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I always thought that the Doctors interest in River was simply because she was an anomaly. He likes the mystery and the wild nature of their meetings and partings, she’s not someone he can easily predict, and that’s fun to him. We all know the Doctor loves fun 😂 It always seemed more of a, “Okay, I’ll play along cause I want to see where this goes,” rather than a romance from his end.

" it's almost as if they gaslight themselves into proceeding with a relationship" pure gold

I found it unconvincing because a lot of River’s values are actually in opposition to the Doctor’s. She doesn’t have the same respect for life and the timeline that he does. Now, Amy and Rory felt like a real love story.

I feel like the problem is that there was never a romantic story arc. Obviously it would have been different than normal, since River already loves him, but we could have seen the Doctor fall for her

I think the concept of time travelers meeting in the wrong order is really cool, but they never really interacted on screen in a way that felt like they actually liked each other. Just on a basic level

I never bought 11 and River as a couple because she always felt more like an ego boost for the Doctor. Imagine a relationship where you get to skip the awkward 'getting to know you phase' and your partner is already madly in love with you. I think why Husbands of River Song works is because it's the only time they seem to be properly aligned.

If Dr Who wasn't a kids' show and Moffat was a stronger writer there could actually be a really interesting dark exploration of free will, agency, consent and love. Two people getting married and gaslighting each other into falling in love, all because everything around them is telling them it's supposed to happen - I think there's a lot of complex layers and themes you could explore with that.

John Smith relationship with that woman in Family of Blood is way deeper than this.

This isn't love,
This is a car crash

Ok, the popcorn is ready. Let's keep refreshing the page and watch the fallout in the comments.

The thing about Moffat is that he's, at heart, a sit-com writer (who can do drama): the relationships he writes are, essentially, sit-com relationships. They do silly, funny, unrealistic things to make you laugh. He's at his best when he's doing couples (the clue's there in the title of his sit-com, "Coupling").
RTD, on the other hand, is a drama writer (who can do comedy). He's at his best when doing familial/intergenerational relationships (Rose and Jackie, for instance, and Donna and Sylvia and Donna and Wilf, ). They ring truer than Moffat's "couples" because they are "drama relationships" rather than "couple comedies".

I truly loath the backstory they ended up giving River. It feels so devastatingly flattening to a character who was so interesting. I really wish she had stayed a mystery. To other writers: if you don't have a clear, strong, reasonable backstory for a character already, leave them a mystery. Not everything needs to be explained to be good.

The relationship between the Doctor and River was something I never particularly liked either. I would say it’s at it’s peak in Silence in the Library where we know literally nothing about River except that she is obviously hugely important to the Doctor, but we don’t know why beyond our best guess being maybe she’s a future companion. Beyond that I hated damn near every creative decision made for her. I hated her being part Time Lord, because her getting Time Lord powers from being conceived in the Tardis seemed like a massive ass-pull. I hated the part about her being a child soldier/assassin who was raised to kill the Doctor but falling in love with him because it made her a badly written yandere whose whole personality is she’s in love with the object of her obsession and likes to murder stuff. It’s also pretty clear to me that the Doctor never actually loved River but was simply going through the motions because it’s better to be friends with the yandere, in the same way in Future Diary Yukiteru starts out by stringing Yuno along simply because she’s terrifying when angry and is the only thing keeping him alive. To me the thing that solidifies the Doctor never actually loving River is once she dies at the library and her consciousness is uploaded he never goes back to see her. She’s put away where she can’t bother him anymore and he’s done with her and the fake relationship he’d maintained.

I think this is completely right, and the problem arises because people thought The Time Traveller's Wife was a romance rather than a tragedy.

Moffat really fumbled the bag with rivers character. It feels like everytime she turns up she's less of a real character and more like a plot device. I do love the husbands of river song and feel like that was a great ending for her character. Weird that her best appearances are her first and last

Although I am a bit downhearted of this realisation, I'm glad you've acknowledged that it wasn't either of their faults and it was purely circumstantial.
Even though I still enjoy their relationship, I do agree with a lot of your points. And honestly, in real life, it REALLY wouldn't be a fun relationship to be in.

When we first see her with Ten, her actions seem self-sacrificing.  Later, when we know more about her, we realize she has no choice.  If Ten dies, there will be no Eleven to have her parents on the TARDIS.

omg, I've never been able to fully explain why these two never clicked for me (though I mostly chalk it up to not liking Moffat's writing as showrunner in general and finding River's whole arc really confusing and overly-convoluted) but you made some really great points and put a lot of subconscious thoughts of mine into words!

We never saw him tell her his name. We've never seen them fall in love. Or being in love. It was just always foreshadowed. I've been waiting for these episodes, but they never came.