“I am not a crazy, jealous person.”
Ross Geller is one of TV’s original ‘nice guys.’
Yet ever since Friends ended in 2004,
we’ve been able to take a more critical look at Ross,
and spot some of the many red flags
we once disregarded.
“I didn’t get the annulment. We’re still married.
Don’t tell Rachel, see you later.”
Some fans have even gone so far as to
remove the laugh track from certain scenes,
to reveal just how sinister Ross can really be.
“You attacked your ex-wife?”
“Oh no no. I tried.”
Through this retrospective lens, we can see Ross as an example
of male fragility.
“Anyway, she thought the very idea of me playing rugby
with him was, like, hilarious. So I'm gonna show her
how tough I really am.”
He’s a guy who’s so preoccupied with proving that he’s a ‘man,’
he often ends up overcompensating
and even hurting others in the process—
and perhaps more than anything, he’s a narcissist, too focused on himself
and his own needs to ever develop emotionally.
“We need to talk.”
“Okay… sometimes I feel…”
No, no, don't. I'm going to talk. I just don't think I can take
another second of you whining!”
And yet, after ten seasons of this questionable behavior,
Ross ends up getting his dream girl anyway.
“You know, it’s like one of those things
you think is never going to happen and then it does and it’s everything
you want it to be.”
Here’s our Take on the many Toxic Takeaways
from Ross Geller’s story, and the lessons he can teach us
about how not to be a good friend.
“Hey!”
“Ugh, this guy again”]
“And my father walks in and says... What's wrong with you,
why aren't you... why aren't you… why aren’t you outside playing
like a... like a real boy?”
Ross is a classic example of a guy who regards his masculinity
as under perpetual attack.
“Not that it's any of your business,
but we did go out.”
“Really? You two?”
“Not only did we go out… we did it 298 times!”
According to Dr. Darcia Narvaez, boys who grow up feeling insecure
have difficulties behaving in a way that is “fiercely egalitarian.”
And when these boys grow up, they become insecure men
who cope by attempting to dominate."
“GIVE ME MY PUCK!”
As Dr. Narvaez writes, the fragile male
“uses his survival instincts—
territoriality, rivalry, routines, and group loyalty—
to move through the social world.”
Ross certainly falls back on these “survival instincts.”
As we see, he demonstrates territoriality over the women he dates.
“It was like you were marking your territory.
I mean you might have well have just come in and peed all around my desk!”
He makes a rival out of his ex-wife’s new partner, Carol.
“Susan’s Carol’s, Carol’s, Carol’s, Carol’s friend.”
“Life partner.”
Likewise, any men who dare intrude on his territory—
such as Rachel’s other romantic interests, or even her male coworkers—
are met with grudges and suspicion.
“Look, if you’re not working with him anymore,
why do you still have to do stuff with him?”
“Because, he’s my friend!”
“Okay, but do you really need another friend?”
Many men will try to frame their nerdiness—
especially when it leads to their being rejected by girls—
as a form of trauma.
“So what it is, you’re saying you can just put away feelings or whatever the hell
it was you felt for me?
“Hey, I’ve been doing it since the 9th grade.”
And even though he’s channeled those nerdy interests into a successful career,
and he obviously has no problem with attracting women,
it’s clear that Ross has crafted a narrative about himself
as someone who is unfairly demeaned and emasculated.
“Ross play rugby? I don't think so. Heh.”
“What? What's so funny about that?”
This low self esteem is only compounded by Ross’s first marriage,
which ends when his wife leaves him for another woman.
“And you never knew she was a lesbian.”
In 2012, psychologists Joseph Vandello and Jennifer Bosson proposed the theory
of precarious manhood— the idea that “manhood is seen
as a precarious social status that is both difficult to achieve
and tenuously held.”
And having been given many external reasons
throughout his life to believe his manhood is under threat,
Ross is particularly susceptible to adopting what Vandello and Bosson call
“risky and maladaptive behaviors” to protect it.
You get tough with people, and you can get anything you want.
Hey! Tribbiani! Gimme that coffee, now!”
This need to perform his masculinity goes some way toward explaining
Ross’s propensity for lashing out.
His awkward adolescence and his divorce can explain
some of his constant self-victimization.
“Well, I was with Carol for, like, eight years. And I lost her.”
“So it's hard for me to believe that, well, that someone else
isn't gonna take you away.”
