I started talking about this couple in Aus discussion, but realized I'd probably bore everyone to death with my in-depth review of them in particular
Like I said in there, I think Geoff and Nicole are the best teen couple at the moment. Jai and Annie aren't happening enough, Belle and Aden are happening too much, and Ruby and Xavier... I really have no idea what's happening there, to be honest. I guess the closest you could get to competition when it comes to couples, would be Belle and Aden. Now I liked Belle and Aden when they first started out, now not so much anyway. I think the key here is character development. While Belle and Aden getting together sort of made them both more stable because Aden finally started dealing with his past and all, I think Nicole and Geoff were forced to compromise much more when they got together, and that has made them continuously developing characters.
Belle and Aden are sort of just there, dealing with their own stuff, while Nicole and Geoff has this whole thing where they have to deal with their values vs. their relationship because they're so different. I was watching Nicole after the memorial election today, and I thought to myself how much she has changed. She has truly woken up to herself and become a lot more honest about her true colours. Geoff has been forced to question his moral values based on religion, and try to fit his values into that relationship. Even when it's not a direct issue, like it was when they were trying to figure out whether to have sex or not, it's so obvious they're both trying to balance their own values with the values of the other person, and I don't think you see that very often in the teen relationship storylines.
I think these differences has forces the two character to be more honest, and I think that happens to make the relationship more believable, like you almost feel like you're closer to that couple than to the others, if that makes sense. Even when they have their differences, it's never really DRAMA in the teen storyline sense, it seems more like genuine issues brought on by their differences. With most other teen couples, including Belle and Aden, I feel more like it's just drama, even when it's emotional storylines, because we're not really as close to that couple as we are with Nicole and Geoff, emotionally. (I hate myself for sounding so soppy, I'm not sentimental, I promise!)
In addition to this, it is of course important with chemistry, and I think Nicole and Geoff have great chemistry on screen, much more than Aden and Belle have ever had, except maybe for a very few scenes before they actually got together the first time. I really don't hope Nicole and Geoff break up, because I think without Nicole, Geoff's character will be done. She's what keeps him a good character now, and I don't think he'd work well as a single character anymore, especially not since Annie has become so much more independent. So if this relationship turns out to be over any time soon. I think the only way to keep Geoff interesting would be to involve him in another similar storyline, meaning a storyline where his feelings are tested against his values. And by that I mean he should hook up with Aden, but that's a whole different story.