Constructing a Compelling Romance

When done well, romance not only makes stories feel deeper and more meaningful but also gives the audience another reason to turn the page. Unfortunately, it’s easy to jump into writing a romance without thinking it through. And if the romance isn’t set up well, it will end in storyteller heartbreak. To aid your efforts, I’ll show you how to plan a basic romance.

Establishing a Need for Romance

Many stories, particularly TV shows, make the mistake of picking two attractive people and simply revealing they are in love. These attempts always fall flat. It takes more than two hot people in proximity to form believable chemistry. To make a romance compelling, the audience must see how the lovebirds fit each other.

So your first step is to demonstrate how your protagonist has an emotional need that a romance could fill. Their unmet need might be one of the usual suspects, such as loneliness or feeling misunderstood. However, it could be less obvious, such as a desire for excitement or stability. In Disney’s Aladdin, Jasmine feels trapped. Aladdin takes her on a flying carpet ride, promising to “show her the world.” He is a great love interest because he offers her the freedom she’s been craving.

You don’t have to lay as much groundwork for a love interest as you do for a viewpoint character, but you should still identify their need and how your protagonist fills it. That will make the romance more convincing.

Making the Love Interest Desirable

The romance won’t be appealing unless the love interest seems desirable to the audience. Creating desirability can include attractive physical features, but if your story is a written work, you don’t have to describe how amazingly hot they are. Instead, you can give the love interest a few unique physical characteristics and let the audience decide on attractiveness. If you do include gorgeous features, avoid objectifying too much. Describing in detail how the love interest’s breasts look will give the impression that the protagonist has been creepily staring at them.

More than their physical attractiveness, a love interest must be competent. Ideally, they’ll have an important skill that makes a difference to the plot. A love interest can even have more candy than the protagonist. If the love interest has a status far above the protagonist or otherwise feels out of reach, that can make them more desirable. However, don’t let the love interest steal the spotlight. If they wipe out the villain when the protagonist isn’t looking, the audience will resent them.

In Star Wars: A New Hope, Princess Leia is attractive, of higher status than both Luke and Han, and as their clumsy rescue attempt shows, more competent than either. This establishes her as a desirable love interest.

Whatever you do, don’t let the love interest become a domineering jerk. This is a common problem, so I’ll go into more detail later.

Planning Attraction and Repulsion

Your lovebirds will need many opportunities to interact. However, those interactions shouldn’t cause them to hook up immediately, or there won’t be much story. When storytellers don’t plan ahead for this, they often resort to depicting inappropriate behavior, such a making one character a stalker or persistent suitor. There are two general formulas that will provide a long courtship. Choose the one that works best for your story.

Star-Crossed Lovers

Your lovebirds form a strong, romantic bond quickly. After meeting the first time, they actively look for opportunities to spend time together. However, external forces prevent them from making their relationship official. Maybe they are already betrothed to other people or their houses are enemies. Perhaps one is a superhero and the other is a villain, and they can’t be together until one of them converts the other.

In Disney’s Frozen, Anna and Hans appear to follow this classic formula. They click instantly, but their plans to marry are thwarted by Elsa. Their romance is subverted later, but you wouldn’t know by the setup.

Bickering Partners

Your lovebirds aren’t interested in a romance when they first meet. Making them hate each other will give the romance more room to bloom, but they can also have lukewarm, mixed, or one-sided feelings. Even though they aren’t pursuing a relationship, external forces bring them together. They might partner to accomplish a joint goal, attend the same school, or be hired to investigate each other.

In Frozen, Anna and Kristoff are bickering partners. Anna needs a ride and Kristoff needs money, so they work together even though they don’t get along. Over the course of their journey, they grow closer.

Need more ideas? See my lists for romance obstacles and ways to bring characters together.

Creating Early Chemistry

In Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 4, Willow goes to a meeting of witches because she wants to learn about magic. However, she finds none of the women at the meeting know that magic is real or practice it. That is, except one, who shyly makes eye contact from across the meeting space. The shy woman’s name is Tara, and she and Willow bond over their interest in magic. Soon, they also realize they’re in love.

Strong first meetings like that one are crucial for getting the audience invested in the romance. However, they can unfold in a variety of ways. The lovebirds might feel affection, dislike, or a mix of the two. Generally, star-crossed lovers need more affection, and bickering partners need more dislike. The longer your romance plot line needs to be, the more it can be helpful to delay by making the characters dislike each other.

Build affection with small bonding moments. The characters might:

• Find they love the same odd things, like pickled eggs or vintage records.
• Help each other out, even if it’s just picking up a fallen bag of groceries.
• Have moments of unusual understanding, such as finishing each other’s sentences.

Build dislike with moments of light conflict. The characters might:

• Compete over something, like a property up for auction or the last slice of pie.
• Engage in an intellectual disagreement, such as whether a notorious criminal should be given a second chance.
• Have an unfortunate misunderstanding, like one mistaking the other for an employee instead of a customer or client.

Even if your romance is on slow burn, look for ways to hint that your couple-in-progress will work well together. Maybe your protagonist is fiery and competitive. Their emotional need is to have a connection with someone they can’t scare away. When they get into a fierce competition with an aggressive new opponent, the audience will notice they’ve met their match, even if the two dislike each other at first.

Avoiding Unhealthy Behavior

While your lovebirds may act out at first, you don’t want your audience to decide they’re terrible people. Unfortunately, it’s common for male love interests in particular to be outright abusive to their partners. As time passes, more and more audience members will feel disgust when relationships aren’t equal. Avoid this pitfall by checking over your character interactions.

Start by comparing the behavior of your two characters. Do they give each other a hard time to the same extent? Do they tell each other what to do equally? If one talks down to the other, is that behavior returned? Why they do what they do also matters. If one lashes out because they’re used to working alone, and the other lashes out because their partner has damaged expensive equipment, that’s not an equal relationship.