But the trouble is, Ross often uses these things to justify
the way he victimizes and mistreats others.
“I just picked up a message from Emily, she and Susan are going
to a poetry reading together!”
“So?”
“So! Poetry? Susan's gay! They're being gay together!”
The very first time we ever meet Ross,
he’s reeling from his recent divorce.
“I don’t want to be single, okay? I just, I just,
I just want to be married again.”
But Ross isn’t missing Carol, specifically.
He just wants a woman—any woman— to fill the role of his wife.
“Even if I could get it together enough to ask a woman out,
who am I gonna ask?”
So when Rachel walks into Central Perk wearing her wedding dress,
Ross takes it as a sign: He immediately sets
his sights on making her his,
and using her to complete his idealized vision of himself.
“Ross, you’ve planned out the next 20 years of our lives,
we’ve been dating for six weeks!”
Throughout their on-and-off relationship, Ross gets upset whenever Rachel
does something that challenges his idea of her being solely his.
“Lately, I feel like you’re slipping away from me…
with this new job and all these new people…
you’ve got this whole other life going on.”
He hates it when she finally finds a job
that she loves in the fashion industry,
feeling threatened by his partner having any interests that
take her away from just being there for him.
“Ross, what do you want from me? You want me to quit my job
so you can feel like you have a girlfriend?”
Ross also clearly doesn’t respect Rachel’s career,
given how much he openly belittles it.
“100 million people went to see a movie about what I do.
I wonder how many people would go see ‘Jurassic Parka’.”
In fact, much of his attraction to Rachel seems to be based on
an entirely superficial idea of what she means for his life.
He often doesn’t seem to respect her as a person at all.
“Sometimes, she's a little ditzy. Oh, and like Julie and I,
we have a lot in common 'cause we're both paleontologists right,
but Rachel's just a waitress.”
Ross’s lack of respect for Rachel also extends to her choices.
From the very beginning, Ross is interfering
in Rachel’s relationships,
before he’s so much as asked her on a date.
“If you get in the way… way of us becoming a thing,
then I would be very sad.”
Even when they’re on one of their many breaks,
he continues to get in the way of her dating other people.
“OK, Bill from the bar, I’ll make sure she gets your number.
Uh, Rach?”
“Yeah.”
“Never mind.”
He can’t stand the thought of Rachel ever becoming
unavailable to him, even as he dates—
and marries— other women.
When Ross and Rachel get married on a drunken, Las Vegas whim,
he tells her he’ll have it annulled, then secretly balks
because he doesn’t like what it would mean for him.
When I got to the lawyers office, all I could hear
was [singing] three divorces, three divorces…”
Throughout the series, Ross continues to think of Rachel as his—
and his to control.
“I happened to look through the window and see you
kissing a guy you’ve known for what? A week?”
Worse, Ross repeatedly manipulates Rachel’s life in order to make it
conform to his needs.
This becomes most evident in the show’s final season,
when Ross does whatever he can to thwart Rachel’s plans to move to Paris.
“Do you think if, uh, if the Ralph Lauren people
offered her her old job back, she would take it?”
At the moment Rachel is finally ready to take a major step in her own life,
to fully become her own person and pursue her own independent happiness.
“Oh, I’m so happy.”
Ross panics.
“Please, please stay with me. I am so in love with you.
Please, don't go.”
He doesn’t care that going to Paris would make Rachel fulfilled.
He only cares about how she can fulfill him.
Rachel’s desire to go to Paris is rooted in her genuine need
for growth and change— the very thing that caused her
to run away from her wedding in the first place.
“It's like, all of my life, everyone has always told me,
'You're a shoe!’ And today I just stopped
and I said, 'What if I don't wanna be a shoe?
What if I wanna be a- a purse!”
Over the course of the show, most of the group changes:
They’re all finding new careers, new partners, figuring out who they are.
But Ross changes very little— nor does he really seem to want to.
Perhaps because he’s already established in his career,
gotten married, and even fathered a son,
Ross largely sees his life as fixed. This explains his anxiety
whenever anything threatens to upset it— and his inability to cope in healthy,
normal ways when something does.
“Ross, is he gonna l ive with you, like,
in your apartment?”
“Yeah. I mean, it's been kinda quiet since Carol left, so…”
“Why don't you just get a roommate?”
