So I am going to give you an extremely unpopular opinion:

I’ve fucking loved every second, and I think it might be my favourite season yet.

Before you kill me, don’t!

See there are lots of reasons I love this season, but at least one of them is entirely personal, which means it is literally impossible to argue with. I’m not going to call it analysis, because it’s not. It’s bias. The best kind.

See, TMP has always mirrored my life a little bit. And this season, as Danny and Mindy tried to live with each other and build a future together, my partner of seven years and I were trying to work out how we fit together as well, in a whole new city. As Danny became increasingly controlling, and Mindy flip-flopped on what she wanted, so did I. I found myself irrationally angry at nothing, like Danny. I found myself uncertain and wavering, like Mindy.

Despite all my determination, my relationship ended - for the better, for the best. It was an impossible lesson in letting go, in knowing when a fight isn’t the right one to take on, when abandoning ship (excuse the pun in the parallel I’m about to make) is the only possible course of action.

A scant two weeks later, the finale aired, and we saw Mindy decide to leave. She made this decision, tears running down her face, in a quiet moment late at night in New York City.

Just as I had.

I waited a week or so to watch that finale, and when I did it felt like a homecoming. As always, Mindy Kaling and her writers seemed to be speaking to me, specifically.

I know how hard it is to make this choice.

You did the right thing.

It is not just acceptable, but admirable, to choose something for yourself in preference to what you’ve been told your family needs.

It wasn’t just relatable. It was painful and cathartic, all at once. It was the Batman of plotlines: never the one I wanted, but goddammit it was the one I needed and I am grateful to the writers for taking me on this journey, kicking and screaming and laughing and objecting and refusing to believe.

Abandoning Ship

I can’t really ship Danny and Mindy anymore, in the traditional sense. I can’t hope for them together, against all odds. Their romantic tension can’t be my happy place.

Danny has, entirely predictably, put his issues onto Mindy. He’s fallen into the classic push-pull relationship dynamic so common to people living with trauma. When she was chasing him, he wasn’t sure. Now suddenly, he’s not just sure, he’s all in to a frightening degree. What I mean by that is that he’s not all in and determined to make both their dreams come true by working through conflict.

He’s all in and determined to make this relationship fit his internal vision of a family. He’ll do whatever it takes to make it work - not through compromise, but through control. I do not believe he has the insight to truly understand the difference. He views, has always viewed, the simple act of commitment as the highest virtue. From his perspective, he’s fulfilling his end of the bargain by not leaving, and he’s doing whatever it takes to fulfill that by taking control of their lives.

It’s unreasonable, harmful, unacceptable. That much has been expressed by all of you, and I have no justification of his behaviour. In fact, I don’t want one.

Danny

I think Danny is exactly where he needs to be right now in order to continue healing. Having learned how to open his heart to love, Danny now actually needs to learn how to lose. People with abandonment issues don’t need to just learn how to be loved. They need to learn how to be abandoned - safely, with the security that comes from knowing that one person is not the world, and that a lack of a partner (or that partner being further away) doesn’t mean a lack of a support network.

Can you imagine how much healthier he will be, as a parent, as a partner to Mindy (if she chooses to be one, and I don’t mind if she doesn’t), as a son, as a co-worker, if he was really comfortable in his own skin? Imagine if he had genuine connections with people that weren’t characterised by a simultaneous discomfort with connection and terror of being alone. Mindy leaving, whether temporary or permanent, could be the best thing that ever happens to him. Unlike with Christina, they still have Leo, a tie that will keep Mindy in his sphere and part of his life - just in a much less dependent way, a new dynamic he’ll have to learn to navigate.

What I don’t know is whether that will be the best thing that ever happens to Mindy.

Mindy

I have never been more proud of a fictional character than I am of this woman.

She is doing everything for herself.

She has learned more about herself over this pregnancy and period of motherhood than she has in the three previous years. She is more self-aware, but also more empathetic and understanding of others. She uses all of this together to be more determined than ever before to take care of herself and to go get hers.

She’s almost a role model, guys. Sorry, MK, I know you hate Lahiri being labelled a role model. But if you don’t want her to be one, stop making her grow up. Until then, suck it up: your girl is admirable now. Pbbbbbbt.

I’m so sorry I didn’t respond to this until now! I’ve been too slammed with work to give it the attention it deserves.

So first of all, I agree one million per cent. I can literally not see a single circumstance in which Danny would break it off with Mindy, not anymore. He got that out of his system in Be Cool, and he knows now what his life looks like without her. He’s committed. He’s all in. And Danny doesn’t back out of a commitment - it’s important to note that in the entire series, the only woman Danny has broken up with is Mindy. The rest of them left him.

Leaving Mindy aside (because she’s the exception that proves the rule), that’s because Danny views commitment as a permanent responsibility. He doesn’t let a lot of people in, because once you’re in, he’s stuck with you, and Danny is responsible for enough people’s welfare already. Danny is a provider, a caretaker. Leaving people is antithetical to both of those roles.

