The Everlasting Trope: The Love Triangle

For these Everlasting Trope posts, I try not to pick only tropes I like, or only ones I dislike, but a whole range of them. Yet I think it is necessary to admit, up front, my own biases.

I do not particularly care for the Love Triangle. I don’t hate it with the fire of a thousand suns, but I would never voluntarily seek it out, and I am very skeptical of it when I see it arise.

But this trope has a zillion versions, and it never dies. Shakespeare did all kinds of triangles and rectangles and basically all of the love geometry. There is nothing new under the sun.

As always, why is this?

And as always, the answer is…there are several answers, a few of which I will attempt to tackle fairly.

Creating Tension/Barriers

In any Romantic scenario, barriers are thrown up to keep the romance from coming to fruition because readers generally prefer tension to satisfaction. We like the ‘almost’ or the fraught uncertainty leading to the plot climax rather than the pragmatic housekeeping that is the denouement.

Almost anything can be a barrier–class, culture, war, distance, group dynamics, religion–but when such things are not germane to the story or setting, a second suitor can do the trick. This can be true whether the extra love-interest is merely a distraction (no one actually believes he is THE guy for the protagonist) or if he is indeed a viable contender.

And sometimes the ‘other’ guy, ends up being the actual guy, and that creates all kinds of tensions, confusions, and wonderings. The presence of doubt or impediment that the extra suitor provides prolongs the central romance, drawing it out as we (for some reason) so often love it to do.

(Side-note: Personally I am not a fan of the triangle-for-tension bit, and I’ve never really understood the appeal, but perhaps that is because the idea of being interested in two people at one time, or torn between them, seems simultaneously impossible and truly awful. I end up disliking the lady-love (as, let’s be honest, it is usually a lady) and wondering why anyone would be drawn to someone so flighty, indecisive, and who shows a tendency for infidelity)

Wish-fulfillment

Sometimes this is all it is. The bald-faced wish-fulfillment of having every remotely intriguing character fall for the main protagonist. The competition. Everyone fighting for you…uh, I mean her…because she’s just SO amazing. On the surface it might be easy to mock this sort of thing, unless you take the word “beautiful” and replace it with “smart.”

Have I ever wished every man in the room was in love with me? No. Definitely not. But have I wished that everyone in the room was impressed with me, thought me astonishingly intelligent, the absolute best sort of company? Why yes. Yes I have. I admit this shamefacedly, but the truth is most of us like the idea of someone turning their head in abrupt amazement at our dazzling brilliance, and it’s not hard to see how that concept might take a strong romantic turn when infused into a story.

Take this scenario a little further, it becomes a triangle or some other shape. Such is life.

Plot-Passion-Push

For simplicity’s sake, let us continue to use the most stereotypical scenario: the extra suitor gives main-love-interest guy a much-needed push to realize his own feelings about Lady-love. It isn’t until his status is threatened that he becomes aware of his status at all. Extra-suitor-guy is there to awaken main-love-interest-guy’s hidden passion for lady-love. He didn’t know what he wanted until he realized he was going to lose it.

This one can actually be really fun and romantic, because it often has one of the protagonists wrestling with feelings they do NOT want to confront, but are forced to address because of competition. Inner turmoil. Angst. Woe. Hope. Doubt. A sudden painful awareness of all the beloveds’ finer qualities, which were heretofore taken for granted.

More than this it give us an opportunity the witness the depth of one character’s love for the other. When provoked by danger (that being the danger of losing the Beloved to someone else) the lover is suddenly afforded many opportunities of long-suffering sorrow, forbearance, and self-sacrifice (because if the Beloved would be happier with Other Guy, then that is what must happen, however painful!) which just goes to show how True Is His Love.

We love to see self-sacrifice and silent struggle! Let it be!

