How to write Enemies to Lovers

Who doesn’t love a good enemies to lovers story? But what makes a good enemies to lovers story? I asked myself the same thing and scoured the internet for information on the topic.

Let’s start with this collection of comments form this post on reddit on writing enemies to lovers.

Let’s pick apart the enemies to lovers trope!

One thing I talk about in each section is the character flaw or the flawed ideology. The idea behind this is that your character should have a flawed belief about themselves or the world that is challenged in the book and they eventually come to accept as being false. This is what people talk about when they say “character flaw.” Like everything else that I’m talking about, the more specific the ideology is, the more people will connect with it and understand it. “Selfishness” is a dumb character flaw because it’s too generic. A character believing that compromising or prioritizing others means that they will be taken advantage of and be unappreciated by the people in their lives is more specific and a stronger foundation for character building.

1) How to make your characters hate each other

Most writers will start out with bad first impressions or a misunderstanding. They do this because you ultimately need your characters to fall in love and you want your reader to fall a little in love with them, so they both have to be good/likable characters on some level.

However, the weaker the misunderstanding, the less believable it is that the two characters don’t like each other.

Rivalry is another really common method because it’s two people that are against each other because of their commonalities, not their differences.

Most authors will combine all three of those things. Your characters will have an awkward/tense first meeting because one character is going through a THING and the other character will misinterpret the situation and then the characters will be placed in a position of rivalry so that their budding dislike can blossom into hatred.

So you can either work with that framework (which has worked for many authors) or you can come up with something different that gives your characters a genuine reason to not like each other (more people need to do this).

The way to make this unique to your characters is to have the reason they hate each other to be rooted in their flawed ideology. That way, as that flawed ideology is challenged, their hatred of the other person is also challenged and will eventually transform as they abandon their old way of thinking.

2) Escalating the hate

Like I said above, the easiest way to escalate the hate is to make two people competing rivals because that forces them to interact and it grounds their feelings in something they have in common rather than their differences, which makes it easier to turn it into a romance later on.

Building on this framework, how can you create a sense of rivalry that is genuine to both your characters? Is the rivalry real or imagined?

Alternatively, how can you escalate things without a rivalry? Is this an opportunity to deviate from the trope? Can you maintain tension without a rivalry?

In The Anatomy of Story John Truby says that the protagonist and antagonist relationship exists because you have two characters competing for the same thing. Some examples are a bit more abstract than others (like in a detective novel, the detective and the criminal both want their version of the story to be accepted as truth). You need your enemies to lovers romance to function the same way. Your characters must want the same thing (either literally or in an abstract way).

Ways authors create a sense of competition without making the characters literally compete:

• forcing the characters to work together as a team and have them struggle for power/control
• Have characters in competition by proxy (rival sports teams, kids at the spelling bee, employees at competing businesses)
• popularity/social competition

The way to make the competition feel genuine and specific to your characters is to have their need for competition to be rooted in their character flaw or their flawed ideology. For example, having to characters competing for a promotion isn’t enough to build a genuine emotional competition. But if one character believes that the only value they have as a person is financial and the other character believes they can only bring about change if you are the sole person in charge, you can use that flawed thinking to inform the rivalry AND a bunch of other decisions your character makes to create a character that feels cohesive and unique.

3) Breaking through the hate to something else

This part is the easiest to dissect but the hardest to craft genuinely. You basically need a shared moment of vulnerability. One of your characters has to crack and the other needs to reciprocate. This isn’t something that can be twisted or reinvented in this trope so the only way to make it not cliched is to have the vulnerabilities something built into your characters from the very beginning. A temporary vulnerability isn’t going to cut it. We need genuine emotional flaws that have informed your characters from the beginning of the story.

4) Old rivalries flare up

Once your characters get together, a lot of the tension dissolves in the relationship and your readers might start to lose interest. The way to maintain tension is to reignite the hostility. The truth is, it’s hard to go from enemies to trusting lovers, so a period of distrust is pretty normal. The way this distrust manifests itself has to be related to your established character flaws. If you manufacture coincidental distrust or distrust based on misunderstanding, it’s going to feel shallow and will make your whole romance feel shallow and cliched.

