I am a straight woman. I am in a relationship. I am not watching Heated Rivalry (2025) because I want to be Ilya Rozanov or Shane Hollander, and I am not watching it because I want to be a man. I am watching it because I want what they are allowed to feel.
Like much of the internet, I found myself unexpectedly pulled into Heated Rivalry and its central relationship. At first, I struggled to explain why. It would be easy to dismiss the fascination as another case of women romanticising a “forbidden” or “heated rivalry” trope, but that explanation feels far too shallow for what the story actually does.
What Heated Rivalry offers is not spectacle. It is sincerity.
One of the most striking elements of Ilya and Shane’s relationship is its awkwardness. Their vulnerability does not emerge through grand declarations or hyper-sexualised dialogue, but through small, clumsy moments, pauses, plain questions, unpolished answers. Their bodies seem to say to one another, 'here I am.' No performance, no role-playing, no attempt to impress. Awkwardness, in this context, becomes freedom. To be awkward is to be unmasked.
As a young woman at university, this kind of intimacy feels both comforting and quietly devastating. We are so used to desire being mediated through performance, through curated language, irony, flirting-as-strategy, that watching intimacy grounded in sincerity feels almost radical. Their dialogue is raw and unembellished, untouched by the pornified language that so often frames modern romance. Desire in this show builds not through spectacle, but through honesty.
What makes this resonate is not that the relationship is queer, but that it exists on an equal playing field. Shane and Ilya’s love is not genderless because gender disappears, but because gender does not dictate the terms of their intimacy. There is no assumption of dominance, no expectation that one person must give more, soften more, or disappear more in order for love to function. Giving and taking are contextual, not gendered.
Watching this as a straight woman forces an uncomfortable realisation: many heterosexual relationships are shaped by negotiation rather than inhabitation. Love becomes something we manage. Desire becomes something we carefully assert, always aware of how easily it can be misread or consumed. This is not about dissatisfaction with men, or with relationships themselves. I am in a relationship I care deeply about. But Heated Rivalry highlights how deeply ingrained expectations still shape the way women experience intimacy , even in healthy, loving dynamics.
At the end of each episode, what lingers is not excitement, but a familiar heaviness. A mix of envy and quiet grief settling somewhere uncomfortable. Not because I want their relationship specifically, but because I recognise the absence it exposes. This fascination is often mislabelled as fetishisation. But this is not about tropes, it is about lack. It is about the lack of safety women feel in asserting desire without being reduced to something consumable. It is about how fluidity, when embodied by women, is so often eroticised and flattened into kink or spectacle. It is about the fear that giving yourself fully to love will cost you something , that to be seen is to be diminished.
Heated Rivalry represents intimacy without voyeurism. A space where symmetry can exist. Where being visible does not come at the expense of power. Even as someone who loves women as friends, it is tempting to believe that lesbian relationships somehow exist outside this tension. But patriarchy does not leave the room when men do. It lingers in language, in expectation, in the ways we are taught to value certain traits over others.
Margaret Atwood famously wrote: “You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.” That line feels uncomfortably relevant here. Even when watching intimacy that appears freer than our own, many women are still negotiating their place as both participant and observer.
What Heated Rivalry ultimately offers is not escapism, but clarity.
I do not want to be Ilya or Shane. I do not want to be a man. I want to inhabit love without fear , to give and be changed without that change feeling like loss. I want intimacy that is sincere rather than strategic, desire that is mutual rather than managed. And perhaps that is why this story resonates so deeply with women. Not because it shows us something unattainable, but because it reminds us of what love could feel like if we were allowed to experience it fully.
I want to say that writing this feels slightly strange. At 21, it’s odd to find myself having such a strong emotional reaction to a story that, on the surface, could be read as something that makes you question your sexuality. But that isn’t what this is for me. I’m not confused about who I’m attracted to; I know that clearly. What I’m responding to isn’t the gender of the relationship, but the way intimacy, vulnerability, and desire are allowed to exist within it. I’m resonating with the feeling, not the form it takes.