As a meditation on less-than-perfect modern romance, Netflix’s Love is spot on. “Yeah, I’m a huge asshole because I care about you,” its nerd-with-a-heart Gus tells the object of his affection Mickey in the newly released second series. Later, Mickey confesses something so many viewers will see in themselves – that when it comes to relationships, “when it’s going well, I panic.”

Love spent its first series convincing us of the unlikely pairing of Gillian Jacobs and Paul Rust, their easy rapport and obvious mutual attraction, before painstakingly outlining why these people should in fact not be together.

The strain of their relationship is not new – television has long crawled with toxic twosomes. But it is part of a recent wave of TV shows candidly addressing them as such, from Lena Dunham’s Girls to Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney’s Catastrophe. In this boom time for screen toxicity, strife is always part of the pain when you fall for someone. Love is never picture-perfect – and it hits home all the more for it.

Gus hurts Mickey by pursuing her; Mickey is fine with being hurt. Photograph: Suzanne Hanover/Netflix

The second season of Love starts where the first left off: Mickey asserting that she wants to take a year off dating, though inevitably, the two are nudged back together. Mickey is a drug, alcohol, sex and love addict, self-sabotaging and beautiful and cool. Gus is a sweet dweeb – but he is also controlling, manipulative and cruel. As the series progresses, Gus hurts Mickey by pursuing her; Mickey is fine with being hurt. These are two people terrified of being alone, both walking tentacles of need: Gus compulsively mediates Mickey’s sobriety, and she needs a nice guy to witness her personal growth.

Whenever their relationship veers towards something resembling stability, they panic, preferring to languish instead in their fractiousness. At one point, Gus admonishes Mickey for smoking in a well-to-do neighbourhood of mansions and manicured lawns. In return, Mickey dismisses his script for a teen witch TV show, a career highlight, as “stupid”. They get under each other’s skin, believing if they can just get it together in the end, the pain will have been worth it.

Love dismantles the very tropes it sets up. What happens beyond the meet-cute when the nice guy’s geniality masks extreme passive aggression? When the manic pixie dream girl’s impulsiveness is pathological? At its best, Love interrogates what that word even means. Is it a tonic for isolation? Good sex? Somebody to eat take-aways with? It keeps us guessing right up to the devastating, bittersweet finale. But Gus and Mickey’s bond is never venerated as aspirational – it is always exhausting.

The current, final series of Lena Dunham’s Girls is similarly rife with poison. The women’s friendships are all breaking down, but it is Jessa and Adam’s relationship that is the most quintessentially toxic. Mistaking conflict for ardour, they thrive on their own self-perpetuating drama; Jessa eats yoghurt naked while Adam bounds around their apartment like a giant squabbling child. The scenes between the pair have been the series’ most claustrophobic – the hermetic nature of their bond fostering their mutual decay.

Hannah has long been the poster girl for millennial narcissism, but now, the gross vanity of the relationships swirling around her throws her own status as a single woman into relief. Photograph: HBO

Marnie and Desi are similarly entangled; they outright hate each other, yet are unable to separate. Marnie is too self-absorbed to realise Desi is addicted to prescription drugs, and Desi resents her deeply for it. “My back is covered in bruises,” Marnie screams, unforgivably selfishly, “from the two-hour massages I have to help me deal with this!” They are, we realise, terrible people. But all this tension acts as a foil for Hannah Horvath’s growth. Hannah has long been the poster girl for millennial narcissism, but now, the gross vanity and whipped-up melodrama of the relationships swirling around her throws her own status as a single woman into relief – and leaves her able to evolve into adulthood and maybe even responsibility. With coupling up so consistently pitched as the end goal, it becomes a bold decision to posit being single as a permissible, perhaps more desirable, state.

Rob and Sharon try to get back on track after respective near-infidelities. Photograph: Mark Johnson/Channel 4

Catastrophe doesn’t deal in the same level of venom, though it too explores the cost of destructive repetitive behaviours. After getting pregnant from what was supposed to be a fling, Sharon and Rob opt to raise a baby together. Sharon voices anxieties that Rob is staying with her out of a moralistic sense of duty, which he half-confirms, forming the quiet resentment that underpins the first and second series. Now in its third outing, the couple are trying to get back on track again after respective near-infidelities. Episodes hum with both hilarious barbs and fears about the tentativeness of their reunion. “It’s fucking ... rude,” Sharon responds to Rob’s accusation that she’s slept with someone else. “What are you – a Brontë sister?” he flings back.

Catastrophe is tightly cyclical: the couple accrue small indignities, with each season punctuated by a separation then reconciliation, before the whole thing starts over. Unlike Love or Girls, the coupling at the heart of Catastrophe has a solidity that outweighs the creeping negativity. In spite of their constant swipes at each other, they are comfortable, and they somehow find equilibrium.

“Holding on to toxic relationships is what keeps us from growing,” Adam told Hannah back in the debut season of Girls. With so few examples of content, single characters in TV or film, is it any wonder we stay in relationships that do nothing for us? Pain can be normalised until quiet fulfilment seems, if not entirely abstracted, just tedious. What is most radical about these new TV relationships, then, is how gratuitously unglamorous they are – leaving both the couples and the viewer exhausted, yet always hopeful for something better.

