In a show who’s relationships are brash, bold declarations, a viewer can’t help but be captivated  by the Underwood’s. Their love is far from traditional & their marriage is very thought provoking, very unusual. They have a close successful partnership of equality~ a companionship marriage. Some may even wonder if they Underwoods have a personality disorder, a fatal attraction where a couple is attracted to one another because their is something in their personality patterns that are complimentary.  They respect one another’s goal, and understand one another on another level.

Their marriage won’t give you the warm & fuzzes. They portray complicated and modern partnerships, and a range of power dynamics too rarely seen in the media. According to Slate, “Were the Underwoods a real political couple in actual Washington and the double-affair scandal broke, news reports would depict theirs as a marriage of cold, calculated convenience—the Clintons but worse.”

But within all of their relationships complexity, they’re in sync and have deep intimacy. They make it look admirable. Working in tandem, Claire schemes, lies, and hustles to help him achieve his political goals; not just for him, she does the same with her international non profit, The Clearwater Initiative. I believe their relationship is functional because she wouldn’t do anything for Francis that she wouldn’t first do for herself.

In Claire’s interview with CNN in Season 2 she explains why she loves him, “He didn’t put me on some pedestal.” Claire says, “He knew I didn’t want to be adored or coddled.” Claire is complex.  And again in Season 1, “You know what Francis said to me when he proposed? I remember his exact words. He said, ‘Claire if all you want is happiness, say no. I’m not going to give you a couple of kids and count the days until retirement. I promise you freedom from that. I promise you you’ll never be bored.’ You know, he was the only man—and there were a lot of others who proposed—who understood me.”

I think how Claire feels can be summed up by the quote, “I have no fear of commitment, only of containment.”

Robin Wright describes the Underwood’s marriage herself: “They’re both leaders and the ends justify the means. They will do whatever it takes to get ahead, they have each other’s back, and they have a mutual respect for one another as a husband and wife and man and woman. They’re a team.” Claire and Francis operate as a single lethal unit.

They fill the holes in their relationship with a common understanding.  Claire says early on, “We have never avoided each other,” but that is not the same as the more common, “We tell each other everything.”

An affair isn’t the ultimate betrayal under the terms of the Underwood’s marriage, but upsetting their delicate balance between separate and apart does. In Season 1, Frank needs Claire’s help to get his Watershed Act passed, but helping him would mean sacrificing  the top priority of her nonprofit, which is getting a shipment of water filters out of Sudan. The only time their marriage appears to be in a crisis is when one souse’s goals are often at odds with the other’s. Claire responds, “So what you’re saying is that my goals are secondary?” Frank loses his temper, “I will not be lectured to the moment I walk in the door!” His mistake here is to assume that his crisis succeeds hers, assuming that when things get serious Claire will become willingly subsumed into his urgent needs~ basically that she will revert to becoming a political wife.