Scribes & Archers

Hello, and Happy Valentine’s Day a little early! Today’s post is part of a week-long collaboration, where each author talks about a relationship trope they enjoy. Laura kicked us off yesterday with a post on the “marriage of convenience” trope, and today I’m picking up with the best friends-to-lovers trope. Stick around to the end to be sure to follow the authors who will be contributing the rest of the week!

The best friends-to-lovers trope is one of my favorites–which especially shows when I talk about love triangles and invariably prefer the steady best friend to the new Hot GuyTM–and today I’m going to talk about a few reasons why I appreciate it so much.

Emphasis on Friendship between Partners

A relationship needs more than chemistry and physical attraction to hold it together. If you don’t like who your SO is as a person, your relationship isn’t going to last. The best friends-to-lovers trope emphasizes the stability that comes when a relationship is built on mutual affection for something deeper in the other person, and existing trust and friendship. I hesitate to use the word “compatibility” because it can easily be taken too far, but there is something in who these characters are that is well-matched, and in a best friends-t0-lovers story we get to see that applied both to friendship and to something “more” between them.

Obviously, this is not to say that all relationships that started out as “more than friendship” lack these foundations! These can absolutely be built within a relationship, and I love stories that show that process, as well. But best friends-to-lovers showcases these traits from a unique perspective which I just always enjoy seeing/reading about.

Prioritizing Emotional Connections over Physical Attraction

To build off of the last point, I appreciate that the best friends-to lovers trope inherently focuses on the emotional connection between two characters more than on their physical attraction to one another. There’s nothing wrong with physical attraction–and it often does play a role in best friends-to-lovers stories, as it should–but it is certainly not the be-all, end-all that it can come across as in a lot of other kinds of romance threads. Lasting relationships, again, have to go deeper than that, and best friends-to-lovers stories acknowledge that in their very nature; two friends realize that their relationship is even more important to them than they realized, and they can’t imagine living without one another because of what the other adds to their life–and even to who they are and how they act. That’s the sort of deep connection that I really enjoy seeing emphasized in romance plot-lines.

Slow Burns are Great

I have to admit, I just like slow-burn relationships. I like seeing two characters take time to develop their relationship, without rushing into things, and seeing them figure out a new dynamic with one another. (Which is funny, since God wrote my own love story to develop very quickly with no pre-established relationship beforehand, but I still love reading slow-burns (and I still love the story God gave me and my husband).) Best friends-to-lovers is the ultimate slow-burn, because the characters aren’t even thinking about romance at the outset; it creeps up on them slowly, and they tend to move forward with it slowly out of care for the existing relationship (more on that in a moment).

Besides this, the dynamics that characters have to sort out are just different when they’re transitioning from friendship to “something more” than when two characters meet and pursue a romance from an early stage of their relationship; both dynamics are fun, and I like seeing both addressed, but the awkwardness of best friends realizing they have feelings for each other and learning to navigate a new kind of relationship with one another–while also clearly being well-suited to one another and having a great deal of rapport already in place–is unique to the best friends-to-lovers trope.

Highlighting the Importance of Platonic Friendship

Lastly, I want to talk about the way that the best friends-to-lovers trope not only naturally emphasizes elements of a strong, stable romance, but also emphasizes the importance of friendship right alongside its celebration of romance. This comes up especially if one friend realizes their feelings before the other, or when one friend realizes they have feelings for the other and the second friend doesn’t feel the same way at all. Generally speaking, the characters in a best friends-to-lovers story don’t rush into romance–as we’ve discussed–and generally speaking this is because one or both of them are afraid of distancing the other and ruining the friendship they already have. The friendship they have, and the other character’s comfort, are more important to them than their own romantic feelings. (This also highlights true selfless love, which is another point in the trope’s favor!)

The strongest examples of this focal point on friendship is actually when there is no “to lovers” because the romantic feelings are unrequited and the character feeling them chooses to place the friendship first by permanently setting aside their own attraction and focusing on the friendship they have. (Obviously, this is a little outside the scope of the trope, but it seemed appropriate to mention all the same.)

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Those are a few of the reasons I love the best friends-to-lovers trope, and as you can see, they largely boil down to the fact that I think the trope tends to highlight particular characteristics of a relationship that I really value seeing and that you can’t always find in other types of relationships (though, again, they’re certainly not always lacking, either!) Do you enjoy the best friends-to-lovers trope? Do you share some of my reasons, or do you have other reasons for enjoying it? Do you have any problems with how the best friends-to-lovers trope is handled? What is your favorite relationship trope? Share your thoughts in the comments!

And stick around this week, because we’ll be covering a lot more! I recommend following the other contributors so you don’t miss when their posts go live (and also because they’re really cool authors you should check out)!

Love Week Schedule

Mon, February 10 – Marriage of convenience – L.E. Morgan

Tue, February 11 – Best friends-to-lovers – R.M. Archer

Wed, February 12 – Childhood sweethearts – M.C. Kennedy

Thu, February 13 – Opposites attract – Grace Johnson

Fri, February 14 – Fake dating – Nicki Chapelway

Sat, February 15 – Forbidden love – Kellyn Roth

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