Happy Valentine’s Day! And happy Anna Curtis birthday, the only true holiday I celebrate on February 14.

I did not expect to write about relationships for Valentine’s Day but my finding both the ability to form semi-coherent thoughts and the time to write them down seems to have coincided as such so here we are.

I was similarly not expecting the Donald Glover-Maya Erskine Mr. and Mrs. Smith remake (if we can call it that, but more on that in a bit) to make me think meaningfully about relationships — I was mostly tuning in for the real estate (more on that later as well) — and again, here we are.

To back up a bit, when it was announced sometime last year that Donald Glover (Community, Atlanta) and Maya Erskine (Pen15, Plus One) would be the stars of a Mr. and Mrs. Smith remake, I was part of the chorus of skeptics. I love, or at minimum, enjoy, the work of both of those actors, but for all their many charms, they are hard to imagine as either half of an on-screen couple generating enough chemistry and charisma to literally ruin at least one, possibly several, marriages.

Then, to be honest, I forgot about the show. Then, two weeks ago I read a review calling it an Architectural Digest home tour turned spy show. (Shout out to my queen Kathryn VanArendonk.) So I gave it a shot. I simply love looking at real estate I can’t afford.

I would describe Amazon’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith best as being the kind of remake that would benefit most from not sharing the name of its source material, such is the difference in tone (and to some degree, story) with the 2005 Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie banger.

Of the many differences, it is a TV show (obviously) and an extremely episodic one at that: Each episode follows a different mission the couple undertake. They are also strangers paired to be a spy-assassin duo, not rival spy-assassins who incidentally meet, fall in love and get married. The movie has a clear plot and story arc — effective, if simple, stakes. The TV show does not really have any of those things.

This is because the show positions itself more so as about the ups and downs of a relationship than any kind of Big Bad conspiracy. In that sense, it has more in common with the HBO Max series Love Life in that the driving question is: Will these (two people) find love and happiness (together)?

To this end, in addition to each episode being a new mission for John and Jane, it’s aligned (explicitly, right there in the episode titles) with a different stage or milestone in a relationship (First Date, First Vacation, Couples Therapy, Infidelity, etc. — would we call infidelity a milestone? A subject for another time).

Now, to call Mr. and Mrs. Smith a spy show that is really about a marriage would/should draw unflattering comparisons to The Americans, the ultimate spy show that is really about a marriage but also a show that operated from a totally different framework of genre, storytelling, writing, etc. Much as Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2024) isn’t trying to be Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005), it also isn’t trying to be The Americans.

So let’s take Mr. and Mrs. Smith for what it is, which is a decidedly good time! I agree with the assessment that it is first and foremost a real estate tour and a strong temptation to sell out in the fastest way possible. (Could I kill for that Como cottage*? Shan’t be answering that on the written record!)

Aesthetics do thus seem to be its strongest appeal. I wish it was funnier, given how funny we’ve seen the cast be in other things. Both Glover and Erskine are masters of line delivery and physical comedy so they set and don’t clear a very high bar for me. The show’s sitcom structure and jumpy timeline — it’s very unclear the amount of time that passes between episodes — also makes it admittedly hard to get emotionally invested in the couple or feel the weight of the aforementioned milestones in their relationship.

I also think it makes it harder for the show to explore the themes it teases an interest in (financial security, power dynamics, race, capitalism, careers, children — plus the intersection of all those with and in a relationship). Ultimately, I can’t say I really cared whether John and Jane ended up together at the end, which again, is the only thing resembling a driving question of the show.

Still I do think the question is, in fact, maybe more interesting that show itself — especially in contrast to the relationship at the molten-hot heart of the film version. And now I have to ask you to excuse me while I read far too deeply into what I just got done saying is a piece of entertainment best enjoyed at face value.

Whether or not John and Jane stay/end up together is tied distinctly to two concerns: whether they like/love each other enough to overcome the things they don’t have in common and their petty dislikes, and whether they are sufficiently motivated and equipped to communicate to do the work to do so.

These are, perhaps not unrelatedly as John and Jane are millennials and so am I, also the distinct concerns of any and all group chats or text threads I have been in with anyone who has been single and/or dating in the last 2-3 years.

What’s mildly (or more than mildly) upsetting about this is that it both lowers the bar deep into hell and also finds the vast majority of dating society unable to clear to it.

The problem isn’t that such a view of love suggests, as the movie version does too, that relationships require work — a semantic thread I am inclined to pull at because effort, care, attention seem better words and is it work if you’re doing it because you want to, because you care about the person?

