10 Couples That Hurt Buffy The Vampire Slayer (And 10 That Saved It)

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one of the most revolutionary television shows of all time.

Action/adventure/sci-fi series still use terms like Big Bad to describe their season’s major villain. Its impact on pop culture is tremendous.

The show works so well for so many reasons, it tackles so many themes that are still relevant, but the main thing that keeps coming back has to be the wide cast of characters and their sincere, often troubled relationships.

The Scooby Gang never has it easy when it comes to love. In some ways, the show is defined by heartbreak.

People rarely just break up on Buffy, their relationships usually end in profound loss, even for couples that fans aren’t even necessarily fans of.

Fans love their relationships and still speak passionately both about the ones they love and the ones they hate.

There are certain boyfriends of Buffy’s that, even now, spark contempt amongst the fan base, and there are still endless debates as to whether she should have wound up with Spike or Angel.

There have been so many couples throughout seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that it is worth going through each of them to determine which ones actually hurt the show, as well as which ones saved it.

Here are the 10 Couples That Hurt Buffy The Vampire Slayer (And 10 That Saved It).

Many people don’t even remember Scott Hope, but he was one of three recurring characters introduced in the season three episode “Faith, Hope and Trick”, with the other two being new slayer Faith and vampire Mr. Trick.

While he might not have made an impact, he was Buffy’s boyfriend for an entire chunk of the season.

Everyone expected Buffy to eventually break up with Scott to get back together with Angel, but that didn’t happen.

Instead, Scott broke up with her after she continued to keep him at arms length.

The fact that this relationship for the show’s central character had no real impact definitely didn’t help the show and barely registers as an afterthought now.

It should be clear right off the bat that the couple’s actual time together was abusive and manipulative and not great for either of them, and that’s why it won’t top this list.

However, there are still many people who believe that Buffy and Spike belong together. That’s because the pairing made sense, even after it was mishandled.

Spike went through so much to win Buffy’s affection and Buffy could count on him and confide in him even when she couldn’t go to her friends.

While the end of season six was a disastrous turn, the seventh season at least gave fans hope that one day they could get back together as a mature couple.

It was great to see Giles move on after Jenny’s tragic loss and have some kind of mature adult relationship after the destruction of the high school and the loss of his job as both librarian and watcher.

However, his relationship with Olivia ultimately went absolutely nowhere.

It would have been perfectly fine for them to just be two people keeping things casual with no real need for serious feelings, but the show attempted to expand their relationship a couple of times and it never worked.

Olivia learned the truth about Sunnydale and Giles in “Hush”, and suggested that it might be too much for her to handle.

It must have been, as she never appeared again save for a dream sequence in “Restless” that seemed to suggest she was pregnant.

While the two of them never got together in the long run, there were always clear feelings between Giles and Joyce, particularly in the third season.

These feelings were best exemplified in “Band Candy”, in which both characters are reverted back to a teenage state and lose their adult inhibitions, resulting in them copulating on the hood of a police car.

Buffy later finds out about this in “Earshot”.

Even though Joyce and Giles never really pursued a relationship after that episode, there was a sincere respect and trust between them.

While it was wise for them not to get together in the long run, their brief pairing together proved to be a lot of fun for fans.

This was funny at first. However, the joke wore out quickly as the relationship went on. Spike’s treatment of Harmony was manipulative and abusive, to the point that he even staked her without realizing that she had become invulnerable.

He did not know that it would not dust her when he did it, which is a huge red flag for a vampire relationship.

He continued to see Harmony even after becoming aware of the fact that he was in love with Buffy and even used her as a rebound in the fifth season of Angel, even after he had gotten his soul back — though she was at least aware of it that time and managed to call him out.

It’s no secret that most people weren’t a fan of the Buffy/Riley relationship throughout season four and into season five.

They had far from the passionate drive that she had had with Angel.

For many fans, they never even wanted to see her with anyone but Angel, so no one was going to compare.

