.

But when the focus of the movie is the couple, there’s almost always something wrong with the relationship. Even when it’s not. There are just so many movies about couples who can’t seem to stand each other, or else couples that have broken up in some way. Troubled couples. Dissatisfied couples. Couples who don’t want anything to do with each other or just have no way of communicating with one another. Happy film couples exist, but not anywhere near as many as unhappy ones.

We would rather put seasons into “will they or won’t they?” over and over again than start with a happy Nick-and-Nora sort of situation. We frequently hedge our bets; Firefly had the happy married couple of Zoe and Wash, but there were also two couples dancing around getting together. At least there was no bickering married couple.

Oh, I don’t mind, well, Nick and Nora. They bickered, but they also expressed love quite often. There are several couples along those lines, mostly in television—Homer and Marge, for example. However, there are a lot more that leave me wondering why they got married in the first place. How strange some movie courtships must have been, to leave us with the couple that we see on camera. The one in particular that springs to mind is Married With Children, a couple that hate each other. Somehow, they managed to have two children despite his apparent complete distaste for her sexually and in every other way. How does that happen?

Now, this is not supposed to suggest that we should go the other way. There are, after all, plenty of married couples in real life who don’t get along. That’s not news. It’s just that I think there are also a lot who do—and a lot who realize that they don’t get along and just get divorced, which seems to happen considerably less often in the movies than makes sense. These characters who spend two hours fighting are still fighting at the end of the movie. Some other characters spend multiple seasons at one another’s throats and are still married for the series finale.

Well. I’m in love. Still. Thirteen years later. And the movie couple we most resemble are Marge and Norm Gunderson. I wish we were Nick and Nora, but I’m not sure we’re that funny.