#who am I kidding. I'm in my thirties. Things haunt me at 11 after I've been asleep for three hours after a ten hour workday at the clinic

[andromediae]

Not sure how many spn storylines have Dean and Cas explicitly or implicitly paralleled with a heterosexual couple's arc, but it's gotta be a lot. Like from Cas' first few episodes you've got Ruby and Sam's relationship contrasted with Cas and Dean. You've got Cas and Dean vs. Anna and Dean in mid season 4. S5 has Dean offering end of the world experiences to both Cas and Jo. The rest of the season is heavy on the Cas and Dean parallel existential crisis train so there's not much in the way of women involved at all. Though you do have Jo sacrificing herself in a grand explosion to save everyone from hellhounds at the mid season climax and much later Cas blowing himself to kingdom come to save Dean and Co. from angels when they're trying to break into the Beautiful Room. In 6 there's a triangular thing where Dean is stuck between like three hard places because he can't be with Lisa because of soulless Sam and he can't focus on Cas' needs because of re-ensouled Sam. Then you've got Dean and Benny and Dean and Cas love triangle contrasted with Sam and Amelia and her dude (I can't go into detail 'cause the filter on those Sam flashback scenes plus the scene "dialogue" makes me want to scratch off my own skin). Obviously Cain and his wife vs Cas. There's Ishim's weakness (Lily Sunder) vs. Cas' weakness (Dean). Eventually you've also got the explicit "what's real-? We are" parallels between Dean/Cas and Sam/Eileen in 15.

I'm sure there's more, somebody should enlighten me. Certainly there are more of those parallels happening with Dean/Other Male Character. Thinking of that Wrestling ep where Dean and Sam split off to faun over their aging teenage wrestling crushes - male and female respectively. Like it HAPPENS A LOT. At some point was it just like a KNOWN thing behind the scenes? Like "Obviously fellow writing team members we have to figure out how to write Dean into another M/M thematic mirror to a M/F relationship." Like somebody knew this. Writers aren't dumb. It's their job to notice these things (even if other people on the team wrote them initially) and decide whether or not to continue adding to the trend and building a thesis. Right? RIGHT? AHHHH.