I will admit, I\u2019ve never been a big fan of romance stories. I\u2019m more of an action\/adventure\/mystery type girl. Considering that I\u2019m eighteen and dating now though, I\u2019ve started to appreciate a good romantic subplot a little bit more, and as writers, a love triangle can be a good way to add more conflict to a story right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cOh, but everyone\u2019s done them. They\u2019re getting to be cliche.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I had a revelation a while back. The problem isn\u2019t that the entire idea of love triangles has become cliche, it\u2019s the characters and assumptions we construct them with. There are so many different ways to write a love triangle, and yet we largely only consider one of them: a female character who must choose between two male love interests. If we can get out of that limitation, a whole new world opens up for us writers. The problem is often that we think heteronormatively, though there are other possibilities within that constraint that we forget about too. Why does it always have to be a guy-girl pairing? How about a girl trying to choose between a guy and a girl? Or a guy trying to choose between two other guys? Or nobody gets with anybody? There are SO many options just waiting to be written, and to help us out, I\u2019ve listed several ideas below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Option #1:<\/strong> Gender-swap the main character. If you want to stay heteronormative but shake things up a little, use a guy for your main character. It seems like the majority of love triangles I read have a girl trying to choose. Why? A male main character that has to choose between two girls is perfectly realistic too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Option #2:<\/strong> Make it all guys or all girls, and they\u2019re gay\/lesbian. Maybe one person is trying to choose between two others. Maybe they\u2019re all trying to choose between each other and it\u2019s a giant tangled mess! *Insert evil author laugh*<\/p>\n\n\n\n Option #3:<\/strong> Someone who\u2019s bisexual who can\u2019t decide between the guy and the girl. Fairly self-explanatory I think.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Option #4:<\/strong> Traditional triangle with a plot twist. Use the usual setup with Riley trying to decide between Jordan and Emery, but instead of someone sacrificing their life or something, thus leaving only one choice, Jordan and Emery decide they want to be in a relationship with each other rather than with Riley. This means that Riley becomes the third wheel of course, but if the romance is only part of the larger story, it can work. Another possibility is that a third person – let\u2019s call them Morgan – wants a relationship with Riley, and the loss of Jordan and Emery leads Riley to date Morgan instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Option #5:<\/strong> Dissolve the triangle. For whatever reason – and please don\u2019t do the old \u201cJordan sacrificed their life so Riley only has Emery left now anyway\u201d – no one ends up with anyone else at the end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Option #6:<\/strong> Really shake things up, and have them end up in a polyamorous relationship! Who says a character has to choose anyway? That way everyone gets their happy ending.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Option #7:<\/strong> Don\u2019t do a triangle, do a square or something. You could have someone trying to choose between more<\/em> than two love interests, and\/or also apply any of the above scenarios. It does happen in real life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There you have it, folks. If you factor in other identities like pansexual, agender, etc., that opens up even more avenues for variety, but I haven\u2019t gone into detail because A) I\u2019m not as familiar with those identities and I don\u2019t want to misrepresent them (note: please don\u2019t misrepresent people in your fiction by writing about an identity you don\u2019t know anything about yet), and B) there are so many combinations if you factor in every gender identity, sexual orientation, and social outcome (i.e. the \u201cmaybe they\u2019re polyamorous\u201d and such options) possiblities that it would tax both of us were I to list them all. I\u2019ll just close with the reminder that you\u2019re not limited to only picking one variable. You can have the lesbian love square where no one actually makes a choice in the end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, go forth and be creative! And if you have more ideas to add to this list, feel free to drop them in the comments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I will admit, I\u2019ve never been a big fan of romance stories. I\u2019m more of an action\/adventure\/mystery type girl. Considering that I\u2019m eighteen and dating now though, I\u2019ve started to appreciate a good romantic subplot […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":148,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-writing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":149,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144\/revisions\/149"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}