I suppose yes, but work carries such negative connotations. There is an Ursula K. LeGuin quote I like (but have only ever read out of context so forgive me if I am misapplying it) that goes, “Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new.”

I like that, partially because I love bread, but also because it feels true. All the loves of my life, romantic or otherwise, have been re-made over time. The love I have, for example, for my best friends looks different today than it did when we met and fell in love 12 or 13 or 14 years ago.

It is also not that the relationship in the Mr. and Mrs. Smith series is unappealing. In many ways, I would argue it presents the framework of a much more enviable kind of romantic love than the film.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith paints a picture of love that is deeply familiar — and truthfully, I was never more charmed by their relationship than when they are newly together and just roasting the hell out of each other, and their feelings for each other, in bed. It struck me how their intimacy was so deeply rooted in the two’s ability to make fun of each other, to know each other well enough to tease and fight lovingly, not cruelly. Such a silly thing, but the kind of intimacy one only really builds up with someone who one sees or talks to (and, in this case, works with) every day. The banter isn’t charged, but it’s intimate nonetheless.

I don’t necessarily think one should marry or date their best friend, but I do think you should, uh, like spending time with person you’re with and feel an unparalleled level of comfort with them, or at least a level paralleled by the other loves of your life.

(Sidebar — I don’t think Mr. and Mrs. Smith does a particularly good job building on this scene to deepen the intimacy between the characters. I am only four episodes in but I do think the new One Day series on Netflix would perhaps have been a better case study, given I’ve seen it described as “an homage to friendship, and to those who add meaning to our lives” as well as being anchored by “lovely chemistry that teeters between deep intimacy and sexual tension.” I would not say Glover and Erskine have that but that could be a fault of the writing. Alas I try to avoid writing about shows I have not finished.)

A possibly apocryphal story about my best friend from high school goes that she didn’t want roses or big gestures, just someone to tell her you’re awesome and I like spending time with you. I adopted this as my own and variations of this refrain have become something that my (present day, different) best friend and I say to each other, it is our thing now and I will never need a man to say it to me, but it remains very much a big thing for me. I have dated my fair share of men that I did not actually enjoy spending time with, and been hurt by just as many who didn’t see our ability to talk about lobotomies or make the other one laugh as a testament to what we could be to each other.

(On this subject I would also like to plug the Jack Quaid and Maya Erskine romcom Plus One — a movie that comes to define love as finding someone you want to hang out with as long as humanely possible and just trying not to screw it up.)

In any case, I think that’s the kind of love that Mr. and Mrs. Smith is interested in, but the kicker is that that alone is not enough. You need someone who thinks you’re awesome and wants to spend time with you AND is willing to do the work to make it work.

The title of this newsletter comes from the Joe Strummer song used in the Mr. and Mrs. Smith movie. It is a great song that opens the film and is used as recurring motif for their ✨ love ✨.

To the extent that the song has a narrative it is about a spy who falls in love with a woman on a mission and to the extent it can be applied to both Mr. and Mrs. Smiths, it concludes that it is simply not fair that both couples fell in love with people who have made their lives more difficult, more complicated, more work — but such is life.

We have talked a lot amongst my friend groups about whether relationships should be easy — whether its a red flag when they are a lot of work from the start. I think they can, should — maybe — be both.

Easy to be with each other, an easy rapport, an easy comfort, but work to understand and know and see each other, work to actively and conscientiously fit this person into your life. Ideally, this doesn’t feel like work at all, but it is a form of work nonetheless.

Nobody said it was fair.

*A follow up on the Como cottage: As a known hater of the cinematic romantic gesture of BUYING REAL ESTATE WITH/FOR SOMEONE YOU JUST HAD A RELATIONSHIP-THREATENING FIGHT WITH, WHICH IS REALLY JUST SADDLING A PERSON YOU ALLEGEDLY LOVE WITH A 30 YEAR MORTGAGE, this is the only known instance where it would have been ok for me because it clearly was a pebble in the pool of their finances and yet she was RIGHTLY still annoyed he BOUGHT THEM A HOUSE without consulting her.

P.S. A final note on the movie because I do not have an editor and I didn’t want to delete this but didn’t know where else to put it: I rewatched it after watching the series — to be honest, I think it’s a classic. It is an extremely fun action movie and both funnier and hotter than the TV show. Yes I know Brad Pitt put Angelina Jolie (and Jennifer Aniston) through hell after that but regrettably I still love it. This is my truth.