I admit that I'm a Scully/Mulder 'shipper, and I have been practically since the first X-Files episode I ever watched nearly two years ago. Admittedly, that might have something to do with the fact that the episode in question was "Triangle", but that's beside the point. 
There's one thing, though, that I've never really understood about many of my fellow 'shippers, whether they started watching the show during its original run or they became fans of it years after it ended. And that thing is the unusually extreme hatred which many of them direct at the character of Diana Fowley (and, by extension, the actress who plays her). They call her "old"—which shouldn't be an insult anyway, as we all get old if we live long enough. (I wonder how many of them realize that the actress who plays her is only about four years older than DD.) They call her a whore when there's no indication that she sleeps around, whether or not it's for money. They take a grim delight in Scully's report that Diana was found murdered early on in season 7.
Why? As far as I can tell, it's because she's Mulder's ex-girlfriend and possible ex-wife, and she represents the biggest threat of any of "Mulder's women" to the relationship between Mulder and Scully.
To be fair, Diana is a pretty ambiguous character. She left Mulder years ago, but she wants him back and isn't afraid to show it, and she is working for the Smoking Man. She has a way of making Mulder trust her when her actions show that his trust in her isn't completely warranted, and she's unconscionably rude to Scully. But in the end, she does show that she really is on Mulder's side to some degree; she slips Scully clues to Mulder's whereabouts, allowing Scully to rescue Mulder after that experimental brain surgery that Mulder and the Smoking Man undergo after the incident with the spaceship fragments. Her reward? Death. Cue the cheers of lots of Fowley-loathing 'shippers.
But even if she does want to get between Mulder and Scully, the damage that she does to their relationship on her own is almost surprisingly minor. She tries to talk Mulder into admitting that Scully's insistence on proof has been a hinderance, and she fails; he tells her that he's been fine without her. Later, she takes a few jabs at Scully. That's about it. The real damage is done when Scully gets angry or jealous and Mulder gets defensive; they break down their own communication. Scully doesn't trust Diana; Mulder, arrogantly assuming that his past with Diana somehow makes him the expert on All Things Fowley, refuses to listen to Scully or to consider that maybe there's something just a bit fishy going on with Diana. Scully then (understandably, since Mulder refuses to listen) comes to the conclusion that Mulder doesn't really trust her after all, perhaps even thinking that their partnership and friendship didn't mean as much to Mulder as they'd come to mean to her. Is Diana the catalyst? Of course. But she isn't entirely to blame for the difficulty that Scully and Mulder have with each other whenever she comes back into the picture. The biggest problem is with them and the way that they react to her—Scully with suspicion and jealousy, Mulder with defensiveness and a demand for a blind faith that Scully has never been capable of giving.
So, maybe my fellow 'shippers (if they've managed to get through all this without deciding by now to poison my afternoon cup of tea, that is 
) can explain this to me—what's behind all this hatred of Diana Fowley?
Every once in awhile, I just sort of lapse into "lurking mode" and just don't have much to say. I have been visiting fairly frequently, though, and once I start feeling more talkative again, you may even start to hope that I'll shut up.
...or, "They Ruined The Show When They Let Those Two Get Together!"
It's an accusation I've been hearing hurled at a lot of shows—most of which I've never watched—over the years. The thing is, though, I've always had a difficult time believing it, and this is why.
The thing about accusing the writers of ruining a show when they decide to resolve UST, especially when it's been carefully preserved over a period of several years, is that it's usually rather a self-fulfilling prophecy. It happened with Get Smart; the network that owned the rights to the series at the time forced the writers to marry off Max and 99 in season 4 in hopes of boosting ratings that were already falling. Somewhat unsurprisingly, it didn't work—it was forced and rushed, which goes to show that obeying the dictates of the Almighty Studio isn't always the best way to go. Lois & Clark wasn't so much ruined by the characters' romance as by the writers' fears that there would be no more stories to tell after the characters exchanged wedding vows, which resulted in storylines that frustrated much of the audience and left us feeling like we'd been led around by our noses. (I'm thinking about the "Clark Marries a Clone" story arc in particular here.) And in The X-Files, the relationship between Scully and Mulder only became consciously romantic sometime in season 7, when the ratings had already been slipping. (Even then, it was in such a way that there are still people who say that despite the child that both characters acknowledged as Mulder's as well as Scully's, the kiss at the end of season 8, the Shadow Man's crack about Scully inviting Mulder to her bed on "one lonely night" and the way that they're cuddled up in bed together at the end of the show's final episode, Mulder and Scully never allowed their relationship to be anything but platonic.) The increasingly tangled mytharc, somewhat clumsy attempts to re-create the original believer-sceptic tension (and UST, of course) with two otherwise good new characters, and Mulder's absence from half of season 8 and all but the last two episodes of season 9 were, quite arguably, more significant factors in the show's decline than "OMG they KISSED the story is OVER!!!!!"
And then there's the way that we tend to think of fictional weddings as happy ENDINGS. In Western culture, it's an idea that's fed to us from the time we're small children; except for the words "happily ever after", we never see what happens to the Beautiful Princess and the Handsome Prince after the wedding. Many of us never quite manage to escape it, either. Romantic comedies usually end with an engagement, a wedding or at least some kind of confirmation of the lead couple's commitment to each other. We are supposed to assume that all their problems are now over and they will blithely sail through the rest of their lives together because it's Meant To Be—but also that there can't be anything interesting to say about them anymore because "JUST MARRIED" is also "just...married" and everybody knows that nothing interesting ever happens to married couples. They just sit around being in love with each other, right? 
(Of course, this entire line of thinking makes me wonder why, if marriage is supposed to be boring, we're all supposed to want it. However, that's not the point of this post, and perhaps a subject that's better discussed elsewhere.)
My point is that if UST is drawn out for too long, it ceases to be interesting and just becomes boring and annoying. Either resolve it somehow or get rid of it in some clever way, though this latter solution could alienate a significant number of audience members if it's not handled right. Allowing UST between characters to be resolved isn't necessarily the end of the story, and if it's done right, it doesn't have to lead to a show's demise.