It was clear that Riley was not the one, though, and the show even commented on that numerous times.

Riley left during a devastating season five departure and when he returned, he was married to a woman named Sam.

It turned out to be the best for both Riley and Buffy. He settled down with someone who can share the same lifestyle.

This relationship definitely served its purpose by showing what a terrible human being and hateful misogynist Warren turned out to be.

This was a guy who built a robot girlfriend and then abandoned her without her understanding why and without telling any of this to Katrina at the time.

When Warren tried to win back Katrina’s trust, it turned out to actually be part of his plan to hypnotize her into being his slave, which then backfired causing Warren to assault her and end her life.

Katrina’s entire purpose seemed to be to pass away in order to further the development of a male character, which is a bad look.

However, when that character’s whole development is that he’s an abuser of women, it’s also somewhat unavoidable.

Faith was never one for romantic entanglements, saying that as soon as she spent one night with a guy, she found out all she needed to know about him.

Her only fling with any of the main characters had been Xander, and it had just been a one night stand and she had tried to strangle him afterward.

When she met Robin Wood, son of a slayer, they were two people from completely different worlds but they also shared some similarities both in terms of their respective losses and of growing up having to take care of themselves.

Robin helped Faith to slow down and even if they never fully got together, they were clearly on that path by the end of the series.

Oz and Willow were great together, easily one of the best couples in the show’s history, even when they had their ups and downs. They balanced each other incredibly well.

However, Oz considered caging himself once a month to be an easy fix for his werewolf condition and when Veruca showed up in Sunnydale, she forced him to confront some hard truths about who and what he actually was.

His werewolf fling with Veruca devastated Willow and led to Oz being forced to end Vercua’s life to stop her from eating Willow.

It was rushed and horrific, but Oz’s departure did allow both he and Willow to confront things about themselves and grow individually after he left.

One of the show’s best relationships, the only problem with this pairing is that their time together was so short.

While Jenny Calendar was introduced in season one, she appeared more regularly in season two, where the chemistry between her and Giles was made abundantly clear.

Viewers got to see a whole new, much more boyish, side of Giles and that was great. But unfortunately, Jenny met a devastating end after Angel lost his soul.

Giles returning home to see Jenny laid out on his bed is still the most unsettling, devastating image in the show’s seven year history.

Her loss lingered throughout the rest of the series and Giles never had another relationship remotely this serious.

On one level, the relationship here was just hilarious. One of these people is a well-to-do intellectual, a total academic and the other is Cordelia.

However, they were certainly similar in how clueless and superficial they could both be at any given moment.

Of course, the major problem here is that Wesley was quite a bit older than Cordelia, and not in a way like Angel where he could get a pass for being immortal.

This is different. Wesley was a grown man trying to court a high school student Even if she was of legal age, it was still very creepy.

Thankfully, the sparks between them completely fizzled out after their first kiss and they went on to have a profound friendship on Angel.

Absolutely nothing about this relationship should have worked. Throughout season one and up to this point in season two, the only thing Xander and Cordelia had in common was the fact that they hated each other.

However, they traded insults more than anyone else and eventually that passionate vitriol manifested itself as actual passion.

While this began as a relationship built on mutual lust, it transformed both characters for the better, giving Xander an actual relationship and forcing Cordelia to realize that she could define her coolness on her own terms rather than who she hung out with or who she dated.

Unfortunately, even after Cordelia turned her back on her popularity, Xander blew this relationship by kissing Willow.

While season three was undoubtedly one of the show’s best, it was bogged down with some questionable relationships and this was the very worst of them.

The smartest thing this pairing did was finally make it clear to the viewers that this was not something they should actually want.

On that level, it does succeed. Fans had wanted to see Willow and Xander get together from the very first episode. Even after they found their own relationships, it didn’t seem to matter. The people wanted what they wanted.

