10 Ways to Make Your Characters’ Romance Feel Meant to Be

No matter what genre you write, I’m willing to bet you’ve at least consider giving your characters a romance. It’s no mystery why—no matter how dark and twisted the plot, a love story gives us something to pin our hopes on and a reason to root for even the least savory characters.

But just because romance is consistently the bestselling genre in the world and so many books include romances doesn’t mean writing them is easy. Far from it! A romance that doesn’t ring true gets called out in bad reviews for:

• A lack of chemistry between the leads;
• Main characters who don’t come across as well-rounded individuals;
• A rushed romance in a book that didn’t advertise itself to be “insta-love;”
• Drama that feels unnecessary and forced;
• An unconvincing, contrived happy ending;
• Or just being plain ol’ boring!

So, how do we avoid those issues?

We make the characters’ romance feel natural and even inevitable. It’s easier said than done, but with these ten ideas, you can make getting your characters to fall in love with each other a little easier—and feel a little more realistic.

1. Give them a shared quirk (especially a food-related one).

Whose day hasn’t been brightened by learning that someone else shares the same niche hobby, interest, or unpopular opinion? Almost no one. That means that including a scene where your leads discover they have an unexpected commonality is going to feel relatable to your reader.

The trick to this is avoiding throwing in a shared pastime or quirk thoughtlessly. If they’re both going to have a fascination with calligraphy or beekeeping or ghost hunting, you better be able to explain how that atypical hobby came to be in both of their lives!

That’s one of the reasons I like using food for this—we all have to eat!—and the other reason has to do with how intimate or casual sharing a meal with someone can feel. You can have this in a scene as a meet-cute, at any point in the rising action, or even as the ice breaker to get them talking to each other again after everything’s fallen apart.

Example: Jack and Olivia are snowed in at a cabin. Jack makes them hot chocolate, and after Olivia takes a sip, she pauses and stares at the cup. Jack realizes what he’s done and apologizes. He likes to add a spoonful of instant coffee to his hot chocolate, and he made hers the same way without thinking. Olivia tells him she’s not thrown off because the taste is different than what she’s used to—she’s thrown off because she didn’t know how he’d guessed her preferred way of drinking hot chocolate. The conversation is naturally going to flow into how they each came up with this, and that can open the door to all sorts of topics!

2. Reveal they had a missed meet-cute opportunity before the characters’ romance begins on the page.

Several stories have made the rounds online over the years about couples realizing they were in the same spot years and years before they met. There’s a reason those stories go viral—they make the world feel a little more magical, and they make us believe that fate or destiny or whatever–you-call-it is on our side. It also gives them new things to talk about and bond over, which is always a plus.

Example: How about one from real life? My partner and I both grew up in Tallahassee, Florida, and we met at a boba-slash-karaoke café in our freshman year of high school. We were meeting up with separate friend groups that night, I told them the similarities between our names must mean something, and then it was another two and a half years before we were in the same room again for any length of time. I thought we went to different schools, or lived on opposite sides of town. Not the case! Turns out we’d basically lived across the street from each other our whole lives, and we went to the same high school. Tell me that doesn’t sound like something from a book!

My partner Logan is one of the reasons why I write romance. Learn my other reasons why in this blog post.

3. Let them say what the other’s thinking, even if they’re not usually on the same side on an argument.

It feels so good to be told you’re right, and it feels even better when it comes from someone who’s almost always butting heads with you. These singular moments of sharing an opinion—especially a deeply-rooted one—can demonstrate that your characters’ romance can be built on a foundation of shared values, even if their initial approaches to problems are wildly different.

Such a moment makes characters stop and reconsider their preconceived notions about the other. That’s one of the first steps to getting them from enemies to lovers. Think Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy!

Example: Second-in-command Damien is listening to the leader of the Shadowed Hands, his brother Ryder, lay out the plan for a heist unlike any the kingdom has ever seen. Damien detects a flaw in Step One and is wrestling over how to bring it up. Before he can find the words, newly-inducted Scarlett announces that Ryder is setting them up for failure—there’s no way they will be able to sneak into the ball without an invitation, not since the last attempt on the king’s life used the same method to infiltrate the palace. When Ryder tries to shush her, Damien backs her up. Now Scarlett feels that Damien isn’t the lapdog she thought he was, Damien thinks Scarlett isn’t as airheaded as he thought she was, and we’ve sown the seeds of doubt in Ryder’s leadership.

4. Have each of them notice a little thing about each other everyone else misses or takes for granted.

It’s flattering to have attention paid to us, especially when we didn’t think of ourselves as anyone special or worth noticing. Weaving in moments where the characters are showing interest reinforces the idea that they’re attracted to each other. After all, we naturally pay more attention to people, places, and things we like!

Example: Nate and Alex have been friends for years, but too shy to reveal their attraction to one another. At their other friend Cole’s bachelor party, they’re all sitting down to a game of poker while they wait for the pizzas (and, unbeknownst to Cole, the obligatory stripper) to arrive. Alex raises his bet, which causes everyone else to fold, but Nate calls. Alex reveals he just had two pairs, where Nate has a flush. Everyone talks about Nate’s stroke of luck, but when everyone’s distracted by the show later, Nate reveals to Alex that it wasn’t luck—Alex twitches his nose when he’s lying or being deceptive. But don’t worry, Alex—Nate thinks it’s cute!

Ready to brainstorm more scenes like these? Download the free Romance Scene Sparker Worksheets!

5. Give them complementary strengths and weaknesses.

Two people discovering they have things in common is sweet to read, but discovering that each of them can step in when the other flails makes the characters’ romance feel truly like a well-made match. This also makes your characters feel distinct from each other and can also be moments used to highlight how their pasts have shaped them.

