Last fall, we started to talk about tropes in my books, then other discussions took over. Today, I thought we’d get back to that topic, as there are a lot more tropes than we discussed already.

We talked about marriage tropes (Marriage of Convenience, Arranged Marriages and Runaway Brides) and also about tropes featuring the hero’s qualities (Wealthy Hero, Hidden Heir/Heiress and Bad Boy Hero). Today, we’ll start talking about tropes describing the relationship. There are a lot of these, so we’ll have to break the discussion into parts.

Enemies to Lovers – the hero and heroine meet because they’re on opposite sides of some issue or in competition for the same goal. They begin as adversaries then find common ground and love.

Friends to Lovers – the hero and heroine have been friends for some period of time, but their relationship develops into a romantic one. This includes Friends with Benefits.

Class war – the hero and heroine come from opposite ends of the social spectrum.

Destined Lovers – fate brings the hero and heroine together, but kismet faces some challenges before their happily-ever-after is achieved. One, for example, might not believe in destiny. This is a popular trope in paranormal romance – all of Dragonfire falls into this category.

Are any of these your favorite kinds of stories?

We’ll look at some more relationship tropes next week on Trope Tuesday.