Overthinkings: Romance Tropes

It’s February. Red and pink are taking over every store and all cookies are heart shaped. Nothing says Valentine’s month like me overthinking relationships! I have a four part series in mind this month starting with identifying cliches and relationship tropes. Then we’ll deep dive into a diagram heavy look into how relationships progress over time, and look at how Characters feel and show love. At the end of the month we’ll combine it all and learn some techniques for writing romantic/steamy moments. 

So what is the difference between a cliche and a trope? 

Well, a trope is a theme or story element that is common enough that a reader is going to feel comfortable with the idea. Think love at first sight (Cinderella), or Forbidden love (Romeo and Juliet). Tropes become cliches when they become overused to the point that they are predictable. We’ve all sat down to a romcom and known in the first two minutes that Guy A is actually a prince and therefore the plot is going to be Girl falls in love, They are just too different, but wait we’re all people in the end, smooch. 

Does that mean that writers should steer away from tropes and cliches? Well, good luck with that. There are only so many places a relationship can build from and go to and all of them have been explored extensively. Instead, we can subvert expectations by making the characters themselves more interesting, ramping up exterior tension, or layering tropes so that the reader has more to think about than the pace of the Will they/won’t they phase of the story. 

Let’s look at a few common tropes to start off with. 

Meet Cutes: A meet cute is the term for how two love interests meet for the first time. This might be literally bumping into one another, or getting wrapped up in a cartoon dog’s leash. Neighbors getting each other’s mail or waking up on the wrong lawn; showing up for a blind date with the wrong person or “saving” someone from a bad date in a bar. Meet cutes are an industry standard way to get a couple together, or the inverse, to set up the enemies to lovers trope. 

Both love and first sight and enemies to lovers are common follow ups to the meet cute—depending on how well it went. But since that is the first step in the relationship plot love at first sight is generally a lead in to one of several new tropes: Secret identity, forbidden love, fake turns real, or The Bet. 

Secret Identity is simply that one or both of the characters are keeping secrets about who they are from the other character. Maybe they are in another relationship, or they are a more or less desirable social class or profession, maybe they are a spy; whatever the secret is, it will come out at the worst possible time and lead to loads of conflict. 

Forbidden love is the classic Romeo and Juliet. Something or someone is keeping the two apart. This causes tension as the characters navigate their emotional turmoil and rising passion with built in consequences for any consumption. I most often see this trope used with two people in relationships with other people who keep missing their chance (star crossed is another term). 

Fake turns real is when two people are together and looking like a real couple to the world (green card marriages, gaming the system, spies undercover) who start falling for each other. The Americans used this trope masterfully, exploring more dimensions of relationships than just love. 

She’s all That is a movie about a guy who bets he can turn any girl in the school into the homecoming queen. The 90’s were big for Bet plots. Of course Freddie Prince Jr. actually falls for his prey and after she gets over the fact that he is awful, they end up smooching in the end. Bet plots are almost always combined with a character who looks great after they take off their glasses (not that they weren’t cute before), and a popularity disparity. The Bet trope is just as likely to start off with a bad meet cute as a good one. If the meet cute goes well, the reader is often out of the loop on the bet (which may be the twist ending) or knows that the Better is actually an antagonist. If the meet cute goes poorly then the Better is incompetent and redeemable but leads us into an enemies to lovers trope. 

IF a meet cute wasn’t cute at all, or some interaction turns the relationship cold and now the two must work back from this then we end up with an Enemies to Lovers trope. (Sometimes this trope begins with an off the page established relationship, no meet cute needed.) Enemies to lovers is a classic way to stretch out tension but the line between rude and awful is narrow. 

The biggest problem I have run into with this trope is that if a character is too mean/rude/thoughtless to another and they don’t walk away, the one that accepts the abuse becomes unlikable. Readers want to see themselves in characters and accepting abuse is a passive reaction; no one wants to be the passive character. 

The answer to the too rude  conundrum is to have each character’s behavior rooted in backstory. Giving  a realistic reason for behavior makes it believable that a character can grow or change in a forgivable manner. A character whose parents taught him to hate elves is very different than one who is arbitrarily rude to them. 

