Relationship Spotlight: Jude Jacob & Connor Stevens (The Fosters)

Hearing about Jude and his storyline was, honestly, one of the reasons I finally checked out The Fosters.  While, like most things on the show, Jude’s relationship with Connor can be written a bit haphazardly (more often, it feels, this season,) it’s one of the series’ more consistent ongoing arcs, and I enjoy it immensely.  (Relationship-related spoilers.)

With Connor and Jude, one of their plot’s best qualities is also its most maddening:  the slow pace at which it unrolls.  A lot of stories on The Fosters careen around at breakneck speed, which can make them feel inauthentic.  However, since the actors playing Jude and Connor are young enough to be constrained by child labor laws, their screentime, and thus their story’s momentum, is limited by necessity.  This can be great, because it allows this gentle story of a friendship that might be blossoming into first love to play out more naturally.  Jude/Connor doesn’t have a ton of improbably drama piled on top of it to up the ante every week, because there’s drama enough in the plot unfolding.  At the same time, though, weeks go by where all we get of their plot is tantalizing scraps.  So, it’s a conundrum – I want the series to take its time with them and give me a top-shelf story, but I also just want more Jude/Connor!

Jude and Connor intrigue me from their earliest interactions.  Jude is new in school, but, due to his penchant for painting his nails, has already been labeled “the gay kid.”  Connor, by contrast, is what would stereotypically be called more “all-American.”  He’s into sports and videogames (though Jude likes videogames as well, other kids are quick to reduce him to a single trait,) and he’s big enough that he wouldn’t make anyone’s easy target.  With all this going for him, I suppose one could argue that, when he paints his nails in solidarity with his new friend, he comes at it from a place of relative privilege.  I don’t care – that is a ballsy move for a 12-year-old boy, and whether he’s doing it out of friendship or maybe-like-like, it’s a magnificent gesture.

As their plot moves forward, we start to see the first tentative steps toward a deeper relationship between the boys.  Jude is startled by his feelings of jealousy when Connor expresses interest in a girl, and Connor continues to see Jude in secret after his dad forbids their friendship, assuming Jude to be afflicted with “teh gay” and not wanting Connor to “catch it.”  They make shy advances toward each other, physical contact that’s at first easily “explainable,” like jocular tussling, but soon gets bolder, like moving to sit closer to one another for no evident reason.  Their first overtly romantic gesture – holding pinkies at the movie theater while ostensibly on a double date – feels like something out of a Jane Austen novel, a tiny physical connection that, in such a repressed environment, is positively charged with unspoken attraction.

And although it’s hard, because I like both boys but especially Jude and want nothing but the best for him, I like that it takes them a long time to figure out exactly what their relationship is and where it’s heading.  It’s tough for them, inspiring confusion in both, fear in Connor, and insecurity in Jude, but it feels real.  I like that they dance around the idea of a “them” and struggle with what they mean to each other, but by the same token, I love it when Jude realizes things can’t keep going the way they are and confronts Connor about it.  For a sensitive boy, Jude can be pretty daring, and it’s so gratifying to see him finally stop accepting the on-off, behind-closed-doors relationship that Connor is apparently so okay with, and tell the boy he likes that he needs more than that.