Do you think Beth fights differently with Rio than she does with Dean?
That’s such an interesting question, anon!
The way anyone fights or argues with someone really comes down to context, and in that sense, Beth and Rio’s relationship couldn’t be further from Beth and Dean’s. Those relationships have such different histories, such different dynamics, and were formed at such different points in Beth’s life, so the context of them will always be different. So short answer, is yes, haha, I do think Beth fights differently with Rio than she does with Dean.
In a lot of ways, I think that probably comes down to Beth’s investment in the relationship too. The way Beth has fought with Dean across S1 and S2 is really about her wavering investment in their joint history, in the product of that history (aka - the kids, the house, the way their lives are still tangled), and ultimately the ways he’s wronged her in that history (the cheating, the lack of support, the debt). Beth doesn’t fight with Dean about their future - and the one time she tries to - when she tries to get him to build a better Boland Motors with her for their future - he shuts it down by being too attached to the roles they had in the past.
I’d argue that the way Beth fights with Rio is entirely about her investment in a potential future - a future she wants, even if I don’t think she entirely knows what that looks like. They fight about work, about opportunities, about the balance of their partnership, about separating and losing that future, whether that future is professional or personal (and come on, it’s both).
Fighting about your past together and fighting for a future together are incredibly different things, and completely changes the stakes of a fight. In changing the stakes, it changes the emotion in it, it changes the way you fight, it changes the way you feel about it. Her fighting with Dean will always be weighed down with a certain degree of resignation, of grief, of exhaustion because they’re fighting about things that are over, that have been done - wounds that have been inflicted, even when they’re not actually fighting about any of those things.
Her fighting with Rio will always be struck with something passionate, with something urgent, with something alive, because so often what they’re fighting about is the way they want something to be - the way they want to be (and often the way they want the other to be or behave too, haha). Of course that will change a bit in S3 given the events of the tail-end of S2, but I don’t know. I think these two will always circle back to wanting each other, and wanting something together, which means their fights are always going to be more about what’s next, even when they’re about what’s happened now too.
