Forget the slow burn, Gen Z loves a failmarriage

"If there's a failmarriage in there, nine times out of 10 that's what's gonna draw me in more than anything," Azhar, a 24-year-old student in London, told Mashable.

Online, there's a habit of assiduously categorizing everything you watch and read into types and tropes. And this tendency is particularly pronounced in romance spaces. There's slow burns, friends to lovers, enemies to lovers, and most recently, Azhar's favorite: the failmarriage. 

"It's a marriage where the couple, whether they love each other or not, has problems and knows they're having those problems, but won't separate or divorce," Isabella Montoya, a 20-year-old student in Texas, told Mashable. Usually there's cheating, high stakes, and someone deploying puppy dog eyes. So far its use is limited to describing fictional relationships — and for many young people, the dynamic is a major draw for a movie or TV show.

Failmarriages on big and small screens

"It's really boring when you're watching something and the couple is together and love each other. No one wants to watch that," Noa Bourne, a 24-year-old student and writer in Maryland, told Mashable.

The term rose to prominence to describe Tom (Matthew Macfayden) and Shiv (Sarah Snook)'s relationship in Succession due to their marriage of convenience rife with resentment. But failmarriage aficionados retroactively apply it to couples ranging from The Sopranos' Tony (James Gandolfini) and Carmela (Edie Falco) to Mad Men's Don (Jon Hamm) and Betty (January Jones) to Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) and Kim (Rhea Seehorn) from Better Call Saul.

The latest fictional relationship given the moniker is Challengers' Tashi (Zendaya) and Art (Mike Faist). The tennis film moves through time, jolting from different moments in Tashi and Art's careers and relationship. It portrays when they first meet as teenagers and their time playing tennis at Stanford before Tashi sustains a career-ending injury. In the present day, Tashi is Art's coach and they're in the throes of a failmarriage.

Tashi and Art's relationship — and their individual relationships with a third tennis player, Patrick (Josh O'Connor) — is teased out as the film progresses. It's full of complexities, giving fans lots to sink their teeth into. But there's one scene that epitomizes what viewers love about their failmarriage. The night before Art's showdown with his former doubles partner and Tashi's ex-boyfriend, Patrick, he implores Tashi to tell him that she'll still love him even if he loses. She replies, "What am I, Jesus?" He says, "Yes." Later in the conversation, Tashi tells Art that she'll leave him if he loses. 

"When she says that if he doesn't win the match that she's going to leave them, that indicates to me that her marriage is only about tennis. And if there's no tennis, there's no marriage," explained Bourne. A marriage based on something external is a textbook failmarriage, but it's not just that drawing fans in. There's a romantic tragedy to it.

"Even though that marriage isn't supposed to work, there's still that gravitational pull," said Azhar, who requested to go by her first name only for privacy reasons. "He knows Tashi isn't in love with him or even warm towards him, yet he will still do anything for her because of this intangible connection he has to her that hasn't wavered in the 12 years they've known each other."

Psychology of the failmarriage

Failmarriage is one of many terms that's proliferated online in recent years. It's an example of compounding — when you put two words together to create a new word with an intuitive meaning — Nicole Holliday, an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Pomona College, told Mashable.

"It's a lot of words to say, 'Well, Tashi and Art are using each other and nobody's happy,' so we've created a shorthand for this thing that we see," said Holliday. 

It's similar to other compounds and portmanteaus that gain traction online like tradwife, thanks to creators chasing their viral moment. "With these words, especially when they're compounds that are very accessible concepts, somebody with a lot of reach generates it and other people will start using it, spreading it across the internet," said Holliday. "On TikTok people compete to coin new terms, because it will get them more engagement."

She attributes the term's popularity to its utility and that it taps into a preexisting dissatisfaction with the institution of marriage.

From 2006 to 2020, the proportion of high school seniors that expected to marry in the future fell from 81 to 71 percent, according to Bowling Green State University's National Center for Family and Marriage Research. While the divorce rate in the U.S. declined between 2008 to 2022 according to the same center, so did the marriage rate. A fixation on doomed marriages is on par with these changing attitudes.

Beyond the lack of love and insistence on staying together, there's another throughline in failmarriages: wealth. A prerequisite of a failmarriage is that there's an advantage to staying together. "Tashi and Art can give each other tennis and Shiv can give Tom Waystar Royco, but you don't see that in middle class marriages because what is there to stay married for?" said Bourne. Montoya agreed, "A failmarriage only works when there's a lot of money or power at stake." 

Despite failmarriages' lack of love, those attracted to this dynamic find it deeply romantic and stirring. "These people stay together because it's convenient for them, and isn't there something kind of romantic about that?" explained Bourne. "Art loves Tashi, but he knows that she loves tennis more and he stays with her."

Montoya wondered if finding failmarriages romantic is delusional and a symptom of seeing romance everywhere. "I've never been in a romantic relationship. But I'm a big hopeless romantic. I love romcoms. So if there's any dynamic with chemistry, I just like it."