The Love Story of Sherlock and John 

(Sherlock Meta by Ivy Blossom)

I’m a broken record on this: Sherlock is already a love story, and it’s been a love story since the beginning. Nothing that happens in the next two weeks or 10 years will alter that fact. Nothing whatsoever!

Sherlock and John have outsized feelings for each other, and they both know it. Everyone around them knows it. So far this story has been largely about the various ways they try to make sense of this basic truth, and try to find an arrangement that satisfies them based on what each of them thinks they want.

They try being friends who solve crimes together; John’s dating gets in the way, and he fails to distinguish between one girlfriend from the next. Without discussing it, they become monogamous and ambiguous life partners who sometimes share a bed and don’t bother correcting people who assume they’re lovers. Sherlock, with his big ego and low self-esteem, fails to understand the nature of his complicated relationship with John and inadvertently breaks up with him (oops). Two years later, Sherlock wants his relationship back, but John has understandably moved on.

But John can’t quit Sherlock altogether. He needs and loves Sherlock as much as Sherlock needs and loves him. But how do you square this circle? They are very different people who appear to want very different things. John wants a romantic, ideally sexual relationship and everything that Sherlock is. Sherlock wants John to solve crimes with him and be with him at all times, and artfully dodges everything else.

John shifts his language to best friend, best man, godfather of my child, and they slip back into something of their former closeness, but with the addition of Mary. Their relationship is still far more intense and involved than would be considered usual, but what’s the word for it? What are the rules?

John’s happiness is reliant on his relationship with Sherlock. Fortunately Mary doesn’t mind, and fortunately Sherlock is prepared to do whatever’s required of him. Mary and Sherlock learn to comfortably share John, though it’s not clear that John is comfortable being shared. You’d think he’d be happy, he’s got everything we thought he wanted: the normal life and romantic/sexual relationship with Mary that he seemed to crave, even a child, and he still has Sherlock. Everything should be perfect, but it isn’t.

John doesn’t just love danger and adventure. If he did, Mary’s danger and adventure would be equally thrilling to him. He doesn’t just love hints of sociopathy and acting as someone’s moral compass, or he’d be as invested in helping Mary become a better person as he is in helping Sherlock. Mary’s brilliance doesn’t excite him the way Sherlock’s does. John is a man with trust issues: he isn’t able to forgive Mary the way he’s able to forgive Sherlock. John’s feelings about Sherlock go beyond the adrenaline and the thrill of danger, and beyond a mere admiration for his abilities.

People don’t always understand what it is they want. Sometimes it’s through convolutions like this that they work it out.

Considering this progression, it makes perfect narrative sense for John to act upon the knowledge he’s gained about exactly how deeply and irrevocably in love with Sherlock he is, and that he is not capable of forming this unique kind of bond with anyone else. It makes sense that Sherlock, who has thus far has deliberately avoided romance, love, and sex, to finally mature enough emotionally to accept that he has these needs as well. It makes sense for them to admit all of this in one way or another. They are made for each other. They are both better people when they are together. They will only be truly happy with each other.

If Sherlock and/or John decide not to address this, it will be a tragedy in the classic sense. But it will not mean theirs has not been a love story.