Next, check for behavior that would make any character unlikable.

• A character might be abrasive because they’re too busy for niceties, but they shouldn’t cut someone down for no reason.
• A love interest can clean and bandage a wound on an unconscious protagonist, but they should never bathe or dress them without permission.
• A character shouldn’t make important choices for anyone else, even if it’s supposedly for that person’s own benefit.

In Firefly, Inara and Malcolm have an antagonistic relationship despite harboring feelings for each other. For the most part, their antagonism works because it’s two-sided. Malcolm is sometimes petty and rude to Inara, but Inara is also petty and rude to Malcolm. Unfortunately though, Malcolm casually refers to Inara as a “whore” several times. This may seem fair; Inara does sell services that include sex. Even so, a term like that has too much emotional baggage to be comfortable to many audiences. A man calling a woman a whore reeks of misogyny and verbal abuse. To keep your romance from feeling that way, don’t use gendered slurs.

Avoiding unhealthy behavior isn’t always easy. Knowing your characters are meant for each other will color your perception of their actions. That’s why the non-consensual sleeping kiss in Sleeping Beauty was overlooked for so long. It can be helpful to remember that if something wouldn’t be okay for a gross and ugly acquaintance to do, it’s not okay for a love interest either.

Depicting Bonding and Growth

Once you’ve finished with the awkward first interactions, it’s time for the bonding stage. If you are using a star-crossed romance, this will usually happen right at their first meeting. Otherwise, it should start later and continue gradually until the climax.

In the bonding stage, the characters will engage each other on a deeper, more meaningful level. If they dislike each other initially, they’ll start to warm up to one another. Deeper bonding is often created by:

• Doing something unexpected that impresses the other person. A character might save their partner’s life or display an unusual act of compassion.
• Opening up about personal things. The characters might discuss their pasts, talk about their life goals, or reveal what they’re afraid of.
• Working well as a team. Maybe once they’ve bickered about what they expect from each other, the next time they face a tough situation they will complement each other well.

The characters may not be in love yet, but work in body language, thoughts, or actions that illustrate their growing feelings. They might take an extra look back when parting or thoughtfully make the other’s favorite dish.

In Live Die Repeat: Edge of Tomorrow, Major Cage is caught in a time loop of going to battle and dying on the field every day. He knows the same thing once happened to a famous war hero, Rita Vrataski, so he seeks her help. At first Rita is unimpressed by Cage, but as he continues to repeat a day of training and then a mission with her, he becomes more capable. He gets to know her and uses his knowledge to earn her trust. When he halts progress on their vital mission to keep her alive, it tells the audience how much he cares.

Causing a Tragic Separation

Assuming you want your lovebirds to get a happily ever after, consider separating them first. This creates a riveting and satisfying finish. (If they don’t end up together, they should instead become a happy couple briefly and have a falling-out at the end.) This separation will form the climax of your romance arc. It might be during or just before the climax of your throughline (or central plot thread).

The cause of their falling-out can be outside forces, disagreements between them, or some combination of the two.

• If the characters are star-crossed lovers, one or both of them may decide that the forces pulling them apart are too much to overcome. They might become convinced that dating a member of Team Evil or violating their family’s betrothal agreement is irresponsible.
• An antagonist might forcefully separate them. One or both of them could be kidnapped and taken far away. Even if the villain has no objection to the romance, the lovebirds might be too powerful together to be left alone.
• Their intellectual or personality differences can come to a head. Perhaps they have to make a critical decision, but they disagree so strongly that they turn against each other. Alternately, one of them might be too slow in reforming and make a big mistake the other can’t ignore.

In The 100 season 2, Clarke and Lexa bond over their desire to be good leaders for their people. But when Lexa cuts a deal with the enemy to save her people at the expense of Clarke’s, it’s a heartbreaking betrayal. At the end of season 2, they go their separate ways as enemies.

If one of your characters decides to abandon the relationship, the other should respect their decision – even if they disagree. A scorned character can make arguments for staying together, but they shouldn’t physically prevent the other person from leaving or insist their beloved is “running away.” Controlling or condescending behavior will only make your lovebirds look like a poor couple.

After the characters separate, show how unpleasant it is for them to be apart. They might wake up expecting the other person to be beside them or spend every moment ranting about the other person to anyone who will hear. By the end of their separation, it should be clear they’re better off together.

Bringing Them Together

At a pivotal moment, your lovebirds should choose to be together. If they were forcefully separated in the previous step, they can get back together through daring deeds. However, a conscious choice will make your end more satisfying. Perhaps one or both of them is forced to choose between reuniting with their beloved and something they care about. Sacrificing something to be together will make their reunion more meaningful.

In the 2003 Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Aragorn encourages his lover, Arwen, to leave him, so she can emigrate with her people to a paradise across the sea. She is headed to the ship when she sees a vision of her future with Aragorn. She decides to stay after all, but doing so comes at the cost of her Elven longevity.

If your characters separated because of a disagreement, it can be resolved in a number of ways.

• After they feel the pain of separation, whatever disagreement they had may feel small in comparison.
• They may discover they were lied to by a character that wanted to separate them.
• One or both of them may learn firsthand that the other person was right.

Once they are back on speaking terms, they should quickly resolve their differences and apologize where appropriate. Their willingness to compromise and admit guilt will convince the audience that they belong together despite their previous trouble.

Last, don’t forget to include happy moments in your epilogue. Show how those emotional needs you set up in the beginning are now filled by their relationship.

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Once you get used to them, you’ll find romance arcs are much like other plot arcs and especially similar to other relationship arcs. Start with a problem, let your characters struggle to solve it, peak with an important choice, and tie it all off.