20 Onscreen Relationships That Should Never Have Existed

Television and movies have given us some legendary couples. They have also given us romances that felt like they were assembled by a writers’ room dartboard, a panic button, and one deeply cursed bottle of wine. Not every bad relationship is bad storytelling, of course. Sometimes a terrible couple is the point. The real problem starts when a show or movie wants us to swoon while we’re sitting on the couch whispering, “Absolutely not.”

That is the energy behind this list. These are the onscreen relationships that should never have existed because they were forced, creepy, wildly incompatible, narratively pointless, or so toxic they made healthy communication look like a fantasy genre. Some wrecked character growth. Some hijacked entire seasons. Some had all the romantic heat of two damp cardboard boxes touching in a garage.

So, with respect to the actors who did their best and the fans who still have strong opinions in group chats, here are 20 onscreen relationships that never should have made it past the idea board.

20 Onscreen Relationships That Should Never Have Existed

1. Rachel Green and Joey Tribbiani Friends

   This pairing felt less like organic character development and more like the show rummaging through old plot bins in the final stretch. Rachel and Joey worked beautifully as friends: affectionate, funny, and weirdly wholesome. As a romance, though, they felt like a sitcom dare. The chemistry was off, the timing was late, and the whole thing landed like a detour designed to delay the inevitable Ross-and-Rachel finish line.

2. Carrie Bradshaw and Aleksandr Petrovsky Sex and the City

   On paper, this sounded sophisticated: glamorous writer meets worldly artist, Paris beckons, cue designer coats. In practice, it was a giant blinking warning sign in a turtleneck. Petrovsky was self-absorbed, dismissive, and emotionally chilly, which is not exactly what you want from the man you moved across the Atlantic for. Carrie did not need a romance; she needed a return ticket and a nap.

3. Jackie Burkhart and Fez That ’70s Show

   Fez spending years pining for Jackie was one thing. Actually turning them into a couple was another, much stranger thing. The relationship felt like a last-season shrug, as if the show looked around, realized it was running out of combinations, and said, “Sure, why not?” Because there was almost no believable romantic spark once the fantasy became reality, that’s why not.

4. Lorelai Gilmore and Christopher Hayden Gilmore Girls

   This relationship had years of history, yes, but history is not the same thing as compatibility. Christopher represented chaos, unfinished business, and emotional regression wrapped in a familiar face. Pairing him with Lorelai that late in the game felt like the show stepping on its own rake. Instead of deepening her arc, it made her seem stuck in old habits she had already outgrown.

5. Andy Bernard and Erin Hannon The Office

   The problem here was not just that the romance lacked spark. It was that it looked like the show trying to recreate an earlier magic formula and getting photocopy-quality results. Andy and Erin had cute moments, but the relationship never earned the emotional weight it was given. What followed was awkward, stretched-out, and less charming than the writers clearly hoped.

6. Ted Mosby and Zoey Pierson How I Met Your Mother

   Ah yes, the classic romantic setup: man falls for woman actively working against his professional dream. The pursuit had tension, but the actual relationship exposed the obvious problem: they fundamentally wanted different things, and not in a cute opposites-attract way. Ted and Zoey were the human version of a meeting that should have been an email.

7. Ann Perkins and Tom Haverford Parks and Recreation

   Ann was often the grounded center of the show. Tom was a hilarious tornado in expensive sneakers. As friends in the same orbit, perfect. As a couple, baffling. The relationship mostly existed to generate awkward jokes, but the jokes never justified how little sense the pairing made. It did not reveal hidden depth. It revealed that not every subplot needs to leave the writers’ room.

8. Rosita Espinosa and Gabriel Stokes The Walking Dead

   Post-apocalyptic life is hard, sure, but that does not automatically make every nearby adult a compelling romantic match. Rosita and Gabriel felt less like a developed love story and more like a time-jump footnote that accidentally became canon. Their relationship was not offensive so much as dramatically weightless, which might be worse on a show that specialized in making every emotional beat feel life-or-death.

9. Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen Game of Thrones

   The show spent years steering these two powerful figures toward each other, only to turn the whole thing into an awkward cocktail of rushed passion, shaky pacing, and deeply unfortunate family math. Once the truth about Jon’s parentage came out, the romance became less sweeping and more “maybe everyone should sit down for a minute.” Epic scale cannot save a relationship that feels both hurried and misguided.

10. Archie Andrews and Valerie Brown Riverdale

    Teen dramas love a temporary romance, but this one barely had time to remove its coat. Archie and Valerie felt like filler, not fate. Their relationship arrived quickly, exited quickly, and mostly served to stall other pairings already looming on the horizon. It was the romantic equivalent of an app update no one asked for.

11. Aria Montgomery and Ezra Fitz Pretty Little Liars

    This one was controversial then and looks even worse now. The show framed Aria and Ezra as star-crossed soulmates, but the teacher-student dynamic made the whole romance deeply inappropriate from the start. What was sold as passionate and forbidden often played more like grooming with dramatic lighting. When a relationship requires viewers to ignore an entire field of ethical red flags, it does not belong in the endgame box.

12. Jackson Avery and Maggie Pierce Grey’s Anatomy

    Sometimes two individually good characters become a couple and somehow make each other less interesting. That was Jackson and Maggie. Their storyline cycled through arguments, discomfort, and emotional static until the relationship became a weekly reminder that chemistry cannot be ordered in bulk. Instead of making either character feel more layered, it made both feel trapped in a joyless loop.

13. Ted Mosby and Robin Scherbatsky How I Met Your Mother

    Yes, they mattered to the show. No, that does not mean they should have been treated as the grand romantic answer after years of evidence to the contrary. Ted wanted one life. Robin wanted another. The series spent a long time proving why they did not fit, then swerved back anyway. It was less “fated love” and more “we wrote this ending a long time ago and now everyone must suffer.”

