Down With the Love Triangle

Wherein I excoriate the bane of YA fiction.

Let me tell you a story.

A great city was under siege. A nobleman deserted to the enemy camp, leaving his daughter behind in a city doomed to burn.

This daughter was lovely and virtuous. The prince himself fell madly in love with her and won her heart. She proudly hung the prince's battle trophies in the hall of her family, the greatest of which was a black shield studded with silver stars, won from an enemy soldier in battle.

A message came from the enemy camp. They had captured a lord of the city and would return him in exchange for our story’s heroine. The king, caring nothing for his son’s trifling romance, agreed to the ransom, and the enemy army sent a hero to fetch the girl.

After collecting the trophies she prized above all else, she swore to the prince that she would find some way to escape and return to her city and her love.

Just then, the tall, handsome hero from the enemy camp arrived. With a gallant bow to the lady, he introduced himself and escorted her from the city.

The prince waited and waited for her to return but despaired of seeing his love again and took to his bed with a high fever. When he awoke, his younger brother proudly showed him a new trophy.

“Brother, I have injured my first man! It was that pretty princeling who fetched away the traitor’s daughter. He escaped with his life, but I stole his shield.” He held it up.

It was a black shield studded with stars.

You may recognize this as the story of Troilus and Cressida, an apocryphal tale of the Trojan War about a prince of Troy and the girl who leaves him for the Greek hero Diomedes. Shakespeare retells the story in Troilus and Cressida, but he stuffs it so full of random episodes from The Iliad that the lovers’ plot is lost by the end. Let’s face it, this story of an unfaithful lover may be relatable and gut-wrenching, but we don’t want to dwell on it for a full-length play. It’s best left as a short story.

What Shakespeare could have done, of course, was shift the perspective from Troilus to Cressida, make us sympathetic to her confusion about leaving Troilus for Diomedes, and glorify her infidelity.

In other words, he could have written what passes for a love triangle in much YA and romance fiction these days.

Trope as Old As Time

The love triangle trope is as old as literature itself, and it’s not always a problem if it is used well. There are only three possible responses in any romantic relationship, real or fictional, to a third-party love interest: “unrequited love,” “infidelity,” and “tempted but honorable.”

UNREQUITED LOVE

Unrequited Love is technically a love triangle in which no one is unfaithful, even emotionally. The established couple remain true to each other. The beloved character may know that the third person loves them, as with Éowyn’s love for Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings, or they may be ignorant as with SPOILER’S love for SPOILER in Harry Potter. (Seriously though, if you need a spoiler alert because you still haven’t read Harry Potter, you need to get on that. After all this time? Always.) Or they might be not so much ignorant as clueless, since Marius really can't take hints from Eponine in Les Miserables.

Unrequited love is a poignant love triangle, and it’s a great way to make the third party more sympathetic. We can all relate to that pain. A great author will use this vain love to develop character. Aragorn embodies the renown that Éowyn craves, his rejection makes her seek death in battle, and she completes her arc when she no longer desires to become queen. In Harry Potter, SPOILER’S love explains everything about his decisions through all seven books. In Les Miserables, Eponine’s jaded reaction to Marius not loving her makes her lead him to the battle where she hopes they both will die.

INFIDELITY

Sometimes the person’s affections are returned, and this quickly devolves into the Infidelity Love Triangle. The infidelity may be merely emotional, with the character indulging his or her feelings, but it may move past into flirting, declaration of love, or physical cheating. The story of Troilus and Cressida falls into this category.

Done well, this indulgence is acknowledged by author and audience to be a flaw. In Poldark, Ross nurses his old flame for Elizabeth even after his marriage to Demelza. His unwillingness to let it go is a reflection of his broader insistence on always doing things his way.

In Hamilton, Alexander’s flirtation with Angelica is another skillful example. Even though he never actually has a relationship with her, we see that saying “I have never been satisfied” is not a proof of genius but a self-destructive spark that will burn down his whole life. The character doesn’t have to be “punished” unnaturally by the author because the natural consequences of his actions are enough.

The Infidelity Love Triangle can also resolve in a different way, as in The Office with the relationship between Jim and Pam in the early seasons. Pam is engaged to a man who is not good for her, and she’s really in love with her best friend Jim, having essentially an emotional affair, but she doesn’t just get to be with Jim. She has to actually break off her relationship with Roy and then go through a lot of character growth and a lot of time gaining the strength that she needs in order to actually, honestly, be in a relationship with Jim.

