Welcome back to The Romantic, a newsletter devoted to the thoughtful, impassioned, and occasionally ruthless dissection of love stories.
Today, you are cordially invited to a Trope Tasting event.
I hope you enjoy the vintage, hand selected for its intoxicatingly familiar bouquet, featuring notes of reluctant fascination, revenge posturing, and palpable magnetism.
Before you sip, please join me in a brief visualization exercise designed to heighten your tasting experience.
Picture it: A warm summer day at the peak of food truck season. Dharma’s mobile livelihood, Veg O’ My Heart, serves a respectable crowd of grain and greens fiends. The cash box total climbs steadily toward almost breaking even on the day.
A flash of reflected sunlight blinds her patrons as the rumble of a meticulously serviced engine fills their ears. A state-of-the-art foodie-flex on wheels rolls into view and parks presumptuously beside Dharma’s diminutive transport, blocking the coveted sidewalk access she showed up at 6am every day this month to secure.
The driver cuts his engine, swings himself through the open door, and begins to set up shop. If the spicy Reggaeton blaring from the speakers on his roof isn’t enough to turn the heads of Dharma’s customers, his flagrant disregard for food service dress codes is.
Her insides boil with rage (or something like it) and she abandons her post to confront the infiltrator about his numerous transgressions, not the least of which is his decision to sell barbecued animal parts inches from her vegan kitchen.
“You can’t park here,” she says with wavering authority.
He reaches into the back pocket of his barely held together jeans and flashes a permit along with a cocky half-smile that makes Dharma want to slap him in the bronze-dimpled face.
“Looks like I can,” he says in a buttery brogue, sending the once carnivorous Dharma into a flavor flashback of finely ground banger sausages and gravy-drenched potatoes.
Her mouth waters shamefully as her opponent eyes her menu board with bemused affection, granting her a moment to swallow her imagined indulgence.
“Lovely fare,” he lilts. “How’s business?”
“Great,” she lies through gritted teeth, pretending not to notice half of her loyal patrons have abandoned their consumer values in favor of the new guy’s affecting physique and buffet of charred flesh.
“Glad to hear it.” He tips an invisible hat and she rolls her eyes in lieu of swooning. “Thanks for being neighborly.” He saunters back to his truck and burgeoning queue of converts.
Dharma wants to shout at him to park his over-waxed meatrocity somewhere else, turn down the disorienting club music, and put a goddamn shirt on.
But she doesn’t.
She retreats to the sanctity of her salad bar and fumes over her circumstantial victimhood. She tells herself she’ll get here at 5am tomorrow and park defensively. That she’ll find a way to win her customers back and try her best to remain neighborly (or something like it) with the meathead.
As if compelled by her thoughts, her tawny antagonist suddenly lowers the volume of his sound system into the realm of considerate, and Dharma must order her dimple-loving heart not to flutter in gratitude.
Until she plainly overhears a nearby couple gushing over the succulence of his meat, forcing her thoughts to twist eagerly toward a decadent feast of escalating sabotage scenarios.
Salud!
About the trope
This ubiquitous story libation tells it like it is:
Two people who HATE each other in the beginning grow to LOVE each other by the end.
HOWEVER …
In order for those two people to make the seemingly insurmountable leap from antagonistic to compatible, there must already be a volatile combination of romantic chemicals simmering between them which, when triggered to reaction, will be capable of breaking down emotional boundaries, melting icy demeanors, vaporizing sullied backstories, nullifying personality defects, and laser-shocking libidos.
For this reason, “enemies to lovers” is something of a misnomer.
Unfortunately, “arch rivals who want to simultaneously marry, bang, AND murder each other to lovers” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.
Pairs well with …
Opposites attract
Workplace rivalry
Where you’ve seen it
The intergalactic itch between the sarcastic scoundrel Han Solo and the high-and-mighty Princess Leia begs to be scratched through two banter-filled thirds of the original Star Wars trilogy, only to leave us cock-blocked in carbonite before the third act of their romance.
Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks play ruthlessly embittered business rivals in the plucky rom-com You’ve Got Mail. When they’re not busy trying to end each other’s careers in real life, they’re falling ass backwards (and anonymously) in love with each other online.
In Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice (subtly mirrored in Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary), we’re shown precisely how hot it is when two self-righteous individuals with a penchant for barbed discourse go ten rounds in the ring of misunderstanding the other’s true nature and obscuring their own amorous feelings.
And last but not least, there’s our old boy Will Shakespeare, whose classic comedy The Taming of the Shrew (albeit a feminist’s nightmare) became premise contraband for generations of hate-to-love-you copycats. From Cole Porter’s Broadway musical Kiss Me Kate to modern film adaptations like 10 Things I Hate About You and Deliver Us From Eva.
Why you love/hate it
The most satisfying romances are the ones that live in the faintly far-fetched limbo between reality and fantasy. Not vampires and dragons fantasy. Just run-of-the-mill human fantasy. The kind that lets us believe two people who despise each other can somehow find common ground in a mutual attraction that transcends their respective bullshit.
We can celebrate, enthusiastically, the joining of two calculating curmudgeons dead set on torturing each other because the reward of their tension splintering consummation is worth the shit-storm of sociopathy we suffered—willingly—as spectators.
Real world/craft application
Try the over-under approach to scene writing.
When two lovestruck characters are convincingly play-fighting as rivals on the outside, we must assume they’re also shadow-boxing their unfiltered humanity just under the surface.
Readers of romance love to experience both sides of this spinning coin. And romance writers would be wise to routinely put their sparring partners through their paces with a sharp-witted (spoken and unspoken) dialogue woven through an equally snappy internal debate.
Consider the food truck meet cute I shared above. As we watch our protagonist make a less than friendly first impression with the meathead, we also get to see the effect his sudden (and stirring) appearance has on her, psychologically, emotionally, and physiologically. 😏
In the spirit of education/fun, why not write the same scene from the new guy’s perspective?
Does he park where he does knowing it will annoy her and disrupt business, or is he just an innocent newb learning the ropes?
Does he see through Dharma’s rigid demeanor and find her charming, or does her attitude turn him off immediately?
Does he admire her commitment to veganism, or does he intend to poach her business to win a point for team carnivore?
Does he turn down his music to be thoughtful, or does he do it to be absolutely certain she’ll overhear the gushing couple praising the merits of his meat?
Consider which answer (there’s one right one in every case) will yield the most tension, ensuring that these two experience an all-consuming need to remain in each other’s company, and under each other’s skin, for as long as we they can stand it.1
Next up on The Romantic - A salute to “first times,” showcasing two superb coming of age novels (written 50 years apart!) that give this tender slice of subject matter all the weight, wisdom, and compassion it deserves.
See you there, meatheads. 💕😉
If you did try the over-under scene writing exercise and want to share what you cooked up, feel free to drop a link in the comments!
I love the way you break it all down, Meg. We know it works, but you highlight the "how" and the "why!"
Thank you for sharing this Meg.
I’m a long time romance reader who is finally “admitting out loud” my desire to write romance and posts like this are exactly what I’m using to become more conscious of what I’ve been reading all along.
All this to say: more please!