Relationship with Chandler Bing Andrew Harrison of The New Republic believes that the writers deliberately broke up any main character who was approaching a borderline life-changing relationship because "The ones the Friends were really meant to be with were, after all, the other Friends". Because Monica and Joey were initially conceived as the show's two most sexual characters, Crane and Kauffman had originally intended for them to be the show's main couple, before ultimately replacing them with Ross and Rachel. The idea of Monica and Joey was abandoned once the role of Joey was cast; actor Matt LeBlanc approached his character using much more of a "big brother vibe" in terms of Joey's relationship with Cox's character as opposed to a romantic one, which the writers ultimately preferred. According to Allison Piwowarski of Bustle, Monica and Joey's relationship would have greatly altered the trajectory of the entire series, having life-changing effects on its characters. However, there were incidents on the show referencing a possible intimate relationship between the two, such as Monica's initial attraction to Joey when he moved in and Monica's intent to sleep with Joey in London rather than Chandler. Those events proved only to be humorous, nonetheless. Summarizing the role of Monica in the series, Martin Gitlin wrote in his book The Greatest Sitcoms of All Time that while her friends "were ... just out to make the most of their social lives", Monica "sought to keep the others in line" while searching for "Mr. Right", who surprisingly turns out to be close friend Chandler. Several years before Monica and Chandler became romantically involved, Cox once joked in an interview that if her character were to ever have sex with another main character, it would most likely be Chandler. Crane and Kauffman had never intended to pair off Monica and Chandler with each other, and only decided to expand upon the idea of a relationship between the two friends upon realizing that viewers had "fallen in love" with the notion of Monica and Chandler as a couple. According to Robert Bianco of USA Today, "Their affair came out of the blue and was supposed to quickly return there — but something in the relationship clicked with viewers." The idea of Monica and Chandler's romantic arc originally surfaced much earlier in the series from writers Scott Silveri and Shana Goldberg-Meehan, who first observed the characters' chemistry in the