The 6 Month Break, Or The Guilt-Free Way To Dump A Love Interest

Say you’re a showrunner and you’ve set up your leading man or lady with a love interest, just to mix things up. Say their on-screen love affair is going along pretty well with a few bumps thrown in to “keep it real”. Then say you decide it’s time to dump the love interest. Maybe they were just a temporary relationship until the REAL one – the one the fans have been jonesing for – could happen. Or the guest star needs to move on to other projects. Or your lead’s life is too easy and you need to give them some drama. But you’ve established that the love interest is a nice person (otherwise your lead wouldn’t have fallen for them in the first place), and you don’t want to make your lead look stupid/insane/murderous. How do you get rid of the love interest?

Send them on a humanitarian mission for six months, that’s how.

Matt and Betty, love on the run

A few weeks ago Ugly Betty‘s Matt and Betty broke up after Matt announced he was going to Africa for six months, “or longer”, to participate in humanitarian work. Betty can’t go with him, nor can she blame him for wanting to make a difference in the world, so they break up. I never saw much chemistry between Matt and Betty, so I never thought he was The One for her. This was a creative way to end that relationship without a lot of angst, I thought.

Then I watched last week’s Psych. Shawn and Abigail have been together for a while now, but we all know Shawn and Juliet are meant for each other. But Abigail is so nice! She’s sweet, she seems to “get” Shawn, and she’s got a quirky sense of humor. So how can the writers disentangle Shawn without undoing some of the character growth we’ve seen lately? Voila! A humanitarian trip to Uganda to build schools and teach children presents itself and Abigail takes it. How long will she be away? Six months. At least. (To be fair, this episode of Psych had been filmed long before Ugly Betty‘s similarly plotted extrication aired.) Good-bye Abigail, hello chance to mature a bit for Shawn. Oh, and now the Shawn/Juliet pairing can progress. Neat and tidy.

So there you have it, aspiring screenwriters. The perfect way to extricate your lead from a nice-but-not-really-going-anywhere relationship.

(Why is Chuck a tag on this article? Because if you watched the season premiere last month, you may have noticed that after Chuck opted to save the world instead of run away with Sarah, he fell into a depression for…six months. Apparently six months isn’t enough time for Chuck to get over Sarah, or vice versa.)