Why We Love Heated Rivalry

And what it’s gotta do with wellness.

It started, as many things do, with a WhatsApp message.

My friend Andrea dropped a note into our girls' group chat a few weeks ago. Had any of us seen this show called Heated Rivalry? She described it as a series about ice hockey with a lot of gay sex, and warned us that we would need to push through the first two episodes before we really got it.

Ice hockey. Gay sex. I remember reading that and thinking: thank you, Andrea, but absolutely not.

I was so wrong.

I did not even make it past the opening scene before I was hooked. The acting. The storytelling. The music. The tension between two people who cannot stop orbiting each other no matter how hard they try. I watched the whole series in what felt like one long exhale. Then I watched it again. And I am now, I will freely admit, planning a HR-themed birthday party this year in a cottage.  If you have watched the show, you understand completely. 

There is something this show stirred in me that I was not expecting.

When I was a young girl, I used to dream about a love like this. That particular quality of longing - the kind that lives in the body before it ever finds words, the kind that survives years of silence and distance and circumstances conspiring against it. I believed in that love completely as a girl. And then, somewhere along the way, as life gets lived and practical and layered with real complexity, that dream gets folded away. Not abandoned exactly. Just set aside.

Heated Rivalry took it out and held it up to the light again. Not with nostalgia - that would be too simple. With something more interesting. A more mature version of that longing. One that understands the cost of waiting, the weight of fear, and the extraordinary courage it takes to finally choose what you actually want.

I was not expecting a TV show to do that. And yet.

Psychotherapist Esther Perel, whose work on desire and relationships has shaped how a generation thinks about love, binge-watched the entire series after her followers kept asking for her perspective.  What she offered went beyond a simple explanation of its popularity. It was something more illuminating.

Perel describes Heated Rivalry as a "corrective experience“, a term from psychotherapy that refers to an encounter, real or witnessed, that offers the response you needed but did not receive. The reason the show resonates so powerfully, she argues, lies in its consistent refusal to punish vulnerability. A character drops a plate and instead of consequences, receives understanding. Someone stumbles over a difficult question and is helped rather than judged. A son comes out to his mother and she responds with exactly the words you would wish any mother to say: I am sorry you did not feel safe enough to tell me sooner.

Every uncertainty works itself out. Every moment of exposure is met with care. As Perel puts it, this is precisely how you wish the world would respond to you. 

After the first viewing, she explains, you already know the characters will be okay. So watching it again becomes something else entirely, like stroking a teddy bear. Comforting. The world of the show becomes a refuge. An antidote to the harshness of the realities so many of us are currently confronting. 

That is huge. It is medicine.

"It is like a lullaby in the beautiful sense of the word. Nothing bad ever really happens. You are never waiting for the other shoe to drop.“ - Esther Perel

The corrective experience runs deeper than emotional safety alone. It lives in how the show portrays men.

Ilya and Shane, the two protagonists, inhabit one of the most traditionally unforgiving environments for male vulnerability that exists. And within that world, they are tender. They are honest. They ask questions and wait for real answers. Ilya, the more dominant of the two, checks in constantly. When they finally find their way to each other, his first words are: so, what do you want to do? Not as a formality. As genuine curiosity. As care. 

This is consent as it was always meant to be. An expression of how much one person values another's experience, lived rather than performed. Research by Dr. Leah Dajches, Assistant Professor at New Mexico University, on how consent is portrayed in media shows that watching it modeled on screen makes people more likely to practice it in their own lives. Stories teach. They always have. They help us make sense and give meaning in a world that so often feels impossible to understand. 

And then there is Scott. The teammate who finds his own courage - who makes his love for Kip public in the most breathtakingly open way - and in doing so, creates the conditions for Shane and Ilya to finally stop running from what they have always known. Courage is contagious. The show understands this.

The cottage. If you have watched it, the word alone does something to you. That particular quality of safety, a place outside the world's expectations where two people can finally be honest, is something every human being recognizes. We have all longed for our version of it. And when Ilya finally says it - "I'm coming to the cottage“ - you understand exactly what those four words contain. Everything unsaid. Everything risked. Everything chosen. Everything. 

Esther Perel goes further still. In a conversation with Goop, she situates the show's power within something broader: the act of fantasizing itself. Fantasy, she argues, is never really about the specific story you are consuming. It is about freeing yourself up to imagine. To discover what that teaches you about your own desire. 

This is a wellness conversation. A deeply serious one.

How often do we permit ourselves to want what we actually want? To sit with longing rather than immediately rationalising it away or deciding it is unrealistic? For women especially, there is a long history of editing desire down to something more manageable, more acceptable, more convenient for everyone around us.

Heated Rivalry gives you hours to stop editing. To feel what you feel without apology. To remember what you dreamed about before you learned to be cautious about it.

Chala Hunter, the intimacy coordinator on the show, put it beautifully: fiction becomes a safe shelter where we are finally allowed to be everything we do not permit ourselves to be in real relationships. This is practice. This is imagination rehearsing for a fuller life.

Sometimes the most radical act of self-care is allowing yourself to be completely, helplessly moved by something; to let a show crack something open in you and then sit with what spills out.

The HWELL Takeaway

Watch Heated Rivalry. Watch it with your best friend, or alone with a glass of something beautiful. Enjoy brilliant storytelling, great music, and the performance of super talented actors. Let yourself immerse fully in the experience.

Feeling deeply is a form of health. Longing is what makes us fully alive. Story is medicine. Allowing yourself to be moved, to want, to dream are among the most nourishing things you can do for yourself.

And if, like me, you find yourself researching cottage rentals for your birthday - lean in. The world is better when women allow themselves to be whoever they want to be.

Watch the show. Let yourself feel what surfaces. Trust what it points toward.

💚 Gaby

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