So Willow and Xander shared a few kisses, which completely ended his time with Cordelia and put a serious strain on Willow’s relationship with Oz, which took time to mend.

When Oz was first introduced over the course of several minor appearances toward the beginning of season two, fans hated him. They didn’t want to see Willow with anyone but Xander.

It wasn’t until “Innocence”, where Oz told Willow that he wasn’t going to kiss her just to make Xander jealous, that fans started to fall in love with this character.

His relationship with Willow wasn’t always easy, but it was sweet, tender and based on genuine love.

Unfortunately, it ended only partway into season four, when Oz’s struggle against his inner beast took over and forced him to leave town.

When Oz came back to find Willow with Tara, they left on respectful terms and had the most healthy sendoff of any couple in the show’s history.

On some level, the beginning of this relationship was close to the beginning of Willow’s relationship with Oz, in that people really didn’t want to see Willow with anyone at the time.

The difference here is that people never warmed up to Kennedy as a character and still complain about her to this day.

It was strange to see Willow in a relationship while still grieving for Tara, and even if the show tried to handle that as best as it could, Kennedy was such a strange person for Willow to end up with.

Kennedy was a spoiled brat, different from Willow, but in a way that stretched the concept of opposites attract to its limits.

Still, the series pursued the pairing and they remained together throughout all of season seven.

Unlike most of the other characters on this list, Spike and Drusilla were actually introduced as a couple.

They brought a new layer not just to the couples that were seen on the show, but as also to the mythology as a whole.

They were an example to the audience that vampires actually could feel and share passionate love even if they did not have a soul.

They were utterly devoted to each other, even as they tore up Sunnydale and launched numerous plots to bring down the slayer and her friends.

Ultimately they didn’t work out, at first because of Spike’s alliance with Buffy, though it was later made clear that Dru realized before Spike did that he had fallen in love with the slayer.

Buffy and Parker’s relationship played out over the first few episodes of the show’s fourth season, and it was much rougher on her than fans wanted to see.

They dated for a while, spent the first couple weeks hanging out and when they finally slept together he totally abandoned her and ignored her completely.

The point of her pairing with Parker was somewhat to undo what they had done in “Innocence”, stripping the concept of the first boy a girl sleeps with turning into a monster the next day and dealing with that bluntly and realistically.

Fans did not react positively to this development, though, and even though it did what it meant to do, Parker was a bad spot on Buffy’s dating life.

For most people, this is the pinnacle. This was the relationship that broke through to the mainstream. It was a pairing so popular that it allowed Angel to move on to his own spinoff series even after he and Buffy broke up.

It was a classic doomed romance. They were never going to last, but never really had to deal with that until the third season.

When Angel lost his soul and went bad, that was when Buffy really began to grow up and become one of the most story-driven and influential TV series of all time.

There’s something incredibly archetypal about this romance. Even though they shouldn’t be together for so many reasons, that was always part of the appeal in the first place.

While no one was going to match up to what she had with Angel right away, fans hated the Buffy and Riley relationship.

At first, his whole appeal to her was that he was boring and normal, which is never as interesting to watch.

However, as they stayed together and Riley began to doubt if he was enough for her, he went to extreme lengths to try and connect with her and embrace a darkness and pain that he just didn’t come by naturally.

Riley knew she didn’t love him. Her relationship with Angel was doomed and painful and he was misguided enough to think that the fact that he wasn’t causing her pain was a bad thing.

Willow and Tara might have been the best relationship across the entire run of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Willow was one of the first characters to be established as straight and come to terms with her orientation throughout the course of any television series.

Ironically, Tara was introduced as a friend for Willow but upon the writing and the casting the creators quickly realized there would be much more to the couple than that.

It’s precisely because this relationship was so profound and meant so much to so many people that the loss of Tara is still a gut punch, even now, and will likely always be one of the most brutal sendoffs in TV history.

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Can you think of any other couples that hurt or saved Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Sound off in the comments!

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