Love, Actually? Ranking Five Romance Plotlines by Believability

Spoiler: secret billionaire doesn't even make top 5

Jane Austen does every romance trope best

Hey Fictional Therapy readers! This is a bonus feature to tide you over until Sunday’s classic advice column. It was originally published as a guest post on

The Literary Assistant

, so if it feels a little different stylistically to my regular stuff, that’s why! The Literary Assistant, btw, is an amazing Substack full of romance novel recommendations and reviews, as well as some historical fiction recommendations too. So if you’re a romance reader, be sure to check it out.

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There is a brilliant book by the (delightfully named) Christopher Booker called The Seven Basic Plots. In it, he argues that all stories can be sorted into seven structural categories: Rags to Riches, The Quest, Overcoming the Monster, and so on. This is a good factoid to have in your back pocket next time someone criticises you for reading ‘formulaic’ romance novels - all novels are formulaic, really. It’s what we do with these formulas - how we breathe new life into them, inject fresh meaning - that matters.

It’s fair to say, though, that while some romance formulas seem to express something true and eternal about matters of the heart, others only express our most eternal fantasies. I mean, the secret billionaire trope? A girl can dream. But sometimes that’s what reading is for: dreaming and escapism, rather than truth-telling. So in honour of my love of classic romance plotlines, here’s a list of five, ranked from least realistic, to most true-to-life. They’re all great, even though some are pure wish fulfilment. And you won’t be surprised to hear that secret billionaire did not even make the list.* (Though if you know of any IRL secret billionaire love stories, please write in and tell me everything.)

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5. Enemies to Lovers

   I hate to criticise the holy grail of all romance plots, but please look around your friendship group. How many happy couples do you know that started off hating each other? None. Because it. Doesn’t. Happen. It’s the best one to read, yes, it’s the best one to watch, also yes; because narrative thrives on conflict. But real life does not thrive on conflict. In real life, fighting with someone sucks. And while nothing is juicier than Pride and Prejudice, I do worry that the enemies-to-lovers trope has made a lot of women obsessed with finding the ‘hidden light’ inside rude and obnoxious men. Quite often you can judge a book by its cover.

4. Fake Relationship

   Again, so good to watch. So good to read. And with this one, I wish it did happen more, because it is a trope absolutely rife with comic possibility. But, really - have you ever pretended someone was your partner in order to win a promotion at work, aka How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days? Okay, maybe you think I’m setting the bar too high. Have you ever even taken a fake date to a wedding? Nope. You’d look so deranged when the truth inevitably came out. Better just to suck it up, go with your best friend, and giggle together all night at the bar.

3. Friends to Lovers

   This one goes right in the middle, because it does happen, but not as often as romance novels make out. And almost always there’s been some sort of spark there from the beginning, at least for one of the two, in a Mr-Knightley-and-Emma-Woodhouse kind of way. So do you really call those people friends, or just lovers who haven’t acknowledged their feelings yet?

2. Forbidden Love

   Sure, we don’t (just yet) live in an authoritarian state where loving someone from another district gets you blacklisted. Nor do we live in a Romeo and Juliet landscape of warring families, or in the Georgian era, in which class divide made loving someone from a different social milieu extremely tricky. But religious and cultural differences still stand in the way of couples getting together pretty often. And when I was fourteen I dated a guy two years above me which was extremely verboten at the time. Eventually we caved to social pressure and split up. Maybe he’ll be my…

1. Second Chance Romance

   It may seem like the least sexy of all romance plotlines, but I’d argue it can be the most romantic. Maybe it’s just because I’m rereading Persuasion at the moment, but there’s so much tenderness and yearning and subtlety in the story of reconnecting with the one that got away. A second chance romance plotline inevitably involves someone who’s been hurt before, learning to love again: what’s more inspiring than that? And, to anyone reading this under the age of thirty who doesn’t believe it really happens: I promise you that 40% of your friends will eventually get back together with a former partner, teenage crush or summer fling. A lot of the time this will be a catastrophically bad decision. But sometimes it will be beautiful and hopeful and right, and it will seem to suggest that fate wanted those two star crossed lovers together all along.

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Thanks for reading, folks! If you enjoy Austen and romance, you might like to read my post on what Austen can teach us about red flags, or on what Petrarch has to say about being a hopeless romantic. Or, you can check out my whole Substack here.

And if you like romance novels you should take a look at

Andrea Martucci

and

Scouting Romance

, both of whom write fabulous romance-themed Substacks.

*That being said: I have recently become obsessed with the many Reddit forums in which a contributor asks “how to tell my GF about secret wealth/lottery winnings/inheritance” and must know if these threads are genuine or fabricated so I can revise my opinion if necessary.