So even if Danny didn’t love Mindy more than life itself, he wasn’t going to leave her a second time.

But he does love her more than anything. She makes him happier than we’ve ever seen him, and he is painfully conscious of that, in his own awkward, boyish way. He’s so happy, he’d give up his church for this tiny heathen family he’s made. Danny might file Mindy away as a responsibility, because it’s his habit to do that with family, but if you asked him to name the five happiest moments of his life? Four of them would be about Mindy, and the fifth would be Richie’s high school graduation.

So no, you’re right. He’s never leaving.

I don’t think Mindy will, in practice, either. But I think she would, if it was right for her. And that’s an interesting contrast, because I don’t think it’s because she loves him less than he does her. I think it’s because where Danny knows commitment too well to jump into it, Mindy falls headfirst into things, and finds herself saddled with responsibilities she never really wanted or asked for.

We see this, over and over again. She goes to Haiti. She gets engaged to Casey accidentally, as a way of getting out of going back to Haiti. She has to write Cliff’s grandmother’s eulogy. She signs up to be part of Dr. Gurglar’s practice. All those decisions made her happy, sure, but that was really more because Mindy is the kind of person who can find happiness anywhere - a rare, precious talent.

I don’t mean to denigrate her as flighty, or to say that because she’s able to adapt quickly to changing circumstances and be happy she’s somehow less loving or committed than Danny is. I have never believed that love was finite, that loving lots of things or people splits your heart into smaller pieces than loving only a few. But I do mean that when she actually took a good, hard look at whether all those things were what she really wanted, she realised she had to get out of them.

There are circumstances in which she might decide that Danny isn’t what she really wants. If he doesn’t measure up to what she needs, she would leave him. And that is a damn good thing. (To be honest, it’s one of the most powerful feminist messages in this show; that a woman doesn’t have to sacrifice herself for her relationships. That she can just leave, not because of a Big Reason like cheating or abuse, but just because she’s finished. That’s a new idea for many women. It’s one we need.)

It gives her decision to stay a great deal of power and agency, to be honest, and it’s part of why I still ship these two so fucking hard. Because I know she would leave him, I know she’s still there because she wants to be, and not because she’s scared of life without him. She’s tied to him by love, not fear, and that’s another powerful message, another one we need, because all of the partners we ever have will be flawed idiots, and they will all need our forgiveness and perseverance as much as we need theirs.

As much as we need theirs, because yes, Mindy needs Danny’s too. It’s not unreasonable not to want to get married. That’s fair, when the only argument for marriage your partner can articulate is “so I can prove you love me.” I mean, it’s always fair - marriage isn’t for everyone - but it’s especially fair when your partner can’t explain why they want to do it. And Mindy can’t. She hasn’t, not to Danny, or anyone. Her visions of marriage have had little to do with partnership and much more to do with proof of her own worthiness. Proof that she has been chosen by someone. Proof that she isn’t the spinster left on the shelf.

Mindy’s insecurity, her fear of being left behind, is one of her biggest flaws. It’s also probably one of her most relateable ones.

It’s time for her to get over it.

I think it’s probably the biggest item left in her Project. She’s come so far in the three years we’ve known her. She’s grown into a woman we can all be fucking proud to relate to. But this is the last thing, this deeply ingrained terror internalised over years of watching romcoms play out from a safe distance. If she can break through this, she’ll be a superhero.

Because really, can any of us say we haven’t had this fear? Can any of us say we haven’t, at times, wanted our partners to prove their love just so we know it’s real? Mindy is all of us, really. She’s even some of us who are married, and some who are divorced because this fear wasn’t enough to hold them together.

And maybe, just maybe, she can show us the way.

I like how u wrote about their goals being compatible and they have to find a way to meet them..because they're so different.

They are so different. But as alittlenutjob pointed out, perfect people and perfect relationships don’t happen. All we can do is try our best with the person we find. And honestly, in my experience, some truly incompatible people can end up in some fucking beautiful marriages, just by trying their best.

Literally the happiest family I know has two parents who are so different I don’t even understand how they like each other. Actually, I know I’ve seen them not like each other plenty of times. But they love each other, and they’re always working to see the other person’s side, and somehow that’s enough for them and their million children.

I think what it comes down to, for me, is for both of them to stop being hung up on the construct of marriage, and start talking about what they actually want from a partnership.

I don’t say this because I think marriage is unimportant. I think for both of them, it’s deeply important, but I think they view it very differently.

When Mindy says ‘marriage’, Danny hears the sound of his own failure, the sense of trapping her with his inadequacy, and feels the looming certainty of mutual hatred. He sees a bond that leaves both of them no room to move, to do what’s best for them.