Ross’s desperate need to be seen as
an accomplished adult belies one of the other,
most toxic things about him.
Ross is what historian Gary S. Cross identifies as a ‘boy-man,’
an ostensible grown-up who “fixates on adolescent longings
for the intensity and variety of experience and escape.”
“Every day I am gonna do one thing I have never done before.”
“The boy-man,” Cross writes, “stands on the
treadmill of endless novelty,
and passively looks for hits of pleasure.’’
“Ross is wearing leather pants…”
“See, I need a new thing for today.”
Ross does show some obvious signs of immaturity.
“Because it’s breast milk! It’s gross!”
He also clings to reminders of his adolescence,
in everything from his would-be music career,
to his sexual fantasies.
“Princess Leia is wearing this gold bikini thing…
it’s pretty cool.”
Even Ross’s relationship with Rachel can be seen as just another
teenage obsession that he’s never been able to let go of.
“It's always been you, Rach.”
As a boy-man, Ross’s endless search for those hits of pleasure
often results in a complete lack of impulse control.
Ross routinely makes ill-advised decisions just to satisfy his own base needs.
He dates his own 20-year-old student, Elizabeth, despite knowing
that it’s inappropriate.
“It actually is in the handbook, I can’t date you.”
He pursues Joey’s girlfriend, Charlie, and he has sex
with Chandler’s ex, Janice.
“Please, just take a moment before you judge me.”
“Oh, nobody’s judging you.”
And he even puts the moves on his own cousin.
“I haven’t had sex in a very long time.”
Time and again, Ross shows that he will put his own
immediate desires before every other consideration,
whether it comes to flirting with Rachel’s younger sister,
“Were you this cute in high school?”
“Oh stop.”
“No you stop!”
“No, you stop!”
or even getting married to someone, despite the fact that he
clearly has unresolved feelings for another woman.
“I, Ross, take thee Rachel.”
He also does many of these things passively.
Ross frames his very first come-on to Rachel as a meek supplication,
putting an unfair burden on her. “Do you think it would be okay
if I asked you out sometime, maybe?” And of course,
there’s the break. “A break from us.”
It’s clear that Rachel is heartbroken to be asking for a break;
she’s still deeply invested in her relationship with Ross,
and expects it to be a chance for them to reflect on
and reevaluate it together. But Ross sees it as an excuse
to sleep with someone else, which he tries to blame on Rachel.
“Y'know what, I’m not- I’m not the one that wanted that,
that break, okay. You’re the one that bailed on us.
You’re the one that, that ran the moment
when things got just a little rough!” Over the course of their relationship,
Ross remains unable to take ownership of his actions and emotions:
When he accidentally gets Rachel pregnant, his first instinct
is to blame the condom. “I'm indignant as a consumer!”
When Joey and Rachel begin seeing each other,
Ross avoids direct confrontation, and again retreats
behind passive-aggressive emotional manipulation.
“The V is for this… very surprising turn of
events.” And again, all of this culminates in the finale, where even Ross cops
to his lingering inability to behave and communicate like an adult.
“I know I shouldn't have waited 'till now to say it, but...
I'm.. That was stupid, okay? I'm sorry, but I'm telling you now.”
Still, recognizing that he’s been selfish isn’t enough for him to actually change.
As fans have since pointed out, by this point Ross had been teaching
long enough that he could have taken a sabbatical and gone to Paris with Rachel.
“I got tenure!” Ross also could have moved there
to be with his daughter— or even considered her in his plans.
“And I've already talked to them about our situation with Emma,
and they said they'll do whatever we need
to make us feel comfortable.” “Okay.”
All told, Ross could have realized his true feelings,
used them to reprioritize his life, and changed for someone else—
even if it meant leaving his comfort zone.
But ultimately, that's not Ross. “Oh and by the way,
Y-O-U-apostrophe-R-E means you are,
Y-O-U-R means your!” Ross doesn’t just need
to feel superior to Rachel— he’s pretty condescending
to most of the people in his life. “And there's the added mystery
of who gets who.” “Who gets whom.
I don't know why I do that.” He regularly treats his friends
with disrespect, generally regarding them as beneath him.
He patronizes and embarrasses them when it comes to their careers and money.
“I guess I just never think of money as an issue.”
