by Nicole F.
We’ve all read them, those books with the swoon worthy romances. Even if romance novels aren’t really your thing, it’s hard not to encounter a book without a romance plotline in there somewhere. Being a huge reader myself, I know I see them everywhere, but more and more people are starting to realize how unhealthy some of these depictions on relationships really are.
In this list, I want to talk about three of the most common and, in my opinion, most unhealthy relationship tropes I see in books today. Now, I want to clarify and say that I don’t think it’s wrong to enjoy these plotlines. I know I certainly do sometimes. Books are meant to be an escape, something to take your mind off of reality. What I want to do with this article isn’t demonize these tropes, I want to educate people on why these tropes are unhealthy so that women, young and old, don’t use these as the standards for their real live romance.
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s start with the most common:
The Obsessive/Possessive:
We’ve all seen this one. Twilight did it, Fifty Shades of Grey did it, this trope is literally everywhere. It’s the one I see the most in all forms of media. This is the guy who is so attracted to the protagonist, that they almost obsessively control their life. They are constantly getting angry with the protagonist for doing anything even slightly dangerous, even if it’s to protect them or someone else important in their life. They passive aggressively will tell the protagonist to eat even though she’s not hungry. They even go as far as keeping tabs or tracking the protagonist if she goes somewhere on her own, even if it’s just in town. Good luck being independent in one of these relationships. Fifty Shades was the worst offender when it comes to this trope. Christian would go as far as tracking Ana’s phone to know where she was and would show up places even after she asked him for space.
To clarify, I see the appeal of this trope. There is something really appealing about having a man so in love with you that he wants to constantly be around you and wants nothing, but the best for you and to protect you. What’s unhealthy about this trope is that it’s just not realistic for relationships. Think about it, if you wanted to have some me-time and all you wanted to do was go into town, maybe have a cocktail with a book (maybe that’s just me), and all of a sudden your boyfriend shows up and tries to tell you that he didn’t want you out alone because he doesn’t trust you to handle yourself if you got into trouble. You’d be furious! Or at least I know I would be. There’s just nothing realistically romantic about a man who wants to control you under the guise of ‘protection’. Ladies, I can not say this enough, if your boyfriend is obsessive or possessive, IT IS NOT OK.
The Beauty and the Beast:
Another classic trope. In this one the man begins as an enormous jackass and in some cases, abusive. He insults the protagonist, laughs at her when she’s hurt, and sometimes will even put her in dangerous situations because of his own fucked up trauma. If anyone has read Paper Princess by Erin Watt, The Cruel Prince by Holly Black, and even City of Bones by Cassandra Clare you’ve seen this trope. Almost always, the love interest has something dark in his past that has causes him to act the way he does making it ‘ok’ in the long run because the protagonist ‘fixes him’.
I really wish I didn’t have to explain why this is unhealthy, but you should NEVER be ok with someone being abusive and mean towards you just because he might turn out to be a great guy later. They should be a great guy to begin with. I’ve dated someone like this before where he was cruel to me and I held on, but it is so not worth it. No one deserves to be treated like that and if someone is being openly mean because of their past trauma it is not your job to fix them. The only one who can fix them is themselves. I really dislike this trope because of that ‘fix you’ narrative it spreads. Someone else’s mental health and wellbeing is not your responsibility. By trying to fix someone, you risk damaging yourself and no man should be worth that.
The Cheater:
Finally we have the Cheater. The trope where one of the two parties are in a relationship that’s either on rocky ground or is just not exciting anymore and then someone new comes along and WHAM. In these books, it can be either the man or woman already in a relationship, but for some reason they aren’t happy. Either their relationship with their significant other is falling apart or they are just settling and convincing themselves that they are happy. Then they meet someone new and they feel that excitement again and they think ‘this is what I missing’, but instead of ending their relationship, either because they are too afraid of hurting the other person or they themselves are afraid of being alone, they cheat.
As someone who has been cheated on and has been the ‘other woman’, this trope is almost painful for me to read. Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins, Maybe Someday by Colleen Hoover, and the House of Night series by P.C and Kristin Cast all have this trope and every time reading it has been very conflicting for me. In a lot of these books the character that is being cheated on is almost always villainized. They try to make the cheating ok, by making the person being cheated on easy to dislike. Sometimes, they make the person being cheated on an invisible character that we never even really see, only hear about. No one really wants to acknowledge how painful cheating can be for the person being cheated on because that would make the main characters villians.
Furthermore, relationship that start from cheating are never really going to be healthy relationships. Sometimes they may work out, but the reality is, there is no reason for that person to not cheat on you later if they get bored or meet some shiny new person. Cheating should never be romanticized. I understand putting it in books because it is a part of life, but it should never be something that is considered ‘healthy’. It’s not, for everyone involved.
I know a lot of books have these tropes and I know that me telling everyone how unhealthy they are won’t make them disappear from literature. But I do want to see them disappear from real life relationships. I think it’s fine to like unhealthy tropes in fiction, but when you start looking for that in a relationship in reality it becomes a problem. It’s fiction and not reality for a reason. Relationships like this just don’t work. Real relationships are just much more complex than fiction.
Now I don’t want to end this on a negative note, so to wrap this up, here’s a list of romance heavy books with AMAZING romances without all of the unhealthy tropes:
Roomies by Christina Lauren
Josh and Hazel’s Guide to Not Dating by Christina Lauren
Confess by Colleen Hoover
Any of the Addicted or Calloway Sisters books by Krista and Becca Ritchie
Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell
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