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Sex

Scott Moir And Tessa Virtue Are Just Too Hot For Each Other to Be a Real Long-Term Couple

The inevitable backlash begins now—with this article.
Super hot image via the Canadian Press

This week, I, like the rest of the Olympics-watching world, had gotten caught up in the delirious furor over the idea that Scott Moir and Tessa Virtue are not, despite all signs apparently pointing to the contrary, fucking. Around midday on Wednesday—which is to say: around half past Moir-Virtue Ice Sex Time and just prior to Moir-Drunkenly-Heckles-Hockey-Refs-O’Clock—I sent my boyfriend of seven years a link to the Twitter account @nearlight, which is basically just a greatest-hits feed of suggestive Moir-Virtue gifs and memes. It’s steamy, in exactly the same way that many centuries-old forms of ballroom dancing have been purposefully steamy since time immemorial and why on earth did it take putting two Canadian millennials on skates for everyone to realize this.

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But I digress.

“This account is making me feel jello,” my boyfriend, also a millennial (see: “jello”), replied, “of their special relationship.”

His sentiment was and is not interesting—again, most of the internet this week has been going absolutely batshit over the idea that an expertly pas de deux is not a type of foreplay—so much as it echoed a particular sort of anguish that I myself have been feeling this week. Scott and Tessa’s relationship is very real; this isn’t like watching a rom-com and losing sleep over whether or not someone will ever run through an airport departures gate to win you back. But they aren’t dating. They’ve never dated. They (probably) aren’t even sleeping together. They have the perfect fairytale romance without all of the bullshit that comes with actual romance, because it’s not real. Except it is. But not in the way we think it is. But it might as well be, for how perfect it is. Except it isn’t perfect, because it isn’t real. But isn’t it? No. No?

It’s driving me insane.

I’m certainly not alone. All the memes and jokes and dedicated Twitter accounts aside, the positioning of Scott and Tessa as #relationshipgoals is not without a whisper of anxious veracity. As Katherine Laidlaw wrote in the National Post last weekend: “We see the crackling moments of cinematic chemistry between them, but this isn’t the movies—it’s better. And every four years when they blaze across our screens, they give us something to hope for: that this kind of intimacy is not only real, but that it can last. That this kind of synchronicity, intimacy, understanding between two humans is not only possible, but gorgeously achievable.”

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That Scott Moir and Tessa Virtue are real people with a real human relationship who happen to embody—or at least happen to have projected upon them—every unrealistic trope of Hollywood romance muddies the water considerably for the rest of us, who occasionally found solace in the widely accepted fact that Hollywood romance doesn’t exist in real life. The only solace here is that they’re not a real couple. But then again, it feels kind of shitty to think that, watching them, you may have never invested as much of yourself into a real relationship as Scott Moir and Tessa have invested in, essentially, getting along as coworkers.

The type of intimacy Scott and Tessa embody—or, at least, the type that we’re all project onto Scott and Tessa—does, certainly, exist in real life. But as anyone who has been romantically involved with someone for more than, let’s say, six months to a year will tell you, that type of intimacy—when it’s real—has a shelf life. (Or, if it doesn’t seem to be waning, it’s turned into the type of rabid, urgent passion that portends life-ruining, hot-blooded, window-smashing, cop-calling catastrophe.)

Frankly, the fact that Scott and Tessa still seem to be so desperately INTO each other after two decades—that he still can’t hold back from burying his face in her neck whenever it’s visible to him; that the look they shoot each other when one finishes the other’s sentence is affection and not agitation—is practically proof positive that they aren’t monogamously, romantically involved. The type of pure, whole, electric synchronicity required to pull off that Moulin Rouge routine is entirely predicated on no one ever having resented the other for forgetting to take out the recycling. And leaving the seat up. And clogging the sink with their hair. Again.

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Or could it? In my current relationship, I don’t have the luxury of sending an entire country of overnight ice-dancing fans into a tizzy through coy non-denial denials that my partner and I are dating, because you can tell we’re dating. Like Scott and Tessa, we also display a physical and mental synchronicity, but it’s the kind that comes with slogging through the years of emotional and physical labour of being in love, not training for world championships. We don’t gaze into each other’s eyes so much as we roll our eyes at each other; we don’t breathe in sync before taking on a difficult task so much as we ensure we’ve delegated according to what we know the other person is incapable of doing; when one of us kisses the other without warning, we give them shit for their bad breath. You know we’re a couple because we’re obviously so fucking tired of each other all the time, and our literal careers don’t depend on pretending otherwise.

Couples get to know each other as people, not as teammates whose success is contingent on athletic compatibility. The most difficult part of settling into a relationship is exactly that: settling. Not in the sense of accepting less, but the way houses settle into their foundation: creaking, shifting, and sinking into a stillness that’s a little less dynamic, but a lot more solid. And athletes—which, to be clear, is what Scott and Tessa are—don’t settle! They’ll forever be daring each other to twizzle a bit twizzlier and gaze a bit deeper, because if they don’t, their whole act—which, to be clear, is what it is—falls apart.

Though I tell myself all this—and we will all tell ourselves all this, all the time, long after we’re done shipping Scott and Tessa—and I still find myself wishing there would be something sexy about it if I hurled myself crotch-first into my boyfriend’s face.

Follow Rebecca on Twitter.