“You love me, Chandler Bing!”
What if Janice... is really Chandler Bing's soulmate?
"Oh.
My.
God!"
“You’re my soulmate.”
Friends treats Janice Litman-Goralnik née Hosenstein like a punchline,
[Braying laughter]
and the joke is basically that she’s annoying.
“Every time she starts laughing, I just wanna...
pull my arm off just so I have something to throw at her.”
But if you take a quick break from writing Janice off,
you might notice that she and Chandler have a strangely enduring bond.
For a long time Chandler tries to quit Janice, but can’t.
"Can you believe this happened?"
"No...NO.
And yet it did."
Over ten seasons, these two cross paths so many times
that it really seems like fate is throwing them together.
“What a small world.”
“And yet I never run into Beyonce.”
Their on-again off-again, can’t-quit-you romance
might easily be framed, in almost any other show,
as a great love story.
"I wish I knew how to quit you."
"Then why don't you?"
So let’s look at the evidence to decide
whether Janice may actually be Chandler’s soulmate.
"What we have, it's like movie love.
You're my soulmate."
And if she is, does that make Janice the one who got away?
Or an argument against whether finding your “soulmate”
really matters at all?
“New Year's, who invited who?
Valentine's, who asked who into whose bed?”
“I did, but--”
“You seek me out!
Something deep in your soul calls out to me like a foghorn!”
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Let’s take a moment to look back at the story of Friends from Janice’s perspective.
She dates this neurotic guy who keeps breaking up with her.
“There's no way for me to tell you this.
At least, there's no new way for me to tell you this.”
But they always get back together.
“One of these times, it's just gonna be your last chance with me!”
She keeps running into him by chance -- they’re set up on a blind date.
They’re at the same nail salon.
They go to the same doctor’s office for fertility tests.
They’re considering buying houses right next door to each other.
Janice even runs into Chandler’s friends in completely unlikely ways --
she hooks up with Ross;
she complains to the chef at Monica’s restaurant;
she even shares a hospital room with Rachel when they’re giving birth.
What are the odds?
"I.
Can't.
Believe this."
"And yet somehow it's true."
This is exactly the kind of coincidence that makes some people believe in romantic
fate.
“Did you ever think of the number of things that had to happen
for me to get to know you?”
In so many stories, two people are signaled to be “destined”
to be together through exactly these signs:
bumping into each other over and over, having a tumultuous on-and-off relationship,
and being unable to stop obsessing over their ex.
"We're inevitable, Waldorf."
Janice rationalizes Chandler’s indecisiveness with the idea
that he’s not ready to admit he feels the same way --
which isn’t so crazy considering that he is so stunted
when it comes to relationships,
"And then I just...you know threw the bag of barley at her
and ran out of the store."
and he does continue to come back time and time again.
“You want me.
You need me.
You can't live without me.
And you know it.
You just don't know you know it.”
Is that so different from all that Carrie puts up with from Mr. Big,
"Why is it so hard... for you to...
factor me into your life in any real way?"
whom Sex and the City eventually declares is Carrie’s soulmate?
"Carrie, you're the one."
Most of us have known that friend -- or have been that person --
who’ll find any way to justify hot-and-cold behavior
from a partner who’s bad news at Janice’s age.
In Season Two, Chandler hits it off with a woman on the internet,
"Well, we haven't actually met.
We just stayed up all night talking on the internet."
only to discover that it’s Janice.
“Oh my god.”
This is interesting because it suggests that intellectually Chandler and Janice
are really well-matched --
more fodder for the argument that they’re soulmates.
“I like this girl, okay?
I seriously like this girl!”
And after their online reunion, Chandler does fall in love with her.
“This is Janice.”
“Yeah, I know.
She makes me happy.”
This time Chandler is completely committed, and he’s crazy in love,
like we’ve never seen him before.
"See, the drawer actually goes in my dresser."
"Oh, you didn't have to do this."
But by this point, Janice is married with a kid.
So, looking again at Janice’s perspective, this woman faces an agonizing choice.
"The way I feel about you... it's like I finally understand
what Lionel Richie's singing about."
This guy she’s always carried a torch for is finally ready to devote himself to her.
"Then don't leave me."
But he’s figured this out a little too late,
and she feels she has to give her family a chance.
