User blog:IEmbargo/On Shippers and Shipping - Part Five

Final Thoughts

As a general philosophical belief, I do not like shipping because it implies that two characters are "meant to be" together. I believe the series does an immense disservice to its fans for promulgating a point of view that I think is malarkey - especially for younger viewers.

FACTS: approximately 75% of high schoolers are in steady or semi-steady relationships by the end of their senior year. But only about 1 out of 7 of those actually result in a marriage. Within 2 years, half of them are divorced. Within 10 years, 1 out of 7 marriages did not divorce. That means that under 2% of all high school relationships result in a marriage that lasts over 10 years. That's not "meant to be."

Collegiates do somewhat better: About 90% of college grads are dating or married by the time of graduation of their terminal degree. Approximately 2 out of 3 of those result in a marriage, and about half of those last more than 10 years. That means that only 1/3 of all college relationships last more than 10 years. That's not "meant to be" either.

And, to put a tin hat on it, a paper presented in the Journal of Applied Probability in 1990 posited that up to 85% of all attempts at "coupling up" fail outright. (The authors' analyses modelled the system resulting in "coupling up" as a Markov Process, but that is not relevant here.)

Any series that presents a young couple in any fashion outside of these norms is doing its viewers as much a disservice as the old "Star Trek" series did for me: they presented characters without emotions or who controlled their emotions by sheer will power who were still well-adjusted with society. Because of this, my peers and I often had - at best - stunted emotional growth well into adulthood. We make the "geeks as blackface" guys on "The Big Bang Theory" looke like normal people. Honest. Similarly, IMHO, a show that presents ships as anything other than transitory or requiring a lot of work is lying to the audience and hurts the fans emotionally. Conversely, honest relationships are hard work and typically don't work.