There have been many will-they-won't-they relationships across television history, even just in sitcoms, but it's hard to find one that's quite as iconic and well-known as Ross and Rachel.
In the first season, Ross and Rachel met again after years apart, and the palaeontologist struggled to hide his crush from her - until Chandler blurted out his secret in the season finale. In the next season, she's ready to tell him she feels the same way, but he's got a new girlfriend.
Soon enough, he finds out about their mutual feelings, and the pair have their first kiss - but it only takes a few episodes before Ross messes it all up by making a list of her pros and cons that she discovers. One heartbreaking prom video later, and Rachel is head over heels in love with him - but the relationship isn't smooth sailing from there.
Ross then starts to get jealous of her colleague Mark, frustrated with her long work hours, and the two eventually "go on a break". Ross, woefully drinking with the guys, ends up sleeping with another woman, and despite his attempts to hide the truth from her, Rachel finds out and dumps him for good. The two don't spend too long apart, however, falling for each other in season 4 - only for their disagreement over what "going on a break" meant leading to an immediate split.
Despite how much time they spend apart from each other throughout the show, Ross and Rachel always seem to come together time and time again, then split through a mix of misfortune and bad decisions. The wrong name is said at Ross and Emily's wedding, the pair get married after too many drinks in Las Vegas... and that's all before it's revealed that a one-off fling between the two of them resulted in a pregnancy.
That's a lot for one relationship to go through - and that's not even the end of it, but according to one fan of the show, it can all be traced back to one moment - all the way at the start of the show. Thanks to Redditor Smoothmotives, who posted a popular post to the fan theories subreddit earlier this week, we may have an answer to why this all went down.
According to the Reddit user, the troubled relationship between Ross and Rachel comes down to their meeting in the pilot of the show, where they believe a "curse" began - all because Ross accidentally opens his umbrella inside as he greets her.
"When Ross is in the coffee shop meeting Rachel, his umbrella opens up unexpectedly, inside; this begins a 7 year bad luck streak with Rachel," they write. "Once the curse is lifted, Rachel tells Ross that he's going to be a father."
The way they back up this idea is by referring to the first air dates of both the pilot (September 22, 1994) and the pregnancy reveal episode (September 27, 2001). So, all this bad luck between the pair of them eventually ends, bringing a baby girl into the world. Saying that - from this point on, it seems that for all his mishaps, Ross and Rachel's lives tend to go a little better, right?
