What Will Be Your Cottage?

What the Finales of Heated Rivalry & Stranger Things Taught Me About the Future

©Crave | Screenshot via HBO Max

Last night, cuddled up and cozy, Casey and I finished the series finale of Stranger Things and the season finale of Heated Rivalry. Two episodes of television that made us cry for very different reasons.

Watching the finale of Stranger Things felt like the end of an era, perhaps the biggest concluding pop culture moment since the end of Game of Thrones. I thought the episode was great, and yet I still found myself watching with remove, analyzing the sheer scale of this juggernaut now that it’s over. It made me feel more about the passage of time than it did about the fates of each character. It made me cry more, seeing how much the actors had grown from episode one to episode 42, than what happened in episode 42. Yet, it felt good to watch it on New Year’s Day, as if we were consciously saying goodbye to this past year and all the years that Stranger Things had been a part of.

I couldn’t help but wonder, as our media consumption becomes more and more individualized, will we ever get another Stranger Things? Will our global attention be so fractured that nothing holds us like the megahits of the past? There are some cinematic juggernauts, but the days of TV that can truly unite us seem to be in the past.

Or are they?

Obviously, Heated Rivalry has been all over my gay internet for the past month or so. This sexy, beautiful gay hockey show has made headlines for all the right reasons. The stars are charming and wonderful, the show is a depiction of gay sex that I’ve never seen before, and it’s a depiction of gay love that made me weep.

Without major spoilers, the finale mirrored a time in my own life with eerie similarities: a young love, a week spent at a Canadian cottage, complex conversations with parents, but above all, the ease and beauty of learning how to just exist and relax with someone you're learning to love.

At that point in my life, eleven years ago, I believed in that relationship more than any I’d been in so far. We were about to be forced apart by geography and were going on a bit of a farewell tour, so to speak, me to his lakeside home in Canada, him to mine in Hawaii. We spent an idyllic few weeks together, which, of course, turned to inconsolable grief as they came to an end.

I’ll never forget us driving to the airport, as I tried to read a quote from a movie that I’d seen. The movie, a multiversal love story, summed up how I felt about our impending time apart. I tried to get these words out through my sobs.

“I don't belong in a world where we don't end up together. There are parallel universes out there where this didn't happen. Where I was with you, and you are with me, and whatever universe that is, that is where my heart lives.” - Comet (2014)

Both Stranger Things and Heated Rivalry catapulted me back to that time in my life, and as Casey and I got ready for bed, we talked about those feelings of youth. Case laughed as I told him of my sob-filled quote and we reminisced about his own young loves (even though we both met and fell in love around the same ages as Heated Rivalry’s Ilya and Shane).

And we pondered together.

Can you access those same feelings of your early 20s in your early 30s? Can we ever have those same feelings of passion and limerence as we’d just watched? How much do you trade for stability and comfort over the many years we’ve been together?

I think it’s all in how you look at it.

What I loved about Heated Rivalry is that it’s a love story that feels so incredibly real. It’s heightened, yes, but it’s honest, not overblown. The people behave as real people do, and the love feels both aspirational and attainable, something I think is rare in most romances (I’m looking at you, Red, White, and Royal Blue and Song of Achilles). It made me think that if Casey and I had a camera following us around, especially this past summer, our life would look an awful lot like what we’d just seen, depending on which scenes you captured.

If new experiences bring us novelty. If novelty brings us new ways of looking at each other, new ways to see each other, then novelty should be what we strive for, and I’m so grateful to have a partner who treasures that as much as I do.

I think it’s easy to confine the exuberance of youth to the past, regardless of what age you are. We’ll always long for a time we think of as simpler, more carefree, more lustful, and passionate. But we’ll also always be younger than we will be next year.

The moments we’re idolizing right now are the ones we’re living in when compared to 365 days from now. So, rather than bemoaning what’s passed us by, what opportunities for novelty can we find in 2026?

What moments can you seek out that make you feel full of life?

What ways can you break your patterns to make your life feel as full as possible? Because even though things will always end, and the past will always look rosier than the life you’re living, we all have the capacity to make the moments we’re in just as vibrant as the pasts we’re longing for.

So, what are you going to do?

Are you going to go out there and chase novelty and life this year, or are you going to consign that to the past?

What’s one thing you’re going to do that makes you feel new, and maybe even more alive?

What will be your cottage?