xandromedovna | Meta: Bi Marriage (Rules s2)-- DFvQ

CW: heteronormativity, biphobia, bi erasure, sexism, toxic masculinity, transphobia

The main point of contrast in Rules is between Jeff and Audrey’s relationship and Jennifer and Adam’s. Jeff and Audrey’s lengthy experience with heterosexual marriage gives them strong opinions on how to make a marriage work, whereas Jennifer and Adam’s relative inexperience means that they encounter many obstacles for the first time. The two couples help each other become better partners, though usually not without getting worse first. There are several axes on which the two couples are foils, such as income level and age, which shapes the difference in their responses to issues. But I also argue that part of the reason is that Jennifer and Adam have more fluid conceptions of sexuality and gender roles that make the hyperheterosexuality of Jeff and Audrey’s relationship unrealistic and uncomfortable for them.

While all of the characters get queerbaited to an extent (Audrey and Jeff get it the least, Russell and Timmy get it the most), Jennifer and Adam get a healthy enough dose that while they’re still in an M/F relationship, they often read more as a bi4bi couple than a cishet couple. Adam is more impulsive with money, passive, and sensitive whereas Jennifer is more practical, frugal, and assertive. Adam was a cheerleader and Jennifer is handy with tools. Adam’s mom is bisexual and Jennifer “could tell you some stories” about her experience with lesbians (2x8). Adam takes the brunt of the group’s teasing for seeming queer, but even Jennifer is razzed for being “the closest thing to a guy that relationship’s got” (6x5). Both of them are heavily implied to have had same-sex experiences, such as when Jennifer runs into her ex-fling Patty at a lesbian bar or when Adam lets slip he and his friend Kyle touched each other at camp. Jennifer herself sometimes doubts Adam’s heterosexuality: “If you’re gay, tell me now, because I do not wanna go through that again” (1x6). This is often in reaction to his brief intense relationships with other men, such as when Adam is enamored with their cooking instructor whom he ends up having to carry to safety, or an ex-boyfriend of hers he bonds with:

Jennifer: Unbelievable! I mean doesn’t he know he’s supposed to be annoyed and uncomfortable? I mean I had sex with that guy!
Audrey: Mm, looks like you and Adam might have that in common pretty soon. (2x12)

I don’t think either of them would necessarily identify as bisexual, not because they aren’t but because bi erasure means it’s just not part of their framework for conceptualizing sexuality. However, they still move through the world in a way that reads more queerly than Audrey and Jeff, both to the audience and to the other characters. In general they have much kinkier sex than Jeff and Audrey, who at one point (mistakenly) think they hear Jennifer pegging Adam through the door, and they sometimes lean into the queerness of their sex life:

Jeff: Jen, you’re a girl, right?
Adam: Well, if she’s not she did some pretty gay stuff to me last night. (5x5)

Adam routinely gets mistaken for gay, such as when he accidentally becomes the face of a gay dating service or gets arrested for solicitation. While most of this is queerbaiting, the fact that these things happen more often to him and Jen than to Jeff and Audrey shows their comparative violation of straight stereotypes.

That said, from the beginning they’ve pushed back on the supposed queerness of the healthy parts of their relationship:

Adam: I proposed because I love her.
Russell: Oh, that’s so gay.
Adam: Being in love with a woman is gay?
Russell: No, but saying it out loud to another guy is. (1x1)

At times Jennifer and Adam look to Jeff and Audrey for advice that, when taken, doesn’t quite apply to their situation. In the pilot, Jeff convinces Adam marriage is a soul-crushing battle, causing him to get in his head about marrying Jennifer. When Adam’s sexist assumptions about marriage start a fight with her, he has to reconsider what he wants out of marriage. At other times, they look to Jeff and Audrey as a prime example of what not to do, only to run into similar problems. For example, when Audrey tells them why they don’t have kids, Jennifer and Adam decide to discuss what they want their future to look like so they don’t end up waiting so long to have kids. At first, it seems like they’re perfectly in sync, but when it’s revealed Adam would expect Jennifer to give up her career, they get in a fight. In both instances they can only reconcile when they stop trying to make their relationship conform to some prescribed (straight) vision of the future.

On the rare occasions Audrey and Jeff turn to Adam and Jennifer for advice, the queerness of the intervention is often suggested if not stated outright:

Jeff: That sounds super gay.
Adam: I was just trying to—
Jeff: Nonono, super gay may be what’s called for here, Audrey loves that kind of thing. (6x8)

When the straight couple runs into impasses, inspiration from queer lifeways is needed to navigate the conflict. To be fair, Audrey and Jeff sometimes do this on their own; in the episode where Jeff’s dad comes to visit, his dad is a stereotypical man of the 50s who expects Audrey to be in the kitchen and to smile and nod, which infuriates her. When she gets fed up, Jeff has to confront his dad: “you can act like some kind of cave man in your own home, but in our house, women are equal to men. They’re men with boobs” (3x4). In another episode, Jeff says to Audrey, “you’re kinda like a chick and a dude, and I don’t mean like those pictures Russell emails me” (2x15). And yet, these moments of queer articulation are deployed to shore up heteropatriarchy—notice that Audrey can be mannish (in a universalizing human sense) but Jeff can’t be womanish. Unlike in Jennifer and Adam’s relationship, where Adam is routinely feminized and Jennifer is often masculinized.

At any rate, the difference in approach between the two relationships is often emphasized by parallel plotlines where Jen and Adam’s solution is less heteronormative. Despite both being M/F couples, Jennifer and Adam’s relationship is coded as significantly more queer than Audrey and Jeff’s, and while the queerbaiting directed at them is a form of policing when they step outside the bounds of conventional heterosexuality, it also points out that at a certain point all real love is queer in its refusal/inability to conform to impossible ideals of heteropatriarchy.

Also Adam and Jennifer are bi because I said so, hope this helps.