Ross & Rachel & The Biggest Red Herring in Millennial Pop Culture
Yes they WERE on a break. But that’s not what matters.
Between original air date viewing, DVD box sets, syndicated reruns, and Netflix, I have watched the series Friends in its entirety, at minimum, dozens of times. (I say dozens so that you might assume 24, and not, say, over 40, which if I’m being honest is likely closer to the truth.) There’s one thing that I think about every time I cycle through to Season 3, and then can’t shake until…ever. It’s never resolved.
You might think it’s this: Were Ross and Rachel on a break?
Let’s get this out of the way. From where I’m sitting (on my couch watching Friends), yes, they were on a break.
In the Great Break Up of 1997, whether you were #TeamRoss or #TeamRachel has as much to do with your ideas of monogamy as it does with the actual plot. But on plot alone, we have to accept that they were on a break, and here’s why:
During the fight in “The One Where Ross and Rachel Take a Break” (our first clue), when Rachel says, “Maybe we should just take a break,” there is room for ambiguity. Ross responds, “Let’s cool off, let’s get some frozen yogurt or something.” Rachel has the chance to clarify, and she does. She says, “No. A break from us.”
As the Suggestor of the Breakup, Rachel has to accept that Ross took her at her word, and they are now Broken Up. Maybe she was bluffing. Maybe she was hoping it would scare him into taking her more seriously. Either way, Rachel broke up with Ross, and they were on a break.
Further supporting evidence comes on the messages Rachel later leaves on Ross’s answering machine, saying she doesn’t want to “get back together over the phone.” When she shows up later, she asks if she can “be [his] girlfriend again.” Rachel knew they were on a break. It’s only later that she rewrites history and insists that he cheated on her.
Rachel should not have let her pushy coworker Mark come over with Chinese food and then blithely (and on purpose??) ask her loud irrelevant questions about apple juice while she was on the phone with Ross, but that’s an error in judgement, not a relationship transgression. Nor can we entirely fault Ross for his interpretation of Mark’s presence as the final confirmation of a real breakup, even though his reading of the Mark situation in general is completely off base and wildly out of line.
So yeah, they were on a break. But that doesn’t really matter.
What actually matters is the unfounded, condescending, and juvenile jealous behavior that Ross displayed in the weeks leading up to the breakup fight, and the show never addresses it, not in seven subsequent seasons. It resurrects the Break/No Break argument many, many times, but never the Jealous Monstrosity of Ross.
In the series finale, Rachel gives up a career opportunity of a lifetime, working for Louis Vuitton in Paris, to be with Ross.
The writers could have shown that Ross was finally deserving of that sacrifice because he had grown and changed in the past seven years. But Ross just asks her to get off the plane, and she does, and that’s all the wrap-up we get (with one final “unless we’re on a break” joke tossed in just to prove that Ross hasn’t learned anything).
That decision by the writers, to punish Ross for sleeping with another woman rather than for dismissing his girlfriend’s career, feelings, agency, and her continued insistence that she isn’t interested in Mark, starts with the fight after Rachel finds out, in “The One With the Morning After.”
The conflict becomes about whether Rachel can forgive Ross, when really it should be about whether Rachel can move past what happened so they can solve the real conflict: Ross’s jealous and controlling behaviour. There’s no question that Ross feels badly and regrets his one night stand with Chloe, AKA The Girl from the Copy Place. But in her anger and feelings of betrayal, Rachel allows the argument to become about a single event, rather than a pattern of behavior that Ross still fails to recognize as something he should apologize for and change. Who DOES bring a picnic basket to someone’s work, after all?
Long before Ross becomes a hollow caricature of himself in later seasons and is universally reviled by audiences, we see him treating the woman he loves like an accessory, a future SAHM and adoring wife. He forgets that Rachel ran out on her wedding to Barry because she didn’t want her identity to be defined by her husband. She didn’t want to be Mrs. Dr. Barry Farber, DDS, so why would she want to be Mrs. Dr. Ross Gellar, Phd?
The whole fight starts because Ross is upset that he doesn’t get to see Rachel very often since she’s working so much. That’s fine. But to connect that issue to his imagined scenario in which Rachel isn’t actually working but sitting at her desk swooning over Mark is not fine at all. (The fact that later we find out Mark supposedly had a crush on Rachel and they go on one date doesn’t change the fact that they both behaved innocently while Ross and Rachel were still dating.)
Rachel likes Mark, platonically, because he takes her ambitions seriously, whereas Ross is just biding his time until he can marry Rachel and sweep her away from all this career nonsense. He’s so passionate about his own career that his love of dinosaurs is written into his personality, but he regards Rachel’s love of fashion as trivial and secondary to their relationship. In a real moment in “The One With Phoebe’s Ex-Partner,” when Ross and Rachel fight after Ross insists on chaperoning her at a fashion lecture and then makes fun of her profession by comparing it to his, Rachel tells him that she likes having something in her life that’s just for her: “My work, it’s for me, I’m out there on my own and I’m doing it. I mean it’s scary, but I love it because it’s mine.”
It’s a missed opportunity for Ross to take off his green filter and see the issue for what it is: not about him at all.
When Ross sleeps with Chloe, he turns the central issue to one of fidelity, and in this narrow situation, he is not in the wrong. But he’s still wrong about his jealous rage and possessiveness and unfounded mistrust of Rachel, and he never has to account for that. Later he tells his ex-wife Carol that he and Rachel broke up because she fell in love with Mark, which he knows to not be even the least bit true.
When Ross and Rachel briefly reconcile in the episode that contains the best grammatical correction of all time, their fight remains about whether or not they were on a break. Rachel writes 18 pages — front AND back! — but misses the chance to make Ross account for the bad behavior that lead to the fight that lead to the break/non-break incident in the first place. Even if she won by getting Ross to admit what they both know deep down to be false, that they were on a break, she’d still lose. She’d have the upper hand of forgiveness, for a little while, and then she’d casually mention a male acquaintance one day and Ross would go off the rails again.
I know that Friends has many problems (fat-shaming, transphobia, lesbians-as-punchlines, the sheer whiteness of it all) but watching it now, most of them are cringe-inducing and obvious. We know that those terrible jokes would thankfully not make it to air today. But the Ross and Rachel issue feels less obvious, like a trope you still see on sitcoms. Friends continues to pull in new, young viewers, some of whom were not born when the show aired its final episode. Some may still see the central issue as the on-a-break/not-on-a-break dichotomy and miss the more insidious, relationship-crushing actual issue.
Maybe it’s high time to re-examine our cultural touchstones and how they impact our relationships. Maybe it’s time to let go of the idea that sexual fidelity, while it may be important, is the most important part of a relationship, the part that necessarily outweighs everything else. Maybe it’s time we tell Rachel, hey, you were on a break, and you have to let that go. But you don’t have to let the other bullshit go. Not by a long shot.
We all deserve better than a passive aggressive singing telegram at our workplace, don’t we?
