‘Friends’ Best Relationship Was Only Supposed to Be a One-Night Stand
The world is still recovering from the untimely loss of Matthew Perry, and we’re still reminiscing over one of his best characters, the unforgettable Chandler Bing in Friends. Just last week, his castmate Courteney Cox, who plays Monica Geller in the sitcom, shared an emotional tribute to Perry with some behind-the-scenes footage of one of Friends’ most iconic scenes: when it was revealed that Chandler and Monica spent the night together on the eve of Ross’s (David Schwimmer) second wedding in London. The two characters would go on to become everyone’s favorite relationship and a cornerstone of the series, but their wholesome romance wasn’t originally supposed to become an actual thing…
The Audience’s Reaction Was Vital to Turning Chandler and Monica Into a Couple
In Cox’s video, after she emerges from under the sheets and the scene is cut, she tells Perry, “Okay, it’s your turn,” for the present audience’s further amusement. She says in her post that this is something Perry whispered to her to say after the cut and that he would often tell the cast to incorporate these types of gags. The filming of that scene was a delight for those lucky enough to witness it, and one of Friends’ co-creators, Marta Kauffman, revealed in 2015 that they had to stop recording because of how intense the audience’s reaction was: “We had no idea what response that was going to get. We had to stop taping the show because people were screaming.”
Kauffman also revealed that Chandler and Monica’s (or “Mondler,” if you will) romance wasn’t originally supposed to continue. The writing team had planned it to only be a one-night stand and was going to move on after the season’s London arc concluded. What convinced them that Mondler had to become a thing was the fact that the audience apparently had friends-to-lovers fanfic-level expectations about the two characters: “We thought it was going to be funny, and we were going to get rid of it. Suddenly, the audience told us they had been waiting for that, and we had to rethink how we were going to keep going and change the relationship. But that wasn’t a person, it was an entire, immediate expression of joy.”
When the episode was shot in London, it was filmed three times, for three different studio audiences, and the reveal of Monica and Chandler in bed together earned three thunderously excited reactions. It was all the greenlight the producers and writers would ever need that Mondler was just what the people wanted, as expectations had been building for a while before that. Nowadays, thanks to social media, shooting an episode like that would’ve been impossible due to the need for secrecy, and we might’ve never gotten Mondler in the first place.
‘Friends’ Had Unknowingly Established Romance as the Next Step for Monica and Chandler
The fans’ expectations were perfectly justified, of course, as there had already been episodes hinting at a potential romance between Monica and Chandler from the very start of Friends. In Season 1’s “The One With The Birth,” for example, Chandler promises to marry Monica if she is still single after she turns 40. In the beach arc at the end of Season 3 and the beginning of Season 4, the two of them share a special chemistry, with Chandler trying to convince her that he would be a great boyfriend in “The One at the Beach” and peeing on Monica’s jellyfish sting in “The One with the Jellyfish.” She does say that, although Chandler is a great guy, he will only ever be “the guy that peed on her,” but no one really buys it — and, let’s face it, the highlight in that episode is Joey’s (Matt LeBlanc) iconic “I’d pee on any one of you!” line.
A whole season later, the iconic episode where Mondler first happens is the Season 4 finale, “The One with Ross’s Wedding: Part 2,” and, in 2013, Scott Silveri, who co-wrote the episode and later became an executive producer on Friends, mentioned that the idea of getting Chandler and Monica together had been floating around since Season 2. Back then, the writers had already taken note of the two’s chemistry in the episode “The One Where Ross Finds Out,” where Chandler is upset because he’s putting on weight and Monica agrees to train him to lose a few pounds. Later, Mondler almost happened in Season 3, but it was Silveri’s future wife and co-writer on Friends, Shana Goldberg-Meehan, who intervened and wisely stated that it was too early. The show had already had too much drama with Ross and Rachel’s (Jennifer Aniston) on-and-off relationship and their whole “on a break” shenanigans, so introducing another relationship between two main characters would seem desperate.
When it finally did happen, the approach from the production team was to see how things played out after Chandler and Monica first hooked up in London. Kauffman and co-creator David Crane were always careful about plotting these things, according to Silveri, but, regarding Mondler, it happened so naturally that no final decision or approval was even needed. What they did need, though, was to figure out how to make this relationship work for the series going on.
Chandler and Monica’s Relationship Changed ‘Friends’ for the Better
Even after the Season 4 finale and while mapping out plotlines for Season 5, the Friends writers’ room wasn’t sure what to do with Mondler. The main idea was that it would be a friends-with-benefits sort of thing for the first four episodes of the season, and then it would die out, with both Chandler and Monica worried about what the implications for their clique could be. But writing Mondler turned out to be fun for the writers, too, and they thought it brought an overall good atmosphere to the show. The characters trying to hide their relationship for the first half of the season made for some hilariously funny moments, like when Chandler has to kiss both Rachel and Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow) on the lips after inadvertently kissing Monica goodbye in “The One with All the Kissing,” but it still wasn’t better than the actual payoff of having them come clean a few episodes later.
For Chandler and Monica as characters, their relationship was like finding out puzzle pieces we thought belonged to different puzzles that actually went together all along. That sense of wholeness is what turned Mondler into the main relationship in Friends in the audience’s eyes. While Ross and Rachel were chaotic and unstable, Chandler and Monica knew from the start that they had found what was missing in their lives in each other. He evolved from being “sad, and awkward, and desperate for love” to being just awkward, and she found the emotional stability she longed for so long. And they grew. Chandler became more mature and an actual functioning adult (although he still kept some of his childish antics with Joey, thankfully), and Monica learned not to take everything in such a serious and competitive way as she did before.
On paper, Chandler and Monica might still seem like a mismatch, but that became one of their strongest suits as a couple. Yes, they are very different from one another, but what makes an adult relationship work is the will to overcome such differences together. There’s no formula; it’s all about making it up as we go along with our best intentions in mind, and Monica and Chandler are the perfect example. Not to mention, we only got them thanks to the excitement of those audiences in London. Could they BE any more important to the legacy of Friends?
