An Un-unravelable Web?

[Louise]

[SH]: And then I started to think, what will happen in the future for this character if he’s married. Is that going to change him so drastically that we won’t have any of that same dynamic we had before. ... And then it just seemed to happen very naturally. It’s been five years. It’s not like we’re in the 10th year and there was never any romance; they just married us. It seems like it built up pretty evenly and naturally. You start to see, wait a second, even though he’s married, the dynamic has not completely shifted yet. He’s not grown up. He’s still with his mother. He still needs these guys to hang out with. And now you’re going to get this whole view of what married life is like, which I think is a kind of fascinating thing to put into this show about young nerds.

**Howard’s been so sweet – what he says after the bachelor party, and with the star necklace…
Yeah. I felt really lucky. It was a bold move to let it go into an emotional territory without feeling sappy or anything like that. Hopefully people felt the same. I think it’s nice to see that side.

He’s not grown up.

Yeah, all he did was graduate from one of the world's most prestidgious universities, and get a job at another one of the world's most prestidgious universities. It's like laying on a rotting couch in the basement, watching infomercials, eating Cheetos, and using drugs all day, really.

It's interesting how cultural context affects our view of stuff like this. Howard's relationship with his mother is clearly unhealthy in some ways, but in some cultures it's both normal and *expected* to live at home with your parents until you get married. My Korean friend is prob. in her early forties and she sort of makes a pretense of living with her parents, although I think she goes off and stays with her boyfriend on the weekends. She has nothing but disposable income and she can travel, buy Louis Vuitton bags, play golf every single day, go on vacation constantly, and just do whatever she wants. I think that by choosing to be single, she is actually a lot freer than some other Korean women and she has kind of outsmarted the system by not becoming a housewife and subservient to her in-laws. There's none of this "living at home = loser" attitude here. The expectations are different, and carry their own set of problems and issues.