My Love/Hate Relationship with Relationship Stories

So.

I'm a bit of a romantic. Always have been. I love that old, clichéd story of boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, boy and girl live happily ever after.

It's the optimistic part of me. I like when two people worm their way into each other's hearts and push past all the crap, hurt, and ugliness in the world around them to stay together and build something truly special. It's really cool watching the progression from strangers, to acquaintances, to friends, to family.

The thing I hate about these kinds of stories is how often people forget that progression. They're in too big a hurry to see the conclusion, so they either rush through, or completely omit all of the stuff that made it happen.

If, for example, the writer has decided that Fluttershy and Big Mac would make a cute couple, we're told that they're already in love, and that they've been in love for quite a while - they just haven't admitted it yet.

That's so boring!

Why should I believe they're in love? Why should I care?! I've got no evidence of it, nothing that let's me see it as anything beyond the author going "because I said so."

Sure, that moment when the two characters finally come out and say it, or that first kiss, or the big reconciliation are really cool moments. They're the payoff for the story and they're why fans of romance stories read romance stories, but without all the stuff that comes first they're worthless, hollow, and shallow.

All that build up isn't just the author making you wait for the payout. If that big "awww" moment is the grand tower sitting on top of the castle, the build up is the road leading to the castle, the foundation, the castle itself, and everything else you need so you can get to that tower without it being some crumbling structure floating in an empty void.

The journey gives the big moment value and weight. Without it, there's nothing of substance for the reader to really hold on to beyond the simplistic idea of X and Y make a cute couple.

And that's not love, that's models posing in a photo.

Love is built, it grows, it has to be nurtured, tended to, pruned, and cherished. It needs effort. And too many stories try to sell that all the work has already been done. It just doesn't work.

The solution here is easy enough - don't skip ahead. The big finish will be a lot more meaningful and the readers will care about the characters a whole lot more if we can see HOW and WHY they fell in love instead of just WHEN.

The other thing that really rubs me the wrong way is folks writing about relationships and love where they obviously have little to no experience with it. I hate to pick on an easy target, but the biggest offenders when it comes to this are youth.

If I don't ever read some variation of the phrase "but I couldn't be in love with him... could I?" ever again I would consider my life truly blessed.

Too often a lot of these romance stories have the characters acting like kids in junior high dealing with their first ever crush. And it's rather off putting because everything else in the story is presenting the characters as being adults. This mishmash of characteristics not only makes me think the author is a child trying to write adults, but it also undermines the story because you've either got an adult acting like a child or you've got a child trying to live like an adult - and unless that's what the story is about, it's extremely poor writing to do that.

The solution for this is a bit more tricky. For the kids (at my age anybody less than five years out of high school is still a kid), sorry, but you should wait till you get older. No one is going to believe what you're writing about love except for other kids, and all of you will look back at this stuff and shake your heads at how you used to act. Want to know why so many adults know that? It's because they and their friends did the exact same thing.

For the folks who have little to no experience with love, you're going to need to be more observant. No writer goes through everything they've written about themselves except in autobiographies, but all good writers are observers. They pay attention to people, watch how they act and listen to what they say - and they pay especially close attention to how situations affect people.

If a character doesn't curse, do you want to have them break that rule when they get hurt or not? What does it say about your character whichever way you have them go?

With something as simple as whether or not someone uses an expletive in certain situations being a potential essay topic, why on earth would the impact of falling and being in love need less attention to detail or less understanding?

In short, tell the whole story, kids need to grow up before they write about grown ups, and pay attention and learn a lot about the things you want to write about.