A Moral Choice

This is a device that need not be used only for love triangles, but often is used thusly. This is where two characters represent not only themselves, but a philosophy or a moral direction. A really good non love triangle example of this device is to be found in Chaim Potok’s The Promise. Abraham Gordon and Rav Kalman are fully realized characters but they also represent two different responses from the Jewish community to the collective trauma of the Holocaust, two different plans and ideologies for the future of Judaism. And it is young Michael who represents the pain and confusion caused by the conflict between these philosophies. (Unrelated: The Promise is highly, highly recommended).

In love triangles, the two competing love interests may be fully realized, or they may be two-dimensional, but they clearly represent two different “tracks” the protagonist can take. This is why there is often a “bad boy” and a “nice guy” in many of these stories. Broadly, that’s an almost Star-Warsian battle between the light side and the dark side, but some stories go much deeper than this. The two love interests may represent a battle between cynicism and hope, between the rejection or embrace of society, between maturity and immaturity, between faith or doubt, between reason and emotion, between pride or humility. Sometimes the right answer is clear. Sometimes it is more ambiguous because both sides are making some pretty compelling arguments.

Hunger Games was not really my thing, but it has a tolerable (if imperfectly applied) example of this. Gale represented resistance via aggression. Peeta (at times) represented resistance via gentleness and sacrifice. The question was which one offered an end to the cycle, which one offered peace. There were some severe contrivances and deviations from the metaphor, but each guy represented more than just his character as such.

Done well, this one can thrill the philosophical/theological part of the mind, and maybe even the romantic sensibilities as well. Tough to get it right, though. One wants the characters to be real people, not just symbols.

Human Complexity and Human Inconstancy

Many love triangles are doomed altogether, and it ends badly for everybody, not just the unwanted extra suitor. These are the stories where the “triangle” exists to examine the complex desires and struggles within human nature itself. We are broken, confused, imperfect, often working against our own best interests.

People who have been mistreated or abused often have trouble escaping cycles of abusive relationships so as to break out and seek healthy ones because some patterns are very sticky…they pull you back.

We want to do right, but we do not.

In other circumstances, our selfishness gets in the way and convinces us (ever so slyly) that what we want is more important than, say, wisdom or fidelity or keeping vows.

And in still other circumstances, mere immaturity may lead to confusion in love and relationships.

In Parke Godwin’s Sherwood, Maid Marian has already fallen in love with Robin, but she is somewhat young and naive, and when she encounters Ralf (The Sheriff) she is somewhat moved by his tortured soul. The author says that she had learned the “primary colors of love but not yet it’s delicate shades.” She must learn constancy while also having compassion for the anti-hero of the book.

But probably the best example off the top of my head for this sort of love triangle is in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. There we have a father and son bitterly jealous over the same woman who herself is astonishingly flawed and confused, and two brothers in a sort of mind-boggling battle of wills over the honor or dishonor of another woman. The woman herself is torn between pride and love. Nobody is happy. Nothing really works out. Much of it is unresolved. Everyone’s a mess. They have moments of fancying themselves noble, or feeling noble, feeling the nobility of love, but hardly any of them ever act lovingly. Speeches are made. Bowings and scrapings here and there. Fools all.*

And so, often, are we. Everyone is angry. Everyone is convinced that they’re right, right up until the moment that they briefly know themselves to be horrible, then we go right back to defending our folly. We feel noble, and think ourselves noble, but our actions often tell a different story. We hurt those we say we love. We destroy ourselves with selfish actions.

The romances in such stories are not often very romantic. They are there to expose our human frailty, and to do so ruthlessly.

*(Except Alyosha, but that’s kinda the point.)

An Unexpected Conclusion

I do not think of myself as loving this trope, but having written this, I think it is a far richer mine than ever I realized. Yes, it is often used in a shallow manner, as a tool to shower the protagonist with inexplicable ardor from the thousand and one suitors who love her beyond reason, or to create tension that was otherwise absent.

But there’s a lot to be had here. More than I would have expected. Lesson learned.