that john mulaney standup where she asks him “are you watching the road?” and he responds “my eyes are looking through the windshield.”

Why do you think Dylan wanted to be in a open relationship with Marco in season 4? I think you briefly mentioned before that you had some thoughts on that whole situation so I’m curious lol.

How funny that you should ask this right now because for the last week or so I have been actively wondering if i will ever be willing to post gif-sets for the two hallway conversations between Marco and Dylan in Moonlight Desires! I want to make them because i think the scenes are well done and incredibly well acted by both AR and JB but I also don’t want to deal with the obvious hate Dylan is going to get in the tags. The guy gets enough tag hate as it is in posts where he’s being perfectly sweet grade A boyfriend material, so I’m not sure I want to see what’s said on posts featuring his worst behavior. 

I’ve mentioned before that I believe Dylan when he says he loves Marco and that he doesn’t think an open relationship changes that in any way. I think it’s absolutely possible for people to be in open or poly relationships where deep feelings are shared an honored. Obviously, I also think that Dylan goes about this all the wrong way, and that probably even if he went about it the right way, it could never work with Marco specifically. 

Again, the writers couldn’t seem to decide how much or how little characterization they were going to give Dylan, so some of my thoughts are canon, others are pure headcanon and some more are based off what we know about Paige and the Michalchuk parents and what we can extrapolate from there.  We see that Rose and Jeff Michalchuk are parents with incredibly high expectations. Their pride/affection for their kids seems accomplishment based. To me, they read as aloof, imperious, unobservant and largely absent. Paige is petrified at the idea that her mom will need to come into school to talk about what happened with Mr Oleander. She is so clearly freaking out about Banting and wants to talk to her mom while she’s home for Thanksgiving and Rose won’t hardly let her get a word in edgewise. Jeff greets his son (who will soon be moving a hemisphere away) with a HANDSHAKE (HUG YOUR SONs people!) and a comment about how he needs a haircut. The fact that Dylan has literally just had a haircut but obviously not the short ~respectable haircut that Mr Michalchuk would like him to have kind of hammers the dynamic of their relationship home for me. I think the Michalchuk family crest probably reads “get good grades, be a high achiever, and make sure I never get a phone call from your principal. ever.” All of this is to say that while I think Paige and Dylan were allowed a remarkable amount of independence growing up, I do not think they were given much freedom.  We don’t see a ton of Dylan in season 4 prior to Moonlight Desires, but I think it’s pretty easy to see the ways that college life effects him. He’s ecstatic and goofy as he moves into the dorms. He and Marco are flirting and dancing in public at a party. He pretty immediately gets that taste of freedom that college can afford him, and then in KoP we see him backlash against having that freedom limited by being kept a secret from Marco’s family. (Again, I do think Dylan goes about this wrong. But also, I will never not be mad at this show for poorly representing the perspective of Dylan/Zane as the person being asked to erase their identity. but again with the “this belongs in a different post”). We see him show up late, and his hair grown long and unkempt, his clothing starts to fit poorly, and the car he “loves more than his sister” is left dirty. We learn in TEotH that after MD, Dylan transfers to a school in Montreal which means two things: he didn’t get drafted in his first year of NHL eligibility and he probably won’t get drafted in his last.

This man is spreading himself too thin and he’s having the best time doing it. He’s drunk on college. He’s drunk on freedom.  

Now, unfortunately, Marco somehow gets rolled up in Dylan’s mind as someone who is a restriction on his freedom. Whether that’s because of KoP and not getting to be fully a part of Marco’s life type or restriction or not, idk. Maybe it’s actually that they don’t get to see each other often enough–with student counsel, downtown sasquatch, the blood drive, etc etc for Marco and with wild college life and hockey obligations, how often do these two really get to see one another? He loves Marco and he doesn’t want to break up, but somehow he isn’t feeling completely fulfilled. Maybe it’s that as a 19 year old in 2005, he hasn’t had a lot (maybe any) of long term monogamous gay relationships modeled for him. Maybe it’s that because he doesn’t fit the physical stereotype of a gay man, he feels like he needs to overcorrect somehow and find a way to “match” his identity better (I talk about this a little bit in the addendum on this post). Maybe he just develops a crush on Eric from Psych Class and doesn’t know that crushes outside of your relationship are normal and even healthy, but it doesn’t mean you need/have to act on them. Maybe it just comes down to that he wants to be more sexually creative/experimental than Marco is willing to be, but he doesn’t want to break up over it. I think he and Marco are pretty comfortable joking/teasing about possible flirtations or attractions with other guys (the headcanon about Craig in that linked post, Marco saying that the best thing about playing euchre with Dylan and his hockey team is that he’s playing it with Dylan’s hockey team) and from there Dylan kind of thinks...’just kidding...unless?’ 

Either way, Marco and Dylan both seem to think their relationship is in a good place where it is ready to take on a new challenge. Dylan thinks they love each other enough that they can successfully navigate opening things without it impacting their feelings for one another. Marco thinks they love each other enough that he can finish high school early and they can move in together. These dummies absolutely love each other, but damn do they need to work on their communication if they are so clearly in two different places like this. 

AND SPEAKING OF WORKING ON THEIR COMMUNICATION. 

Dylan’s first line of the episode, as he drives Marco to school in that “wash-me”-ass car is “So, you’ll call before you come over for the party?” I know others over the years have taken that line as Dylan trying to keep tabs on Marco so that he can sneak around behind his back, but that’s never how I read that line at all. I think the call is when he plans to talk about opening things up. Maybe he’d already chickened out about having that discussion that very morning (did Marco sleep over at the dorms last night? Or does Dylan leave school just to pick him up and drive him to class?) But while I think that Dylan is potentially having difficulty expressing to Marco what he wants from their relationship, I do not find it believable that this man is actively cheating. 

As previously discussed (also in the linked post) Dylan is a bad liar! He smiles too much and avoids eye contact. You just cannot convince me that this man lingering to get 5 more seconds of face time has already hooked up with Eric from Psych Class.  Okay, this got incredibly long and went in about a million directions, so I apologize if it only makes sense inside my own ping-pong game of a brain.