TEMPTED BUT HONORABLE

There is also what I will call “tempted but honorable,” in which a character might have feelings but refuses to indulge them because it would be wrong. It’s hard to come up with many true examples of this because it so swiftly devolves into some form of infidelity.

In Sense and Sensibility, Edward is honorable but fumbling as he cannot declare his love for Elinor due to a previous, loveless, secret engagement. As long as that engagement continues, he keeps his distance from Elinor. This is painful for them both, but it is better than leading her on or being untrue to Lucy Steele. For her part, Elinor respects the secret engagement despite her broken heart.

In War and Peace, Pierre remains true to his awful, unfaithful wife even though he is in love with Natasha. “The girl is a treasure,” he tells his friend Andrei, admitting to the audience, if to no one else, exactly how deeply he means that.

All three of these—Unrequited Love, Infidelity, and Tempted but Honorable—are legitimate ways to play a love triangle, and I think they accurately reflect the foibles of the human heart without glorifying infidelity and caprice.

Bad Romance

Why is it, then, that so many popular YA novels have unrealistic love triangles that flout normal relationship rules? The main character is unfaithful, both emotionally and physically, but rather than reveal the underlying character flaws that would make someone destroy a perfectly good relationship, we are made to understand that she is “confused” and therefore licensed to cheat on a partner while “discovering” whom she truly loves. Alternately, if her first relationship does have red flags that would justify a break-up, she lacks the courage to totally end it with the first guy before flirting with her new side guy.

I say “she” because it is almost always a girl who is cheating in these novels; if a guy cheats, we recognize him as a first-class jerk. Of the dozen or so recent books and series aimed at teenage girls that I have read in the past fifteen years, over half have had this kind of love triangle.

In a stronger series, like Shannon Hale’s Princess Academy trilogy, the love triangle is merely the weakest part of an otherwise good story. In fluffier stories—Sarah J. Maas’s Throne of Glass, Keira Cass’s The Selection, and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight come to mind (and by the way, Twilight is the strongest of those three)—it ruins the already fragile love stories and characters.

Even in The Hunger Games, a series that was trying to subvert the love triangle trope, the studio’s marketing and the fans’ debates focused on “Team Gale” and “Team Peeta,” ignoring the fact that Katniss had no freedom to pursue a relationship honestly, and that the real point of the books was, you know, the revolution, not the guys.

I’m here to say that girls deserve better. Teenagers are not dumb, vapid, or itching to be self-destructive. They are energetic, passionate, and looking for something to fight for and something to believe in.

Many readers, and young readers especially, learn how to live from the books they read. When we get swept up in a story, we start to see the characters as real people; we sometimes react to their circumstances as strongly as we'd react to a friend or loved one. This magic of reading can be a double-edged sword.

Meghan Cox Gurdon, children’s book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal, cites a study in which women felt more insecure after reading novels with insecure protagonists. She writes,

“Books tell children what to expect, what life is, what culture is, how we are expected to behave — what the spectrum is. Books don’t just cater to tastes. They form tastes. They create norms…and the norms young people take away are not necessarily the norms adults intend."

Readers model themselves on characters they admire and think that how a character lives is how life works. This becomes a problem when the characters are showing them the worst way to approach relationships, with none of the real-life consequences of cheating and manipulation.

Deconstructing the Trope

Let’s walk through the traits of the bad love triangle. Essentially, at the end book one, our Pretty Protagonist and her Lover Boy are perfectly happy. They’ve beaten the bad guy, and their love is strong. By the beginning of book two, however, their love is cooling slightly, and the Moody Interloper appears. He is also hopelessly attracted to our Pretty Protagonist, and both boys’ obsessions with her signal how gorgeous she is.

What is a Pretty Protagonist to do? Don’t worry, girls, she’s got this. She either has no idea that the Moody Interloper feels that way about her (because that would make her seem vain), or she does know and feels herself getting more and more “confused.” Is it possible to love two men at once? she asks herself. I can’t choose between them. Fortunately, one symbolizes safety and the other symbolizes adventure, so that will help me decide.

