Does every relationship in fiction have to be romantic in some way? I swear, reading the cover copy for trad pubs, it sure seems like it. YA, adult genre fiction, mysteries, everything has a romance in it. Granted, I’m not exactly one to talk, because a lot of my characters who are old enough do get romantically involved, but what became of friendship, especially between characters of the opposite sex?
I’m going to focus on stories that are not primarily romance genre. Those have reader expectations and beats that demand a certain type of relationship, no matter if they are heterosexual or otherwise. (“Sapphic” has become trendy in cover copy of cozy fantasies and some romances, I notice.)
I wonder if part of what drives “must be romance or ‘adult relationship’” comes from editors who long ago seem to have decided that every main character gets involved with someone. Romantic and erotic tension is relatively easy to write, and relatively easy to have the increase, plateau/rejection/decline, rise to peak pattern that modern readers prefer. It makes a convenient subplot, and can add an element of risk and raise the stakes in the story. And guys and gals fall in love, always have. However, it seems like every single relationship has to have a romantic tension in it. Guys and gals can’t just be professional coworkers, or friends.
Another part might stem from #METOO. It has become rather fraught for coworkers to socialize, or for bosses to have private work conversations with subordinates of the opposite sex, at least in large corporations and in certain parts of the country. I know that I take great pains to make sure that no hint of question arises when I meet with male coworkers or superiors. I’ve done that for quite a while, because I don’t want guys tarred with a nasty brush of rumor. Publishing is far from immune to scandal, and that might influence what publishers buy.
But especially for younger readers, if they read and see in films or TV that every single relationship has to be romantic, they don’t get to see that adult friendships are possible. Guys and gals have to be love interests, not buddies and work friends. That’s not fair, and short changes a lot of valuable options for stories. A good writer can have just as much relationship growth and character development with friendships, in the right genre and setting. And the focus on erotic/romantic pairings in current pop culture devalues other relationships. I remember being startled and a little sad when a kid (10-11 years old or so) and his dad were leaving Return of the King and the boy asked, “Frodo and Sam were boyfriends?” His dad startled, then explained that no, they were good friends, and guy friends who have been through hard times together often hug and express emotions. I suspect Dad and Mom sat down with the kids later to discuss that. At least, I hope they did.
I suspect it is easiest to do in things like mil-sci-fi or police procedurals, where everyone knows you have men and women working together on teams, for a shared goal. You can also do that in other settings, like in a bakery, or a small manufacturing or supply shop, where everyone learns to work as a team to get things done during crunch time. Shared experiences often lead to friendships, or at least to those shared moments and in-jokes that everyone appreciates.
What are some fictional friendships that would serve as good models for modern writers? Holmes and Watson, Raffles and “Bunny”, Sam and Frodo … Who else?
Mad Genius Club 
28 responses to “Relationships in Fiction: It’s Complicated (And Social Media are Not Helping!)”
And at least two of those three have been presumed involved for decades. See also: “Kirk-Spocking”
There’s a fairly large and persistent branch of fandom that will see eros in anything….
They see it as long as it’s not a straight married couple that is faithful to their partner. Then they not so secretly hate each other.
Exactly.
The most obvious non-romantic pairing in SF has to be David Drake’s Royal Cinnabar Navy series with Leary and Mundy.
Leary is a tomcat, but not with Mundy, who is probably his best friend.
In R.M. Meluch’s Merrimack books, I liked the relationship between the male captain, and his female, space-Roman-educated XO. And the male friendship between the captain and the Spanish-named scientist who seemed to be cosplaying as Highlander’s Ramirez. (Look, he had a guitar AND a ponytail AND a katana AND a dead love interest AND a whole lotta philosophizing…it just seemed a bit much to be a coincidence.)
“Does every relationship in fiction have to be romantic in some way?”
This, right here. This has turned me off several shows.
I grew up in an era where being friends was the norm. Police Woman, Adam-12, Emergency, Charlie’s Angels, Star Trek, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (not to be confused with the Buck Rogers serial), these people were portrayed as co-workers, even friends, but nothing beyond that. ((I reject the Kirk/Spock paring.)) There was romance, Bones, Battlestar Galactica, Remington Steele (although I think they ruined it, I like the ‘are they/aren’t they’ tension better), Babylon 5, but you could see that it was build into the story, the relationship grows naturally.