After this point, things don’t work out with her estranged husband.
So she no doubt looks back on turning down love with Chandler
as one of the great romantic mistakes of her life.
If he wasn’t the “one who got away” before,
after this he must take on that status in her mind.
"I can't believe we're not going to be spending the rest of our lives together."
And who knows -- if Janice had stayed in this relationship,
we might have seen things go very differently for this couple.
"Perhaps you'd like me to turn like this, so you can bunny-bump against my back."
By the time they meet up again, Chandler’s long fallen out of love with
her.
“You know all those little annoying things that she did before we fell in love?
You know, like her voice, her laugh and her personality?
They're all back!”
But -- from Janice’s perspective -- this is a chance to fix
the grievous error she made, letting true love get away.
Note that at this point Chandler doesn’t tell her
that he’s not actually in love with her anymore --
"Yemen!"
instead he lies that he's being transferred overseas.
“Yes.
I'm being transferred to Yemen!”
so she nobly decides to fight for their love.
“I'll wait for you.
Do you even know long you're going to be gone?”
“Well, just until we find an energy source to replace fuel.”
Chandler’s lie only intensifies Janice’s romantic belief
that she and Chandler are fated lovers who are being kept apart
by external circumstances.
Years later, long after Chandler and Janice have stopped being a couple,
Monica tells Janice that --
"You have to go."
"Why?"
"Because Chandler still has feelings for you."
And after Janice has completely moved on, yet again,
and is planning on buying a house with her second husband and family,
Chandler tells her himself --
“I never stopped loving you.”
The show encourages us to laugh at Janice for being deluded enough to believe these
lies.
"We have this...heat between us."
But she has good reason to believe that Chandler has been in love with her
for the better part of a decade --
Chandler and his partner have both told her this is the case!
"Now that you live next door, we can be together every day.
Sid and Monica never have to know a thing."
Between Chandler feeding the love narrative in Janice’s mind with these unnecessary
falsehoods,
and the insane number of chance meetings that throw the two together,
if you’re Janice, how could you not think the universe wants you to end up with this
man?
"Don't say that.
Don't tangle the dream and take it away."
"How can I dump this woman on Valentine's Day?"
"I don't know?
You dump her on New Year's?"
"Oh man, in my next life I'm coming back as a toilet brush."
When he first meets Janice, Chandler is a romantic mess.
He’s clearly not ready for a committed relationship.
"You know, I'm like the bing, bing, bing, you're like the boom, boom, boom."
"Ow!"
"Oh my god!"
Later on we see him become a loving, mature partner with Monica.
But it wouldn’t even occur to Monica to date the Chandler of early seasons.
"There's a nucealr holocaust.
I'm the last man on earth.
Would you go out with me."
"Nah."
It’s so obvious to her that he’s far too immature to be boyfriend material.
"What am I, not boyfriend material?"
"No, you're Chandler."
Poor Janice is the one who bears the brunt of Chandler’s neurotic terrible guy behavior.
"Either you're seeing somebody behind my back,
which would make you the biggest junk on the planet,
or else you're pretending that you're seeing somebody
which just makes you so pathetic, I can just start crying right here
in the cereal aisle."
Sadly, she’s the one who “breaks him in” so that someone else gets to enjoy
the more adult man after he’s finally grown up.
"Men go out with me, we break up, and then they get married.
And later they call me to thank me for teaching them what love is,
and that I taught them to care and respect women."
Her qualities make her just about
the only person early-seasons Chandler could have a semi-sort-of-relationship with.
“She was smart, she was pretty and she honestly cared about me.”
She’s pushy enough to hold onto him even when he’s hopelessly indecisive.
"Goodbye, Janice."
"Kiss me."
She’s got thick enough skin to overlook his rude, dismissive behavior.
[Braying laughter] "Kill me.
Kill me now."
And she’s able to forgive a lot.
“If Janice were a guy, she’d be sleeping with somebody else by now.”
Janice even has many qualities in common
with the woman Chandler eventually finds happiness with.
Both are assertive brunettes who own personality quirks
others might find annoying.
Both are caring and nurturing to a degree that can come off as domineering.
While many might classify Monica as a much more desirable partner than Janice,
their similarities tell us that, personality-wise, Chandler has a type.