14. Carrie Bradshaw and Mr. Big Sex and the City

    Television has rarely glamorized emotional inconsistency with this much confidence. Big was charismatic, sure, but he was also evasive, unreliable, and a repeat offender in the mixed-signals Olympics. Carrie kept interpreting instability as passion, and the show often encouraged the same read. As a case study in how not to confuse anxiety with romance, this relationship deserves a museum wing.

15. Buffy Summers and Spike Buffy the Vampire Slayer

    Were they compelling television? Absolutely. Were they healthy together? Not remotely. The relationship had obsession, violence, emotional damage, and enough misery to power a small city. It worked dramatically because it was dark and destructive, but that also makes it a prime example of a couple that should never have existed in real emotional terms. Great scenes, terrible idea.

16. Jim Preston and Aurora Lane Passengers

    This movie wanted to be a glossy space romance, which would have been easier if its central premise were not built on a giant consent nightmare. Jim wakes Aurora from hibernation because he is lonely, effectively stealing her entire life, and the film still expects us to invest in their love story. That is not a meet-cute. That is a moral emergency with attractive lighting.

17. Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey Fifty Shades

    The biggest issue here is not that the relationship is intense. It is that the films keep trying to frame control, manipulation, and emotional abuse as aspirational romance. Christian is possessive, invasive, and domineering, while Ana is repeatedly asked to absorb his behavior as proof of wounded depth. A luxury penthouse does not magically turn red flags into rose petals.

18. Mark and Juliet Love Actually

    The cue-card scene has been packaged as iconic for years, but strip away the holiday glow and it gets weird fast. Juliet is newly married to Mark’s best friend, and Mark responds by staging a grand, intrusive confession on her doorstep. The movie treats this as noble yearning; many viewers experience it as a boundary issue in a wool coat. Snow does not make everything romantic.

19. Nick and Amy Dunne Gone Girl

    To be fair, this relationship is not pretending to be healthy. But it still belongs here because it is one of the most impressively catastrophic pairings ever put onscreen. Nick and Amy weaponize performance, resentment, and manipulation until their marriage becomes mutually assured destruction in designer packaging. It is brilliant to watch and horrifying to imagine living through, which is exactly why it should never have existed.

20. Margaret Tate and Andrew Paxton The Proposal

    Rom-coms sometimes ask us to accept wildly implausible premises, and that is part of the fun. What is less fun is a boss coercing an employee into a fake engagement under threat of professional fallout and the movie still expecting us to root for the couple. Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds work hard, but chemistry can only do so much when the entire setup is built on a workplace power imbalance wearing a charming smile.

Why These Relationships Failed So Hard

What links all of these couples is not just that they were “bad.” Bad can be interesting. Messy can be magnetic. Television and movies need flawed relationships because conflict is story fuel. But the pairings above usually collapsed for one of four reasons: they ignored basic compatibility, relied on coercion or imbalance, arrived long after the audience had emotionally moved on, or asked viewers to mistake chaos for chemistry.

That last one is the biggest offender. Pop culture has spent decades teaching audiences that if a relationship is intense enough, it must also be meaningful. But intensity is cheap. You can get intensity from jealousy, secrecy, control, obsession, or one person standing in the rain making choices a therapist would classify as “concerning.” Real chemistry is harder. It requires emotional logic. It requires two characters who actually seem better, sharper, or more themselves together.

When a show nails that, viewers know it instantly. When it does not, viewers also know it instantly, and then they spend the next ten years posting side-eye memes about it. We have all had that watching experience: one character leans in for the kiss, the music swells, and instead of melting, you pause the episode and pace around the room like you have personally been betrayed by network television.

And honestly, that experience is part of what makes bad onscreen relationships unforgettable. They provoke secondhand embarrassment, fandom civil wars, hate-watches, dramatic rewatches, and extremely specific group-chat essays sent at 12:14 a.m. They become cultural landmarks not because they are romantic, but because they reveal how sharply audiences can spot false notes. We know when a pairing exists because the story earned it, and we definitely know when it exists because somebody in development muttered, “What if we just put these two together?”

There is also something weirdly educational about these disasters. They remind us that charm is not character, longing is not compatibility, and a grand gesture is not a substitute for respect. A relationship can be visually gorgeous, passionately acted, and scored within an inch of its life and still feel completely wrong. Sometimes especially then. The prettier the wrapping, the more obvious the emotional nonsense inside.

So yes, awful onscreen couples can be frustrating. They can derail shows, flatten characters, and make audiences yell at their televisions like unpaid script doctors. But they also give us a useful pop-culture service: they clarify what we do want from screen romance. We want tension, sure, but also logic. We want sparks, but also trust. We want characters whose connection feels surprising in the best way, not alarming in the “please call HR, a priest, and three editors” way.

That may be why lists like this never go out of style. Bad onscreen relationships are the cinematic version of touching a hot pan. You do it once, regret it immediately, and somehow remember it forever.

Final Thoughts

The worst onscreen relationships are not always the most toxic in purely moral terms. Sometimes they are simply the most unnecessary. They drain momentum, distort character arcs, and leave viewers doing the one thing romance should never inspire: checking how many minutes are left. The couples on this list were not doomed because love is complicated. They were doomed because the storytelling, the ethics, the chemistry, or the logic never lined up.

And that is why they still live in pop-culture infamy. Not as great tragic romances. Not as guilty pleasures. But as the pairings that made audiences everywhere say, with full conviction, “Nope. Absolutely not. Put that relationship back where you found it.”

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