Now, it seems like they put no effort into it. Just “oh, hey, let’s put these two together” – never mind they really aren’t that compatible, or that they are better off as friends than lovers. I’ve stopped watching shows after seeing partners become lovers (even married) without facing any of the consequence – like one of them leaving the team / department / fill-in-the-blank. (NCIS-LA, looking at you.) (I ignore the rules on Bones, because … well, Bones – nothing on that show is accurate, it is mind candy – guilty please tv)
And the fans are worse. At least if you wade into the fanfic pool. (I wanted to burn my eyes after I saw the Jonny/Hadji pairing. They grew up as brothers.) The idea that people can be friends, good friends, with no hint of romantic overtones, seems to be totally alien to them. At least on Archive of Our Own I can filter out relationships.
95% of the time, I’d rather see a good friendship than a romantic relationship.
okay, rant over. {kicks soapbox back under the desk}
The “Moonlighting” show ruined it for me when the main characters decided to “just do it”. The episode leading up to it was good, but you got the sense that the writers had “OK. Now what do we do from here?” and had no good answers.
Friendships without sex seemed to be decently portrayed in “Person of Interest”. Might not have hurt that all (or most) of the main characters were broken, but they could do the job without much extra sturm & drang.
I enjoyed that show a lot but I dunno if I’d agree. The original two characters, Reese and Finch, who were male, developed a very strong, convincingly platonic bond to the point of being willing to die for each other, and one of them also had an equally intense, equally platonic friendship with a now-dead male friend. But the show shipteased the two female leads together, Shaw and Root, and wrote them both as people who were basically incapable of friendship with the men. Both were nasty and dismissive towards Reese. Shaw’s main connection with Finch was their shared love of the dog, while Root and Finch, well, on a good day, they had kind of a surrogate father-daughter thing going on, and on a bad day it was more like the relationship a Zeus worshipper would have had with Ouranos, or a Marduk worshipper with Ea or Anshar.
“But the show shipteased the two female leads together, Shaw and Root, ”
This is where I stopped watching. I kinda liked Shaw, and thought she was a good addition to the team. Root on the other hand I disliked from the start, so making her part of the team wreaked it for me. Add in that shipping thing and I gave up on the show.
I didn’t mind Shaw as Shaw, either. If she had been “only woman on the team” her comedic sociopath tendencies and disdain for the people around her would have been a lot funnier. But TWO comedic sopciopath women who are better than the men at the men’s respective plot functions and have ridiculously advanced skills in other ways, was definitely at least one too many.
I think Root could have worked as a sort of distaff counterpart to their mafia frenemy, or maybe had some kind of death equals redemption arc shortly after joining forces with them.
The storyline where the Machine basically dumps Root on Finch and says, not in so many words: “Here, Admin! Bad Code! Please Fix!” is kind of amusing when you realize that’s what’s happening but it doesn’t go anywhere interesting.
Honestly, I’d rather have “friends to lovers” tropes than this currently fashionable thing where the heroine should be romantically paired with the nastiest piece of work in a hundred mile radius, “because nothing else has enough DRAMA.”
But we do need more friendships in fiction. I have a fondness for Poirot and Hastings, just because they troll each other so hard, (We spend so much time in both their heads over the course of the books while they notice pretty women that there isn’t, to me, a lot of question of them being anything other than friends.) Poirot and Mrs. Oliver are one of the better platonic male-female friendships in mysteries also. I like the interplay between Gabriel Syme and the first couple of allies he uncovers in The Man Who Was Thursday as well.
On tv, I bought the friendship between Jadzia Dax and Kira Nerys on DS9, O’Brien and Bashir of course, and Sisko’s supportive kindness towards the various Daxes. And Picard and Data on TNG. The Kirk&Spock and Kirk/Spock fans both miss the point that this is more of a Kirk&Spock&McCoy dynamic, or possibly a Kirk&Spock&McCoy&Scotty dynamic, with the Captain as the D’Artagnan “plus one” to his older officers’ Three Musketeers. BTW, I don’t think the older film versions capture the Musketeer friendships particularly well, but the 90s Man in the Iron Mask and the 2011 clockpunk(1) Three Musketeers are pretty decent at it, and it’s about the only thing the 90s Brat Pack Three Musketeers does right.
Tolkien’s an iffy role model because he’s looking back to the more overtly sentimental protocols of his late Victorian childhood; where people could be intensely emotional about their relationships with other people without there being an assumption that they were physically attracted to the other people. That mode of behavior is now as alien to most English-speakers as the social protocols of Sicily. And he and Bram Stoker are about the only authors who operated in that style and are still read for pleasure today. A.C. Doyle did have that kind of emotional content but was a bit more restrained in expressing it – his inner Scotsman at work, perhaps.
(1) The one with the airships and Milla Jovavich.
I think one of the reasons Star Trek has had so much endurance, is the totally non-sexual relationship of Kirk, Spock, Bones . . . and a lot of the regularly seen crew. We didn’t watch to see what weird space discovery they were going to twist into contemporary social/political metaphor this time . . . we tuned in to see what our friends, the group we wanted to be a part of, were doing today. Romantic interests tended to be with out-group characters.
