Tired: side-eying Hollywood’s unshakeable track record with age gap relationships. Wired: obsessing over Hollywood’s fictional coolness gap relationships that I’m now suddenly realizing are actually all around me IRL too.
What is a coolness gap relationship, you may ask? Well, dear reader, it’s when the two parties in a couple display a noticeable disparity of coolness between themselves, and yet, somehow, they’re making it work. It’s when it’s so obvious that there’s no way that person A is matching person B’s freak that you have to do a double-take. It’s that couple you get sat next to at a dinner party and slowly realize, after three straight hours of bantering with the wife about everything under the sun, that the husband hasn’t piped up to share anything noteworthy with the group except to mansplain the pronunciation of Kamala Harris’ name. And yes, the internet anthropologists tracking the coolness gap trend are finding that women tend to be the superiorly cool member of a hetero relationship more often than not.
But, just like an age-gap relationship, there doesn’t have to be something inherently wrong with a coolness gap relationship. In fact, if you’re the not-so-cool one, it’s kind of a flex that you were able to bag a personality baddie. With that in mind, here are all of my favorite (mostly) fictional coolness gap relationships.
Rory Gilmore And Jess Mariano
I’ll take every opportunity I can to say it: Rory Gilmore is literally the worst. She’s ungrateful, self-righteous, and a subpar friend all at the same damn time. She also happens to be very uncool. Like, yes, being a bookworm is a timeless hobby, but quoting Victorian poets at a rock concert is objectively wet blankety. Meanwhile, Jess, despite his raging teen hormones driving a good deal of his decisions, is the guy you want to get stuck in a freezing-cold horse-drawn carriage with. She was a brat, he was demure, it cannot be any more obvious.
Susan And Mike
https://t.co/Kx8jVprV4e pic.twitter.com/ADMUORdrZA
— Grace (@gracecamille_) August 18, 2024
My favorite messy women who aren’t Real Housewives are, of course, the Desperate Housewives. But Susan, Susan, Susan. She was easily the least cool resident of Wisteria Lane, and that includes Brie and that nosey bitch Karen McKluskey. Susan was tripping over paint cans and accidentally exposing herself in full lingerie to her poor daughter on the daily, and yet big strong Mike with his big strong biceps kept her goofy walking catastrophe vibe so much chiller than it would’ve been otherwise.
Shiv and Tom
As much as Kendall wishes it was him, Shiv is the coolest Roy child. So cool, some might call her cold, like when she suggested an open relationship with her husband on their honeymoon. Tom is a lot of things — hungry, secretly ruthless, and most obviously, a disgusting brother. But cool? Not in a million years or with a million dollars from Logan’s trust.
Cici And Schmidt
I’m still holding out hope that one day I’m going to wake up looking and feeling half as chic as Cici was without trying, but until then I’ll just have to accept I’m just as goofy as Schmidt making stupid faces in the mirror holding up the bathroom from my roommates.
Phoebe And David
Clearly, the man from Minsk knew how to hang despite being the nerdiest freak in the sheets to ever hit the Friends universe (including Ross who definitely would insist he’s just as smart). I’d like to think if Friends was an hour-long HBO drama we would’ve seen Phoebe and David passing a J back and forth in bed after sex as they mused over black holes and alternate universes.
Michaela And Asher
How To Get Away With Murder‘s Michaela was a type-A control freak, but she was still COOL, okay, otherwise Annaliese wouldn’t have hired her to cover up her repeated felonies for like half a decade. Asher, on the other hand, was a nepo hire who could never read the room despite all of Daddy’s cash and whose idea of being sexy was a lot of eyebrow jiggling and mouth breathing. It’s actually a shame they didn’t work out, though.
Dan And Serena
Do I even need to explain this one? Serena was the ultimate cool girl (derogatory), while Dan was just trying to give half the daddy energy his literal father Rufus was. Plus, though I don’t subscribe to this ending, Dan was apparently such a loser (SPOILER ALERT) he was ratting on his friends, family, and himself for years as thee titular role in Gossip Girl for reasons I’ll never understand.
Michael Scott And Jan Levinson (And Carol…And Donna)
Michael Scarn, the man that you are… is overwhelmingly cringy. And yet I can’t help but be charmed by a man so ridiculously earnest? I guess that’s what Jan was going through when she made the mortifying mistake of taking Michael to Sandals Resort (you know, she paid for the whole thing). Jan’s relationship with Michael was so mismatched it drove her to a mental breakdown via scented candles. Sad.
Ariana Madix And Tom Sandoval
Even before Tom was outed as a worm with a mustache, he was a constant deliverer of secondhand embarrassment. A man approaching middle age whose idea of being edgy is rocking animal print, eyeliner, and a Kate Gosselin haircut is probably not one with his finger on the pulse. Sure, Ariana had her moments (see: “sketch comedy”), but she always just got “it” more than 99.9% of her delusional castmates ever did, and yet she was willing to cheer Tom on, year after year, as he took himself as seriously as Elvis Presley for singing cover songs at Hollywood dive bars. And what was Ariana up to this summer? Oh yeah, that’s right, hosting the most-watched show on television. Pretty cool.
Ariana Grande And Almost Every Man She Dates
One thing about me, I’m gonna stan a cancer sun named Ariana. I would follow Ms. Grande through any musical adventure or iconic hairstyle. But her taste in men sometimes proves to be a surprising little plot twist, such as when she dated a jokester from Staten Island who looks like he may or may not have crawled out from under the ferry, a normie realtor from California, or her dangerous woman moment with Spongebob. It’s okay, girl; I support women’s rights and wrongs.
