Seen from a godlike perch, the stop-and-start romance that drives the new Hulu drama Normal People can seem like a cosmic joke. Against all odds, two soulmates find each other in high school, have toe-curling sex every day for several months, get into and attend the same selective college, end up in roughly the same social circles … and constantly break up, sometimes purely by accident. When they're at their lowest, or their loneliest, Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Connell (Paul Mescal) always return to one another. But they never seem to figure out how to stay together.
In the 2018 best-seller of the same name, Irish author Sally Rooney explored how a couple as seemingly perfectly matched as Marianne and Connell — who knew they were lucky to have found each other — still couldn't sustain a relationship. Beneath her bravado shivered a young woman who wondered if something inside her made her family so disdainful and her friends, when she finally made a few after high school, so fickle. And after a relatively easy adolescence as a good-looking athlete adored by guys and girls alike, Connell couldn't understand why it was so difficult to find lasting connections at a place like college, where he was supposed to be among his intellectual peers