We need more of that in fiction of any genre of medium.
The closest was Nurse Chapel’s unrequited crush on Spock.
This trend drives me crazy. It condenses down the entire range of human interaction into your genitals.
In ye olden days, it was expected that men had male friends and women had female friends and those friends enriched your life and performed functions that your spouse did not. I.e., they were friends.
And yes, men and women can be friends without sex getting involved. It’s also possible to be friends with much older people and younger people too.
Aargh.
I completely agree. I mostly read Gen category fanfic for exactly this reason. One of the things I liked most about “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” was that Cap and Black Widow were paired as teammates, and there was no romance between them. In fact, the running gag in that movie was that she was trying to find women for him to date!
Another film example, “When Sally Met Harry,” posits that women and men can never be celibate) friends, which makes me sad. I want to see more friendships develop in books and entertainment.
My Dragonette were talking about this last weekend when she was home from college. Modern fiction is absolutely crammed with couples who should be friends. She is especially peeved by the Frodo/Sam shipping since it tells men that they cannot be friends with other men (that’s gay!) and by the Aziraphale/Crowley relationship in the Good Omens series. Forget being non-canon (the book specifically states that angels are non-sexual creatures), Season 2 was cribbed from Tumblr posts, and I have no interest in Season 3. And we loved Season 1.
That’s one of the reasons I usually only read old books or conservative writers – I want friendships if I’m not reading a romance novel.
Season 2 was cribbed from Tumblr posts
Sorry to hear that.
Not surprised, but sorry.
Been a cultural thing since at least the mid-90s– the only reason you could be attracted to someone was lust. Wasn’t exactly obscure in a lot of theories before that, either, but look at stuff like the dude-hug, or read Spider Robinson going on about “A-hugs” in his cross-time saloon stories. Because touching is physical is sex.
Calling it “romantic” is vastly flattering.
The “new” thing towards… oh, about 2000 or so?… was the implication that if two girls liked each other, it was sex, not friends. Which was generally “hot.”
:shudders:
No wonder folks are touch-starved.
Calling it “romantic” is vastly flattering.
Agreed. More often it seems to be like ‘You’re breathing (and even this is an option; look at vampire erotica) and I’m horny. Let’s have sex.’
And it can get worse. If you’ve ever seen the animated Disney Robin Hood, the one where they have anthropomorphic animals for the characters? You may remember a scene early on where Maid Marian gives a little rabbit boy named Skippy who’s fanboying over Robin a sweet and very innocent kiss on one cheek, which immediately sends him into “Girls, er, vixens have cooties, blech!” territory. Anyone who’s ever seen it understands that this is a joke. But at online sites like Tv Tropes and others, I now find it described as ‘problematic’ and ‘inappropriate’ because, you know, a kiss like that means she wants to ‘do it’ with the kid.
Of course this is from people who think that if two characters even take notice of one another in a given story, that means they want to have sex. Makes me wonder sometimes if this is all going to end with having women dress in full burqa to avoid the evils of male lust.
I go more towards Freud, and some researchers being fairly sure he came up with a lot of his theories because kids were reporting abuse to him, and he was interpreting it in light of the adults saying nothing happened.
I seem to recall seeing an account in which he initially explained “hysteria” as a result of girls being sexually abused by fathers or other older males, and then came under intense pressure and threats to his career. So he backed off (or sold out) and came up with the theory that girls fantasized about their fathers . . .
Rick O’Connell and Ardeth Bey! Not to mention Rick and Jonathan. 😉
Yes! I love that moment in the second movie where Rick, like a good host, is offering Ardeth his choice of weapons 🙂
“That was my first bus ride….” *G*
Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin characters are a good example of a long-term friendship between two men, I think.
Episodic series work well with this trope
One way to avoid too much of this sort of thing is by including younger characters in the mix, as well as oldsters. They’re not just potential friends with each-other, but also across the age/experience gaps.
Yep. I see this most frequently in a certain type of western where the mentor is also the co-protagonist: Audie Murphy was the “young guy being mentored” well into his late thirties, John Wayne did a bunch of mentor protagonists in the later part of his career, Lee Van Cleef did a few in his spaghetti western phase (which in turn led to his misguided but amusing role in Master Ninja).
You also saw them to some extent in older horror movies, usually with Peter Cushing in the mentor/co-protagonist role. This led to him being considered briefly for Obi-Wan Kenobi, I think as kind of a backup in case the more prestigious Alec Guinness refused, but ultimately Lucas and the producers felt they needed Cushing in a Villainous Cheekbones capacity, and so the Star Wars casting fell out as we know it today.