#byler squared

"i wish, i wish, i wish, you loved me less."

Mike’s at Brown for English Lit, Will’s at RISD majoring in painting. Nancy and Jonathan graduate in New York, and start thinking about moving for work. And Nancy has an idea.

Jonathan pitches it to Will at a diner one night while he’s visiting. They all pool their government hush money on a modest apartment, Mike and Will leave their respective dorms behind for their junior year, and get to be out in a way they couldn’t before.

It’s a shoebox of a kitchen but Jon painstakingly teaches Mike how to stop overcooking eggs. Will gets up at 3am for a glass of water and finds Nancy knitting on the couch after a nightmare. Will and Jon pass the phone back and forth while chatting to Joyce. Mike lets Nancy paint his nails like back when they were kids, before they ever had anything to worry about

They buy a shitty little Christmas tree for their Wheeler-Byers Christmas the first year when a blizzard keeps them at home, Mike and Jonathan exchange vinyls, Nancy knits Will an orange wool blanket, Will bakes a cinnamon babka

In Season 2, Nancy's inability to say she loved Steve was played as an explicit sign that the relationship was not going to work out. It was one thing for her to have not said it in the bathroom while drunk and grieving, but she also couldn't even say it sober when he directly asked her to. This is because subconsciously (or maybe even consciously at the time) she knew she had feelings for Jonathan and that her relationship with Steve was sunsetting.

In Season 4 and 5, when Mike is around the same age Nancy was at the time, he experiences a near identical conflict with Jane, where she calls him out for never telling her that he loves her even in his letters. And again, when she is directly asking him to say it to her while she is standing in front of him to witness it, he can't conjure the words. The only time he can manage it is when she's unconscious, with Will at his side the entire time. And then, in her final moments, he can't say it then either, despite her saying it first.

But the way both of these situations are framed is completely different, despite being the same issue at its core. With Nancy, we were meant to interpret that as exactly what it was, which was that she couldn't say she loved Steve because she didn't actually love him anymore (or maybe even ever). Then, inexplicably, Mike's inability to say he loved Jane was just because he was insecure and they're actually fine, despite (again) not even being able to say it to her before her death as if that entire arc meant nothing.