When the Love Triangle is Shorthand for the Main Conflict

Oh, yes, the boys are symbolic and two-dimensional. The author uses them to symbolize the Pretty Protagonist’s choice between different worlds. One symbolizes revolution, the other tradition. One is her old way of life, the other new possibilities. Rich and poor. Adventure and stability. Vampire and werewolf.

Using love triangles to symbolize the larger conflict of the book is tired and predictable. It ties up too neatly when the girl can choose the boy and resolve the conflict at the same time.

Girls can decide between important issues without turning them into romantic contests. The heroine should choose to leave or join the revolution without bringing boys into it.

Young people will face times when emotions and relationships—friendship, family, and romantic—are tied up with important life decisions. That’s tough, and it’s not always obvious how to act. Sacrificing ambition for love is noble. Sacrificing conviction is not.

Displaying this tension in a book can be brilliant except in the love triangle. The Pretty Protagonist is already betraying her convictions by flirting with someone new, so the whole conflict becomes a test of feelings, and feelings happen to be the worst criteria for life decisions.

How Not to Discern Your Feelings

I already mentioned the fact that bad love triangles glorify infidelity and emotional manipulation. I hope readers know that you don’t “figure out your feelings” by being emotionally or physically unfaithful.

This is a terrible analogy, but if you suspect that you are lactose intolerant, you cut out milk for a while to see if the symptoms go away. You don’t glut yourself on pizza and ice cream to see if it kills you.

If you are in a relationship and feel yourself attracted to someone else, you don’t spend tons of time with them. You limit your interaction as much as possible and avoid intimate conversations. And if that person is bold enough to make overtures? Say goodbye. If you have a boy pursuing you while you already have a boyfriend, something is wrong. You either should not give him the time of day, or you should not be in your current relationship. If you get to the point of being kissed by the new guy —and they always do in these stories—you’ve been mishandling things for a while.

What’s worse, though, is the absolution that these heroines are given. The blame, if any is given, is placed at the feet of the man who “confused” her. If you’re wondering why I put “confused” in quotation marks, it’s because women are not idiots. We may make mistakes and ruin relationships, but we are morally responsible for our actions.

This is depicted beautifully in War and Peace. Heaven help me for trying to summarize a Russian novel in one paragraph (oh, spoiler alert), but here goes. Natasha and Andrei are in love and engaged, but during his year-long absence she is seduced by another man and breaks off the engagement. Andrei understandably despises her for a time, but they later reconcile.

Then he tries to blame himself for leaving her alone too long, but she protests. She had let her feelings rule her, but she still knew what she was doing. She repented almost immediately and emerged a sadder, wiser woman. Andrei’s hatred of her had been disproportionate, but so is his desire to exonerate her. She needs forgiveness, not excuses.

Unfortunately, many authors are more interested in excuses.

Is the love triangle trope edifying? Does it inspire readers to live better lives? Obviously not. It feeds vanity to have two or more people madly in love with you, and wish fulfillment is probably why this trope is popular. Reverse roles to see the problems. When a guy is loved by tons of girls and doesn’t care, he looks like Gaston.

A Plea to Writers

Stories need conflict, or no one will read them. Stories do not need melodrama, or I won’t read them.

I sympathize with the temptation to write a love triangle. It’s an easy form of conflict, and even the most poorly written ones do have the what-happens-next appeal that keeps readers turning pages.

If you’re writing a story with a love triangle developing, you don’t have to stop. Just please, please be honest about what it will do to the relationships. Destroy the marriage, end the friendship, depict the sadness of the serial monogamist. You don’t have to end in despair, but as with Andrei and Natasha, recognize that redemption comes through forgiveness, not excuses.

Or better yet, write about the normal issues that arise in a deepening romantic relationship such as selfishness, communication breakdown, and disagreement about the future. These are valid obstacles that still leave us rooting for the couple. In another throwback to The Office, by the last season, when Jim and Pam have been married for a few years, their relationship drama has nothing to do with other people. It’s all about the conflict that they have created, but we still want them to work out.

These honest stories are difficult to write well. Telling the story of the thousand trivial tragedies that can drive a couple apart requires both brutal honesty and undying hope on a level beyond most authors.

But from one reader-writer to another, I hope you’ll try.

An earlier version of this essay appears on my other blog, roadstainedfeet.wordpress.com.