I’m a sucker for a sappy on-screen romance. No matter how ridiculous Ross and Rachel’s antics were on “Friends,” I always rooted for them. For TV shows, the “will they, won’t they” trope keeps the plot moving, but once that question is answered, the plot screeches to a halt.

No matter how much you root for your favorite couple, they can’t get together or your beloved show will die. Once the main couple of the show gets together, chemistry disappears, the couple drags down the show until it’s in the boring, slow territory.

Increasingly, shows are becoming incredibly reliant on this trope.  At least three shows this week, “How I Met Your Mother,” “New Girl,” and “The Mindy Project” illustrated the trope and how TV couples can end and bring down shows that rely too heavily on conspicuous couplings.

Warning: this column is littered with spoilers.

Some people say relationships make the plot deeper: the couple can get married, and we look forward to how the relationship develops, like Jim and Pam from “The Office.” But they’re wrong. “The Office” went into a notable decline after Jim and Pam got married. And although the show wasn’t necessarily about romance, it still relied heavily on “will they, won’t they” tension between Dwight and Angela and Holly and Michael.

Shows like “Friends” and “How I Met Your Mother” had to wait until their very end to get the central couples together because those shows were really about finding a life partner. These shows exist under the guise of being about a group of friends in the city, but at their core, they’re really about the road to settling down. “HIMYM” was always about Ted dealing with the fact that he was in love with Robin, trying to deal with unrequited love and lucky for him, Ted and Robin got their happily ever after.  In those two shows, they were able to draw out romance over the span of nearly 10 years each. If the shows were to continue, there would be nowhere else for the plot to move, after the 10-year-old question of “will they, won’t they” was finally answered.

On the other hand, last week, “The Mindy Project” got Danny and Mindy together after just a season and a half. Writers will have to find a creative way to sustain their romance, or break them up quickly. “The Mindy Project” has to maintain its momentum, or else it will fall victim to “The ‘Moonlighting’ Curse.”

Couples who cause the death of a show are commonly referred to as the “The ‘Moonlighting’ Curse.” When the two leads on the 90s show “Moonlighting,” started sleeping together, the once-great show’s ratings plummeted and it was canceled.

Shows do their best to avoid this and try to invent new ways to explore characters. The fear of the “Moonlighting” curse is good. It forces shows and their characters to be less focused on love and allows for more interesting plot developments.

“New Girl” almost fell into the trap this fall, when Jess and Nick got together. It started off as a show about Jess, Zooey Deschanel’s character, finding herself as an individual after the end of a long-term relationship. But this fall, she got together with her roommate Nick. Sure that first kiss might have been satisfying, but Jess and Nick both got so boring after they started focusing on their relationship. The show became disjointed after the couple got disconnected from its supporting characters.

As much as I love romance, the joy television audiences find in love are its build-ups and breakdowns. Happy couples usually aren’t the source of problems and conflicts that keep shows interesting. If shows are to rely on romance to drive the plot, most shows become predictable and unwatchable.

Cassie-lee Grimaldi is a senior television, radio and film major. Her column appears weekly. She can be reached at [email protected] and reached on Twitter @cassiegrimaldi.

Published on April 8, 2014 at 1:00 am