This works especially well for books where characters are working together to achieve a common goal, like landing a deal with a client or taking care of a child. Two heads are better than one, as they say.

Example: Let’s go classic Hallmark with this one. Meet Grace, a stressed project manager who’s in town for Christmas at her grandmother’s insistence. Meet Caleb, the baker who just can’t seem to get his bakery/café in the black despite its rave reviews. After running into each other a few times and Grace getting frustrated that she has to wait twenty minutes for a chocolate croissant, Caleb and Grace get to talking. She helps him find routines and systems that work wonders for his business, and he helps her lighten up and savor the sweet moments in life (like his new pistachio, rose, and cardamom croissants). As the niece Caleb is raising tells him, he and Grace go together like peanut butter and jelly!

6. Introduce mutual friends or allies.

I’m not necessarily talking about matchmaking types, though those are a hoot to write. Giving your leads mutual friends or allies is a signal that they have some similarities that they probably have yet to discover. They can be a safe bridge between the two characters’ worlds, cause complications in the characters’ romance, or get them to crash into each other, depending on your overarching plot.

Making your leads get along with the same person or people can also show how naturally these two characters’ lives fit together—they already share friends! Or, if there’s only a small overlap in their social circles, you can fully merge the two and start a series as you hook up friends with friends!

Example: We need look no further than the classic “best friend’s sibling” trope. Sophie and Lily have been BFFs since kindergarten. They used to cause heaps of trouble for Lily’s older brother, Tristan, who thought he was too cool to play with his sister and her loud-mouthed friend. Now that Sophie’s come back to town for Lily’s wedding, she’s realizing that Tristan has grown up to be quite the attractive specimen. It’s up to you what happens next: does Lily rebel against the idea of Sophie and Tristan getting together because it’s “just too weird,” or is Lily overjoyed at the prospect of having Sophie as a sister-in-law?

7. Give them a common enemy.

This is more commonly seen in grittier genres outside of romance, and like #3 and #6 in this list, this can show that your characters share values and are compatible, even if they don’t believe that to be the case. Working together might begin in the spirit of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” but you will show that the connection between them could go so much deeper if they give themselves the chance to explore it.

Example: Connor Clay—a wealthy business man—is found dead in a bookstore. The store’s owner, Ava, teams up with private eye Julia (who was frequently employed by Connor to spy on his cheating wife) to track down the real killer and clear Ava’s name. This is going to involve spending a lot of time together: pooling their knowledge, sharing resources, and hatching a scheme to get the real killer to expose themselves. Naturally, they’re going to fall for each other as they work to solve the case and catch the killer!

8. Have each half of the couple play the role of the sage for the other.

This is one of my favorite tricks to pull off! If your characters have very different backgrounds, they’re going to have different Wounds and different perspectives that could help the other see the errors in their thinking patterns. At the midpoint of the story, you can have your characters “trade” Wrong Ideas and Right Ideas. This will help them to see the other person as someone wise and as an “other half” who could help them through life as a partner.

Even if you’re writing a particularly stubborn character, hearing the other’s voice ringing in their head during the wake-up-and-fight stage of their arc will provide undeniable proof that they should be in each other’s lives.

Example: Natalie and Gavin are sitting around a fire as their fifth day on the deserted island draws to a close. Both are feeling reflective, and after talking about everything that’s been going wrong these past few days and all they’ve learned about each other, Natalie tells Gavin that he shouldn’t be afraid of responsibility because look at how well he handled building a shelter, and how well it stood up to the storm! He can handle things! Bolstered by what she said, Gavin tells Natalie that despite what she believes about people as a whole, she can rely on him (and her friends back home) when the going gets tough—he won’t leave her behind. And now your characters’ romance will be tested when a boat appears on the horizon!

I break down Wounds, Wrong Ideas, and Right Ideas in the Romantic Plotting Workbook, but if you’re just interested in learning more about those three elements, download the free Character Arc Sparker Worksheet!

9. Write them with similar (but not identical) Wounds.

Support groups exist in real life for a reason—people who have gone through similar experiences are going to be the best sources of understanding and advice for moving forward in life.

Now, unless you’re writing specifically about how the same event can affect people in different ways, I wouldn’t write your leads with identical Wounds. Having some variety will keep things interesting for the reader and help you avoid repeating yourself. But giving your main characters semi-related Wounds gives them something to bond over, and they’ll be able to relate to each other in a way that other people in their lives probably can’t.

Example: Emma and Luke appear to have come from two different worlds: he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and she was born to a family that struggled to make ends meet more than it should’ve. That “more than it should’ve” part intrigues Luke when Emma says it, and she reveals that her father had a secret second family growing up, so his resources were split between them all along. Luke understands how it feels when parents don’t show up for you like they’re supposed to. He got plenty of money and resources from his father, but at the cost of their time and attention while they ran an empire. But they can show up for each other.

10. Give them opposing Wrong Ideas and make the Right Idea for both of them a happy medium.

As long as you avoid the middle ground fallacy, making your characters’ romance about two opposites finding a happy medium will make for a powerfully underscored lesson for the reader to learn, so make sure it’s something you wholeheartedly believe!

Example: Ethan is a workaholic who bases his self-worth on how productive he is; Brielle is a free spirit who believes life is about fun and spontaneity. When they’re paired up for a project, they both get a taste of how the other one lives and can’t fathom how they stay sane. But after Ethan suffers burnout from taking on too many outside projects and Brielle realizes she’s further behind in the career she loves than she would’ve been if she’d done more than the bare minimum, the Right Idea becomes crystal clear: life is about finding balance. And the rest of your characters’ romance will show they’re uniquely suited to helping each other find it.

---