The enemies to lovers story often plays out through other tropes (of course it does). Stuck together puts the two characters in a situation from which they can’t escape and must work together toward a goal; this intimacy leads to more.  As someone who loves putting characters into a closed room and seeing what happens, I love this story device. It feels the most real to me—not so much the enemy part as the when people spend time together working toward a goal they begin to realize they are more similar than different. 

Closed room stories don’t have to stay in a closed room, but the consequences of whatever the mess they’re stuck in has to keep them working together toward something: getting the handcuffs off, breaking out of prison, winning the big client that will save the firm, hacking the pentagon. The reason this trope doesn’t feel cliche is that in most Stuck Together stories, the goal is the A plot and the relationship is the B. Our readers are going to be so swept up in the action that the romance element becomes another stake in the success of the A plot. Now if they don’t blow up the comet, they don’t get to live happily ever after. 

The last trope in this category is almost an aside. There is no meet cute involving the love interest, because they aren’t an interest at all in the beginning. Every protagonist has a friend or ally, and often times, after that protagonist discovers their love interest is an awful person their eyes are opened and they discover their true love was standing next to them the whole time. Friends to lovers is a comfortable story device. We’ve all been madly in love with a just friend at one point or another (looking at you high school!) so it is easy to root for those relationships. 

Friends to lovers has the possibility to slide into uncomfortable or passive territory if the interested party becomes manipulative or stalkery, or mopey. No one likes reading mopey characters…except for the Twilight fans out there. 

Speaking of manipulative or mopey, let’s transition to character flaws and romantic archetypes.

The Brooder—who is almost universally brunette—is either too cool or too damaged for a relationship. He often drives a classic muscle car or motorcycle, and always has soulful eyes that betray his vulnerably underbelly. He may be a vampire. He probably plays guitar.

Brooders keep showing up in stories for a reason: we love a project. I suggest turning this trope on its head and creating a female Brooder. Give her a reason to stay emotionally unattached. A friend of mine is writing a similar character and I find her fascinating; the internal war between wanting intimacy and staying focused on goals is very compelling. 

For every brooder out there there is the Obsessive. Obsession is a weird trope because it the creepy/cute line seems fairly split by gender. When a woman is obsessive about their love interest it is generally written as silly or innocent; When a man is obsessive it is either romantic (generally pre-me too movement) or sinister. When women’s obsession is portrayed as sinister it seems more due to the sociopathic nature of the character rather than the problematic nature of the behavior. 

Generally the Obsessor chases around an uninterested character until they give in and realize how much they actually love their stalker. This trope may work for historical fiction, but I would leave it aside for modern works…unless it is a character flaw then go for it!

Nerdy girl is actually Hot, and Shy girl gets her boo are two varieties of the same trope. There is an inherent imbalance in attractiveness between love interests. This may be compounded by social status, and/or wealth. The less attractive character has something to offer (usually brains or talent) that eventually wins over the love interest. 

This is one of those tropes that just doesn’t work past high school unless the less attractive character has an alternative motivation for wanting to be with a shallow person who judges someone based on looks. It makes readers feel like the protagonist deserves the misery to come. 

Our final category of tropes are plot centric. 

Miscommunication. Two lovers are heading toward a happy ending until a tiny misunderstanding or mishearing fractures their budding relationship. Girl please. This is the number one most hated of all relationship clichés. If a character can clarify with a text or a “what I hear you saying is…” then do better. 

If miscommunication is a device you would like to use, root the element in a character flaw or world building element. The character is too stubborn or scared to ask for clarification; there is a language barrier, or social expectation that prevents communication; and distance or technology issues can all be effective ways for short term misunderstandings. But by this point in history it is recognized that solid relationships are built on communication so it is hard to root for a couple who can’t talk out a problem. 

Some big catastrophe between first kiss and happily ever after. Two characters simmer with tension for the first half of the book before finally sharing that first passionate kiss. Immediately, to keep tension high, the author must split the characters apart. 

If you’ve read my  “Why Can’t Characters just be Happy?” Overthinking, you will recall that the moment characters become happy they go stagnant and the writer must introduce either interior or exterior tension to propel their relationship to change. The big catastrophe is hard to avoid, so I say embrace it. 

And come back next week when we will delve farther into plot and look at how relationships traditionally progress in a story, and how we can play with and subvert expectations. 

Happy Writing!