When I think back to Danny with Christina, he stayed in that marriage for far longer than was good for either of them. He was so fucking committed that even when he had no interest in her sexually or emotionally, he was going to look after her. Marriage, in that instance, meant sacrificing himself for the promise he’d made to God and his community to take care of the woman he’d taken as family. In return, she cheated on him. Twice. She publicly humiliated him, over and over. From his perspective, he’d kept up his end of the bargain, and it was thrown in his face. Also from his perspective, his inability to satisfy her, to keep her, was a monumental failure. His inability to fall in love with her again the second time around was probably his greatest failure of all.

All of this is so different from what Mindy means by marriage. What she means by it is having the man she loves stand up and publicly choose her, after decades of feeling that she’d never be the one chosen. After having men cheat on her, throw her away for their best friend, only want her for sex, or just put their own dreams and ambitions above their desire to be with her. Mindy has never, ever (that we’ve seen) actually had a man know all of her, and still want to be there above anything else. Marriage, for her, is proof that she’s not making this guy up. It’s real.

I don’t think Mindy believes, yet, that Danny won’t leave her. She thinks he wants to avoid marriage so that he has a way out, when we know he wants nothing of the kind. Danny doesn’t realise that for Mindy, being stuck with him is the opposite of being trapped. 

So there’s your middle ground. Your middle ground is both of them finding a way to prove to the other just how real this is, that they are there of their own free will (not just because of their Tiny Pope), out of love and dedication.

Even more importantly, it’s them finding a way to set the other free. Because something that both of them are missing in this whole marriage debate is that the truest love is the one where you’d let them go, if it were best. The one where we set aside that drive we feel to tie this person to us forever and ever and instead give them the choice to stay or go, with our blessing and our love.

Of course, if I had my way, the middle ground would end with Mindy running her fertility practice and using her own ten children as proof of how amazing she is. It’d end with Danny winding down his work hours to make sure Anthony Francis has his dad around to take him to ballet class, eventually ending up a stay-at-home dad accidentally stirring glitter from his Muses’ art projects into this week’s batch of sawce. Annette would bully them into giving her her own floor of their brownstone, or a granny flat in the back yard if they end up in the suburbs. She’d criticise Mindy’s cleaning skills and tell Calliope not to worry about how chubby she is, because her Daddy was just the same, and Nonna likes that her babies know how to appreciate good lasagne.

Are they married? I have no idea, and I’m sorry that I don’t really care. They’re still fighting, though. All the way to retirement, which Danny refuses to spend on a private island or in the awesome European tax haven Queen Bey retired to. They’ve probably had to take a year off from each other at some point or another, refusing to even speak to each other after the last kid finally went off to college (then missing each other so much after a month that they agree to never fight again). Maybe they’re even married, divorced, and married again. But no matter what, they’re committed to their family and each other, whatever ridiculous form it ends up taking. 

Oh my god, thank you so much! I was so nervous about putting that theory out there, because I know I’m coming at their relationship from a different perspective to many others, and that means I might interpret those scenes differently. I was so ready to be told how wrong I am!

But I really do believe it. When she said “why don’t I get to try it out?” it just clicked for me, that for Danny marriage isn’t something you get to try. And if he thinks Mindy sees marriage as something you can get out of, as possibly non-permanent, than does he even trust that she’s really all in? Meanwhile, has she actually considered what it would be to get married to a man who commits as hard as Danny does?

After all, he agreed to go to Stanford, even though he immediately envisioned flying back weekly to take his mother to church. That wasn’t just for the baby. That was for Mindy, because Danny is all in. If he weren’t, he wouldn’t be as scared of marriage. Marriage means he’s all in, and when he fucks it up, they’re trapped together. Marriage means if Mindy leaves him, he’s failed his family, his God, and most of all his son. 

I think it’s really important that Mindy acknowledges that difference in perspective, so that maybe they can find a middle ground between “till death do us part, even if we hate each other,” and “let’s try it out” that suits them both. I also genuinely believe that that middle ground is where they’ll be happiest, and probably is closest to what they already believe, when they’re divorced from all their cultural and emotional baggage.

I mean, we all know that these characters are meant to be ridiculous caricatures, that they’re meant to behave in absurd and questionable ways, that their minds don’t operate according to the rules of logic we grew up with. Or the rules of physics, sometimes. 

And I know I handwave a lot of crap based on that - their complete lack of patients and medical knowledge, for a start. But I usually come down much harder on them behaving badly to each other, because like, I sure as fuck wouldn’t put up with this crap from friends, SOs or co-workers.

But the more I watch with MK’s ‘AU’ lens on, the more I am forced to admit that their actions make sense within this alternate universe, where one apparently tolerates friends and family being terrible as long as they tolerate your awfulness in return.

I mean, how is Morgan still such a sweetheart to Peter after Peter literally almost killed his girlfriend with a dog allergy? How does Danny find himself loving these idiots so much after their constant accidental sabotage of his life and relationship? And how is Beverley still employed? She’s literally responsible for pencils and corn.

Love, that’s how. It’s motherfucking love.*

*Love = hyperrealist constructs of human relationships in a framework reminiscent of magical realist constructions of reality.