It’s just not very well-set up in his previous characterization: from the beginning, Scott Summers has been one of those “emotionally repressed, …Type-A…personalities,” I talk about not working as well in the present, which is part of the reason why he has such a big hatedom.

Now, unlike Reed, Summers has historically been more of a follower than a leader – Xavier’s teacher’s pet and hall monitor, the eternal Leonardo to the Raphael/Michelangelo antics of Bobby and Hank (and Warren, sometimes) – but very much a rules-following, by-the-book guy. And the main thing that made him more than a total wet blanket was his Teen Romance-style angst about whether Jean could ever love a man who shot red eye-beams. So to sum up: Scott Summers = dutiful and into romance. 

Now, I think there was a way that Claremont could have leaned into the Mr. Vice Guy thing, but didn’t quite: namely, actually exploring Scott’s tendencies to have low-stakes, no-labels affairs the moment he thought Jean was dead/not around (thinking about Colleen Wing, Lee Forrester here) as a way to introduce the idea of Scott straining against his own repression and feelings of being trapped in his role as Designated X-Men Team Leader, and then build up from there to establish Scott Summers as one of these heroes with feet of clay (in his case, a tendency to default to following others’ expectations of him despite not really being fulfilled by the life that results in, and then a reactive tendency to try to wreck his own life in a search for independence and self-knowledge):

But there’s not really any follow-through. Scott and Jean never have a chance to talk through this tendency and how it reflects on his feelings about Jean (even though they’ve got one of those creepy psychic-link-true-love things going on which means she knows and he knows she knows) or what he wants from life beyond being her boyfriend and an X-Men. Nor does anyone really call him out on his hypocritcal jealousy around Jean Grey and other dudes (although one time it was Mastermind, so I guess you get a pass there), or really call him out about about dumping Madelyn (granted, a lot of that was the fault of Fall of the Mutants and Inferno, but still). 

Sidenote: I’ve never had a problem with Spiderman being married and, yes, him getting a divorce works so much better than diabolic annulment.