Close Read: Meet Cute

Part 1 of the inevitable romance mini series

Hallo, it’s me, Laura King. You might have noticed that over the last year I have gotten really into reading romantic comedies. I have also talked non-stop to anyone who would listen about what I think makes a good romance book, or about the different component parts or tropes that might seem familiar but combine to make something great.

At the bare minimum, if you’re reading a romance book, you need to believe that those characters 1. have some kind of connection or spark, 2. that they are falling in love (ie, they actually like each other), and 3. that they are (likely) going to live happily ever after - that is, you need to be sold on this love story at the beginning, middle, and the end. This is a pretty basic (but I hope effective) structure for a short series of essays I plan to publish here on Substack, interspersed between my usual reading updates. If you don’t like romance books (who hurt you?), time to look away now.

At the beginning, there is the meet cute.

A meet cute is the scene in a film, usually, that introduces two characters who we will inevitably watch fall in love, the “boy meets girl” (or whoever meets whoever) scene. I’m a sucker for a proper meet cute: an unlikely event, or a case of mistaken identity that catches the characters off guard. I’m also interested in books where the characters are known to one another, but something happens to dramatically alter that existing relationship early in the novel. What I’m looking for here, in my favourite types of romance books, is where there is a disruption or a shock that jolts the characters out of where they were before, and makes clear to the reader that a shift is occurring, with the characters unsettled and trying to find their footing.

I’m actually not a fan of novels where two people meet and fall in love instantly, or start up some kind of relationship instantly - where is the disruption? Where is the tension?? Nor am I particularly interested in a novel where the characters get together in a way that is normal or straightforward outside of fiction. It’s partially why I’m not usually crazy about “friends to lovers” romances, because that is something that I know can happen and has happened around me, much less any kind of online dating story (it happened to me!). I don’t care if they can make for good “actual” relationships, I just don’t care enough to read about something that could happen in my own life. I love romances where the connection or beginning of the relationship occurs in a way that is outside the norm of how people meet within that world, and because of the strangeness of that connection, they get to know each other more fully than if they had been a usual romantic prospect for each other.

I have written before about many people’s gateway romantic novel: “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen. The book famously begins with Netherfield Park being let (at last) to a young bachelor, a disruption into the lives of five young women waiting around to be married off. There’s a reason that Jane and Mr. Bingley’s story, while nice, is relegated to a B-plot, and that is because their path is the more traditional one, albeit with enough disruption and tension and satisfying resolution that would be quite enough for another author. Their courtship is pretty traditional in that their every interaction is chaperoned up until the point they marry, and while forces (Mr. Darcy) conspire to keep them apart, it’s all resolved fairly easily.

In contrast, Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy get off on the wrong foot right away, and while their initial judgments of one another divide them, the fact that the prospect of marriage is taken off the table right away allows them to get to know each other outside of the normal rules of courtship.

When I wrote about Pride and Prejudice before, I said:

I’ve often wondered if the reason that this romance is so enticing to viewers is because, since the couple aren’t “courting” and don’t have to go to all that ritual, they’re free to get to know each other as people, not prospects, and by the end they know they actually get on, instead of a more normal romance at the time where you might talk to someone twice at a ball and then your dad said you’re married to them now. Elizabeth and Darcy aren’t strangers by the time they eventually get engaged.

As for tropes, this certainly fits into the “enemies to lovers” camp, because the two of them absolutely hate each other, at least for a while. I don’t care about these “slight misunderstanding” books that are marketed as “enemies to lovers”, Elizabeth and Darcy both think the other is really full of themselves and annoying and that is just funny to me. And of course, if the characters understand that they are attracted to one another and that makes them even more annoyed - it’s just funnier again!

There’s also just something about knowing that the two characters have actually seen the worst traits of each other already. They aren’t dating at the start so they aren’t necessarily putting their best foot forward only for those traits or behaviours to cause problems later or if they do, the dynamic is in place where one can challenge the other or call out those behaviours. They know each other, and we see them like each other and get on, and that feels more real than a kind of instant love or attraction.

There have been a lot of really popular enemies to lovers books published recently, and though I think this trope is most effective in fantasy or science fiction books, where the stakes can be higher and the reason for the animosity is a lot more entertaining, the ones that spring to mind for me are “Love Scene” by Anna Carey, “Love, Theoretically” by Ali Hazelwood, or “Beach Read” by Emily Henry.

A very different, but sometimes complimentary trope, is “fake dating”. There can be a few reasons why two characters might pretend to be in a relationship. For example, in the film “The Proposal”, Sandra Bullock’s character wants to marry Ryan Reynolds for his visa, but I’ve seen this explode in recent years with the likes of “Funny Story” by Emily Henry, “Yours Truly” by Abby Jimenez, “The Love Hypothesis” by Ali Hazelwood, or my current read at the time of writing this, “The Bodyguard” by Katherine Center. It’s also a staple of teen romance films where characters are trying to make someone else jealous, and it’s usually a type of deal or contract where both characters benefit from the guise of the relationship, with a specific goal or result in mind. By the end, they know each other so well, the good and the bad, that the reader can almost rest assured that by the time they get together they will be more likely to stay together because they both know each other, and have played out a relationship together and tested some waters and learned about what the other wants or needs.

Because they are only pretending to be dating they get to know each other outside the pressures of normal interaction or the normal milestones of a new relationship, and again may be acting more authentically around each other than they are to the people they are trying to fool. The characters effectively create a bubble in which they are suddenly only being “real” in front of this other person, and therefore create an intimacy or vulnerability that wouldn’t have been there before.

Of course, things can’t stay that way forever. The enemies, after going through something together often have a new appreciation for the other’s point of view. The fake couple eventually are in sight of their end goal and they know they will be “free” to part ways soon. Something has to be disrupted again, something has to change, and some tension has to be dialed up to bring things to the next level. Sometimes…. There’s only one bed.

But that’s a subject for another day.

Thank you for reading, and I hope you join me soon for another installment of LauraEatsBooks.