So I love a rom com. Especially a rom com where the leads have no romantic chemistry at all. And essentially in a rom com they’re just pretty shitty people so you don’t feel too bad about the hijinks they get into.
My beloved had me watch You’ve Got Mail, an old one I’ve never seen. It starts out pretty strong on them being terrible people because the leads Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks are both emotionally cheating on their partners with each other via email correspondence.
Then it turns out he owns the chain bookstore that puts her quaint family owned store out of business. They suggest a meet up and he realizes her identity but doesn’t clue her in to his. He still keeps corresponding with her knowing she hates his guts because again, he destroyed her business, the legacy left to her by her dead mother that she had hoped to pass down to her hypothetical child.
Then he decides he loves her anyway, they both dump their respective partners.
Now here, a grand gesture would have been enough to bridge this very hurtful gap. Buying the shop, converting it into something new as a gift to her perhaps. This man is exaggeratedly rich and would have the money easily.
But instead. He goes to befriend her as himself while still messaging her. He makes her double guess the emails he himself is sending and plants all kinds of seeds, they go on a montage of outings while only talking about his hidden alter ego, the mysterious man she’s been emailing.
Then he shows up at the park to confess. At this point I said aloud, “This is psychopath behavior. This is what psychopaths do.”
But Meg Ryan said she’d been hoping her mysterious suitor was Tom Hanks, the man who, can’t state enough, ruined her life and finances. And they kiss and smarmy music plays.
I fell in love with a person who happens to be a man, and that man happens to be a prince. He has captured my heart and made my life immeasurably better.
Bruce and Clark are married. Clark's colleagues missed the memo and think Clark is just too nice or scared to say anything about Brucie harrassing him.
Bruce just comes by to take his husband to lunch sometimes or stops by his desk when he's in the building for a meeting or dances with him at a gala Clark is covering but they never do anything obvious like kissing and Clark is a lot less enthusiastic in his flirting than public persona Brucie.
The logical conclusion for the people around Clark: Bruce is consistently harrassing Clark and gets away with it, too. Either because Clark doesn't want to start shit or because Brucie, stupid as he may be, is still influential, well liked, and literally the owner of the place Clark works at.
Clark, on the other hand, doesn't realize they don't know of his relationship and completely misses how concerned his friends and coworkers are getting.
Maybe Bruce knows but finds it too funny to set things straight, maybe he's not present whenever someone says anything that could clue him in on their assumption.