Aahana Swrup
The Hulu show ‘Queenie’ delves into the regular life of the titular character as she undergoes a quarter-life crisis, enhanced by her tumultuous, professional, romantic, and familial relationships. After Queenie’s longest-running relationship with her boyfriend, Tom, comes to an abrupt end, the 25-year-old woman finds herself ill-equipped to deal with the drastic changes unfolding in her life. Still, she embarks on a journey of self-discovery and self-reliance— messily punctuated with unresolved issues from her childhood that lead to a domino chain of bad decisions.
One of the notable bad decisions Queenie makes in her journey remains her tendency to jump into the wrong relationships with the wrong men. Even though she tries to hold out hope that she and Tom may get back together, the woman eventually returns to the world of dating, using an online app to connect with new people. Consequently, the dating app Love Below enters Queenie’s life, compelling fans to wonder about the authenticity of the platform and its role in the protagonist’s life. SPOILERS AHEAD!
Love Below Ignites Queenie’s Unhealthy Relationship With Casual Hook-ups
Despite the show’s fictionality, ‘Queenie’ charts a realistic and relatable account of a Jamaican-British woman in her mid-twenties who tries to keep a handle on her rapidly unraveling life. Therefore, while Queenie’s narrative is surrounded by fictitious elements that define her on-screen life, these elements manage to hold authentic roots in reality. As such, even though the woman’s dating app of choice, Love Below, is a fictional platform, the effect it expels on Queenie’s life remains highly relatable even off-screen.
Queenie first interacts with the app after a stranger at a party— who has to listen to the woman’s drunken ramblings about her ex-boyfriend— downloads it onto her phone. Since Queenie is coming out of a three-year-long relationship, her foray into the dating world remains tumultuous. Therefore, the dating app isn’t the perfect solution for the woman at first, as she keeps encountering the wrong crowd on the platform. Nonetheless, she soon finds a way to maneuver the app expertly and land a series of satisfactory hook-ups. Even so, while Queenie enjoys these connections in the moment, she realizes each one-night stand leaves her feeling worse than the one before.
As such, Love Below’s addition to the character’s storyline infuses the show with a realistic interpretation of modern hook-up culture. According to statistics gathered by the Pew Research Center, 24% of individuals on dating apps seek out casual sex on the platform. The same, paired with the fact that dating has become more challenging for 47% of Americans now than it was in the past, provides a cohesive context for the relevance of hook-up culture’s more negative effects. Thus, while retaining a fictional origin, Below Love introduces a plot line into Queenie’s narrative that defines her relatable and realistic experiences.
