For those of you who aren’t aware, The Bear is an incredibly fantastic show; it’s explosive, sobering, gut-busting, beautiful, and perhaps the single most artistic panic attack since Terry Gilliam’s 1998 dark comedy film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It’s utterly magnificent.
The Bear is also a popular show, and is subsequently subject to all the things that a fandom usually likes to charge their show or franchise with; this can include fan theories, obsessing over the celebrities that their viewership has boosted the careers of, and, of course, shipping characters with one another.
In the case of The Bear, Jeremy Allen White’s Carmy is at the center of the shipping game, with plenty of folks going to bat for a Carmy-Sydney romance, and others firmly siding with the Carmy-Claire endgame.
These are both terrible ideas.
Carmy, as a character, works best without romance
Carmy, like every human being, deserves love. That much cannot be denied, nor should anything here be read as an attempt to dismiss such a claim. But, the fact of the matter is that Carmy’s healing journey (aka the inner thrust of The Bear) is a road that must be walked alone, and the love he deserves must come from within himself. Is it any wonder that some of White’s best performances in the show are the monologues he gives in Al-Anon meetings?
In the case of Claire and Carmy, the crashing and burning of that relationship in season 2 is both literally and figuratively tied with Carmy’s toxic relationship to his work; a toxicity that’s very apparent when reflected in Claire. As a restauranteur, Carmy ultimately wants to take care of his customers, and this want is driven by an indignation that eventually causes him to abuse any of his employees who aren’t on the exact same page as him.
As an ER doctor, Claire is Carmy’s equal in terms of professional ambition, but her work — and, indeed, the manner in which she takes care of her patients (customers) — is more important and emotionally/mentally taxing by several orders of magnitude. Yet, despite these stakes, we hardly see an iota of the vitriol that we see in Carmy. Perhaps Carmy, on some level, is aware of this and becomes angrier about his work and the effect it has on him, and therefore angrier towards himself, and therefore harmful to those around him, like Claire. Carmy’s most important relationship, then, is the one he has with his work; that relationship needs to take priority over romance if Carmy is to heal.
It’s for this same reason that a romance with Sydney would be harmful for both her and Carmy. Their current relationship exists entirely within the context of Carmy’s work, and Sydney herself is demonstrating a rocky relationship to that work herself. It’s true that Sydney challenges Carmy, and by extension challenges the toxic relationship he currently has with his work, but in order to improve that relationship, Carmy needs to not only develop some sort of distance from his work, but find — in that distance — a place for grace in the parts of his life he’s unsuccessfully trying to address by doubling down on his work. A romance with Sydney would be counterproductive to both of those endeavors, and given, again, her own relationship with that same work at the moment, getting personal feelings involved as they are now would only make things worse on that front, and that’s not even bringing the power dynamics of the kitchen into play.
But what about when Carmy has had such an internal journey? Would a Sydney or Claire romance be on the books then?
The Bear has a chance to address a very important romance topic
There’s an age-old romance adage that says you can’t love others/expect others to love you until you love yourself. To this day, I have failed to find a stupider piece of advice; not because loving yourself is a bad idea, but because it frames loving oneself as a stepping stone to an end goal of having a relationship.
Make no mistake; the ability to give yourself love and grace and peace is absolutely, positively its own reward. However, if Carmy is to somehow achieve that reward, the beauty of such a feeling and accomplishment would be undercut if his “prize” for not being completely miserable all the time was a girlfriend. The additional problem of viewing potential romantic partners themselves in such a way speaks for itself.
What if, instead, when the time comes, The Bear celebrates Carmy’s healing as the true endgame? Moreover, Carmy isn’t lacking love in his life; between Sugar, revelations from Cicero, and Richie (who, despite season 3 appearances, still clearly loves Carmy), love was never something Carmy needed to earn from anyone; he just needed to allow it to come from within. The Bear‘s naturalistic mayhem tends to subvert that which is often expected (and present) in other episodic dramas; why not set up Claire’s future in the show with respect to that?
Is there a world where Carmy and Claire reconcile and make something wonderful together when all is said and done? Yes, absolutely. But would it be even more wonderful if Carmy’s inner happiness, just by itself, is recognized as the ultimate emotional win condition that it is? I think so, chef.