So why is it that Monica and Chandler get a happy ending
and Janice and Chandler don’t?
One big reason is the timing.
Janice and Chandler are out of sync.
“You probably want us to move in together?”
“It doesn't scare me!”
“Yeah, well it scares me!
I'm not even divorced yet!”
But the most important reason that Monica is a better partner for Chandler
is
that she challenges him to be better.
"If you give up every time you have a fight with someone,
you'd never be with anyone longer than...
Oh..."
Janice’s readiness to put up with his b.s. leads Chandler to see her as a safe option
who will always be there, the person he uses to assuage his fear
of ending up alone -- essentially, his back-up.
“Janice is my last chance to have somebody.”
Based on all that we’ve seen,
Janice and Chandler might really be soulmates.
Fate keeps bringing them together,
and they’re surprisingly similar and well-matched,
but victims of bad timing.
Which leads us to ask, does this mean they should have ended up together?
The show gives us a pretty clear answer to this question -- and it’s no.
In Season Eight, Phoebe is convinced that she’s found Monica’s soulmate.
"And I swear to God he is her other half."
This handsome British foodie does seem cosmically perfect for Monica,
"But God, a house made of cheese.
Wouldn't that be incredible?"
"I’d move in tomorrow!"
"Oh, come on!"
but it doesn’t matter -- because later, Monica and Chandler agree
that they both don’t buy into the whole idea of soulmates.
“I don't believe in soulmates, either.”
“You don't?”
“Nope.
I don’t think that you and I were destined to end up together.
I think that we fell in love and we work hard at our relationship.”
In Monica’s and Chandler’s worldview,
Love is a choice -- something you build and work on,
owning the fact that two different people who aren’t cut from the same cloth
can bring out the best in each other.
“So they can say you’re high maintenance, but it’s okay because I like...
maintaining you.”
So their whole relationship is a rejection of the view
that love is some preordained force revealed to us in coded messages
from a mysterious universe.
“I believe that certain people are more suited for each other
and I believe in falling in love, but soulmates?
I don't think they exist.”
Interestingly, Ross and Rachel’s romance does participate in that whole “soulmate”
mystique.
They have the on-again off-again, obsessive pattern;
the problems with timing;
and that sense that they’re inevitably meant to be together.
“Because she's your lobster.”
This works for Ross and Rachel because they are the type of people
who believe in soulmates, signs and grand gestures.
But while the Ross and Rachel saga is addictive for viewers,
it’s also sad, in that they spend very little of their youth actually together.
You might say Chandler and Janice are a dark mirror of the Ross and Rachel story
--
a counterargument to romantic fate.
They’re evidence that sometimes an on-again off-again relationship
is just a bad habit.
And all those chance meetings are just coincidences,
unless you choose to believe that they mean something more.
30 Rock made the same point through Wesley and Liz --
they keep running into each other, but they can’t stand each other.
“There has to be a reason this keeps happening to us, Liz.
I think fate is telling us this is the best we're ever going to get.
We're each other's settling soulmates.”
So ultimately, a soulmate is in the eye of the beholder.
You’re soulmates if you believe it,
and choose to share the narrative of true love with somebody,
whatever you interpret true love to mean.
The main thing that makes the Chandler-Janice romance kind of uneven
is that she does believe in soulmates -- and maybe even that Chandler is hers.
“Because I know that this isn't the end.”
But in her final appearance she rejects Chandler’s advances
and chooses her husband,
"But I love my husband,
and I know you love your wife."
even though she seems to still view Chandler as her soulmate,
"Maybe just... one last moment of weakness."
or at least the one who got away.
So Janice, too, finally decides that the concept of a “soulmate”
is less important to her than a love that’s realized
in a committed partnership over time.
Even if Janice isn’t the one for Chandler,
for one reason or another,
these two had a big role to play in each other’s lives.
She was the one who helped a scared, neurotic Chandler to grow up.
And if the ten seasons of Friends are any indication,
it’s safe to say she’ll never be too far away from Chandler and his friends.
“You got away from me.”
“But you found me.”
This is Ashley C. Ford.
Ashley's a writer and editor whose work has been published
in high-profile publications like Slate, Elle and The Guardian.
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