In Which I Assess How Many Romance Fiction Tropes I Have Personally Experienced

Reading Time: 4 Mins

There are many more out there, I’m sure, but using this list of seven tropes as a start, here are some nuggets of my personal experience with each.

The Love Triangle

There was a girl in University who I was smitten with and my roommate and best friend knew it. They worked together in a bookstore and he grew to fancy her as well, and had a lot more opportunity to see her. They kissed, something I did not find out until a few months later when we were dating. She eventually became my first wife, so I came out ahead in the triangle that I didn’t even know I had been a part of, but that was the start of a rift that never fully healed between my friend and I.

The Secret Billionaire

Zero experience here. I’m a pretty open book and so if you were interested in me ever, you knew pretty much everything about me, including the fact that I have never had any significant amount of money to speak of.

Friends To Lovers

Every. Single. Relationship. I. Have. Ever. Had.

Stuck Together

Really reaching here and this may come across as insensitive, but it’s the truth and I don’t want to shy away from it. I dated a girl in high school and shortly after we started dating my family experienced a number of significant deaths. Seven deaths in six months. She was amazing through it all and very supportive and I cared very much for her.

We ended up breaking up just under a year later, on Valentine’s Day.

Now, hear me out, because that often gets a shock reaction at first. She had booked a hotel room and I had known we were likely going to be ending things soon and I did not want to go through with what teenagers would do in a hotel room on Valentine’s Day knowing that. We sat on the hotel bed and we cried and we ended it.

While not a traditional “stuck together” story, I do wonder how much of our relationship was built out of the support she showed me during those difficult times and how long we would have been together had everyone in my family just, you know, stayed alive.

Enemies To Lovers

Lovers is a strong term, but I do remember dancing with a girl at a grade eight dance having spent the previous entire junior high school experience absolutely tearing each other apart, calling each other names and just generally hating on each other, which was probably a weird way we were both flirting. She gave me the middle finger every time she saw me but the dance was nice.

Forbidden Love

In my life I have had so many experiences where I have crushed and fell in love with people who already had partners and I could never act on my feelings or pursue them. Most of them were unrequited, which doesn’t appear on this list, so cashing in a twofer and just leaving it at “too many to count” for now.

Soul Mates

I have found mine now and we are getting married in May and I could not be happier.

Fake Relationship

No word of a lie, I have always wanted to have one of these; a relationship of convenience where both parties are mutually benefitting from the arrangement.

The closest I ever came was a girl in University who I knew liked me but I did not share those same feelings. She was awesome, but as a friend. The thing was, I LOVED her friend group. They were all so nice and so cool and I briefly considered dating her just to hang out with them all as a group. I didn’t, because I’m not a monster who treats people’s hearts as playthings, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I really had to work hard to talk myself out of the idea.

Maybe that’s not quite a fake relationship in the truest sense of the term, now that I think about it. I think this trope relies more heavily on both of the main characters knowing the relationship is fake.

Final Score

I’m giving myself a 5/7 with half points for “Stuck Together” and “Enemies To Lovers” and a full point for “Forbidden Love”, helped along there by the unrequited aspect of it all.

I’m definitely no Casanova, but good to know there’s no shortage of experience to draw from should I ever look to write anything exclusively romantic.

What is your score?