“That’s cause you have it.” He can’t understand why they
don’t respond the way he wants them to, when he buys them tickets
to a concert they can’t afford. “We’re just trying
to do a nice thing here.” “Yeah, but Ross you have to understand,
your nice thing makes us feel about this big.”
He shows that he’s intolerant of some of their worldviews—
and he gets annoyed when they pose a challenge to his own.
“But this is not your old mom. This is a cat. Julio the cat.
Not Mom! Cat.”
Ross is ultimately so wrapped up in this narrative of himself,
he often fails to consider other people’s feelings—
or sometimes, even notice them. “Oh, you know what,
you're gonna get it. I-I-I can feel it.” “Can you?” Despite being incredibly sensitive
about his own feelings, Ross regularly shows himself
to be insensitive and even intolerant toward others.
“What kind of a job is that for a man?”
A nanny? I mean, it's like if a woman wanted to be…”
“Yes?” He’s a borderline bigot when it comes
to his relationship with Carol, whose homosexuality Ross
frequently mocks and disregards. “Wow, you guys sure have
a lot of books about being a lesbian.” It’s understandable that Ross
would experience tension with Carol and her new partner, Susan—
after all, it can be difficult to maintain amiable relations with an ex,
and that even goes for emotionally mature individuals.
But Ross uses his hurt feelings as an excuse to lash out at Susan
with a barely masked homophobia. “It’s my baby too.”
“Funny, I don’t remember you making any sperm.”
And even with Susan happily married to Carol,
Ross still regards her as a threat to his own precarious manhood,
simply because she’s a lesbian. “You actually think
that something could happen between Emily and Susan?”
“Hey, they’re going to the gym together!
Two women! Stretching!” Ross’s masculinity is so fragile,
he spends much of his time with his son, Ben, reinforcing harmful,
heteronormative stereotypes— “What’s my boy doing with a Barbie?”
even though we learn that he was free to explore
his own gender as a child. “You used to dress up
as a woman.” When Ross and Rachel
hire a male nanny, Sandy, to help look after Emma,
Ross’s response is also
knee-jerk machismo— and again, homophobia.
“It’s like leaving behind a piece of your heart.”
“Sandy, that’s exactly what it is.”
“Are you gay?” Even when it concerns
his daughter’s best interests, Ross can’t get over himself,
or his prejudices.
“You know, I'm just not uhm... that comfortable with a guy
who's as sensitive as you.” And as Sandy himself recognizes,
the problem isn’t with him, it all comes down
to Ross’s own insecurities. “Maybe because of my father?”
“I always get the feeling he thought I was
too sensitive.” The main problem with Ross is that he probably wouldn’t agree
with any of this. “Oh my god,
you are so paranoid.” “Am I?!”
He doesn’t see himself as he truly is—
only who he believes himself to be.
He refuses to take any blame for sleeping with another woman
while still technically with Rachel because he doesn’t see himself that way.
“I don’t cheat! Right? That’s not me, I’m not Joey!”
But we see that this is far from true:
he’s cheated on Carol with Phoebe, he cheats on Julie
and Bonnie with Rachel, and he’s also
emotionally cheating on Emily— and even after
ruining their wedding, he still doesn’t take
full responsibility for that, either.
He doesn't tell his girlfriend Mona
that he's secretly moved in with Rachel,
who's pregnant with his child. “How could you not tell Mona
Rachel moved in?” “She seemed to think it
was such a crazy idea. Plus, she, uh, she got me taffy.”
No matter the circumstance, Ross sees himself as a nice guy
who’s constantly reacting to a cruel world—
and as with so many nice guys, this justifies
some truly not-so-nice behavior. Ross’s deep insecurity,
incredible vanity, and unwillingness to face his flaws
is a toxic combination of traits. “He was possessive,
he was jealous, he could never just
let the little things go…” And ultimately, the fact that
he gets the girl is the show’s most toxic takeaway.
In the end, Rachel has given up her dream job just to stay
with someone who’s manipulated her repeatedly,
who’s only professed his love for her because of the fear
of losing his agency over her, and who shows no signs of changing.
“This is it. Unless we’re on a break.”
Still, even if it’s a toxic one,
theirs is a relationship we can all learn from:
If you ever find yourself dating someone like Ross Geller,
it might be time to get back on that metaphorical plane.
“Oh you are a petty man.
You are a petty, petty, petty, petty, small man.”