5) Happily Ever After

Since everything you have done so far has been (theoretically) tied to your character’s flawed ideology, the way they are finally able to overcome their differences with the other character is to overcome their flawed way of thinking about themselves or the world. Here, you create a moment where your character realizes the distrust they feel for their romantic interest is rooted in their own flawed thinking so your character makes the choice to try to abandon that ideology in order to have the relationship.

So, if you have 1) made three dimensional characters with specific problems and flaws, 2) constructed their obstacles and decisions around those flaws, 3) relied on character agency to propel the plot rather than coincidence, you should end up with a trope and not a cliche.

Anyone that actually makes it to the end of this comment is a fucking hero. Thanks for coming to my ted talk.

Have them hate each other because they represent to each other aspects of themselves they choose to repress. Have them love each other because they come to understand that there are healthy parts of those aspects they need to integrate into their personalities in order to grow as people.

E.g somebody who is too meek might hate somebody for being aggressive. Then the aggressive person could teach them about healthy boundaries and sticking up for themselves

I think it’s about finding the good in both characters and slowly letting them discover it for themselves.

For example, there was this older kid that used to bully me pretty bad. He’d shove me around, make fun of me, throw food at me, the usual. I HATED him, and justifiably so, and he hated me because he thought I was weird and annoying (guilty as charged.) But one day I made a joke and he laughed, and in a weird way I was kind of like “oh, well that’s nice.” So in that moment I was alerted to some friendliness within him that I didn’t exist. But we still hated each other.

Two years go by and I try to jaywalk down the street, not paying attention. A car almost hit me and he yanked me out of the way before it could. That really settled the dust, you know? From that moment on it was civil and I appreciated him.

After that we built a decent relationship and now we’re good friends!

It’s all about letting the characters find the good. Let the hate be justifiable both ways, but give openings to slowly change that.

I think a good way to do it is to have them in conflict over something they both are right about from their respective perspectives.

If you have them realize the other person’s perspective then you can have them love each other and understand each other.

Have a third force that pits them against each other, and then realize their mutual enemy.

Enmity can often be based on a knee-jerk reaction. You meet someone in a very specific role or circumstance and dislike them because they did something that you perceive as offensive. And then your first thought is “jeeze THIS is how they present themselves!?” and you react negatively. And then it’s a viscious cycle because they think “wow this person I just met isn’t very nice to me, they must be a real asshole!” and the cycle continues.

I think oftentimes in relationships there’s a moment where something happens to break the front, and you see the real person. For example:

I have this coworker. Big loud guy, kind of obnoxious. I was neutral on him and I thought maybe he didn’t like me for some reason. Well one day we’re on the train together going to work. It’s very early and this complete stranger comes over to me and starts hassling me. I didn’t do anything badass (life is not a story, alas) but I did pointedly ask “can I help you?!” and stare the guy down a little.

My coworker totally changed demeanor. I don’t know if it was just that he felt neutral towards me before that or what, but he told everyone in the office about how “theworldbystorm and I almost got in a fight on the train!”

Shared experiences, even rather mundane ones, can bond people.

Personally, how I do it is I have them be enemies under bad information (x race is evil, character a is x race kinda deal) and force one of them into a situation where turning down the aid of the other is guaranteed death. When forced to spend time with the enemy race (character a is in disguise because he is notable among that race), misconceptions start to break down and relationships form.

In my opinion, nothing can bring people closer than working together towards a common goal. If these two are legitimate enemies, put them in a scenario that forces them to cooperate for a relatively long(ish) period of time. People who hate one another often know a lot about the other’s ‘bad’ traits, and very little about their ‘good’ traits. By forcing them to interact in a way that doesn’t interfere with the other, they get plenty of opportunities to learn about those good traits, which can help to ease their hatred of the other. Additionally, they’ll have a chance to learn about the details behind the exterior appearance of those bad traits, and realize that they may have misjudged some things or not had enough details to understand others.

Even if they haven’t gotten together by the time they finish their cooperative task, even if they still dislike each other, the hatred between them will have been softened, and the basic groundwork upon which a relationship can be built upon will have been set in place. …Or they could despise each other even more, but that’s probably not a good idea for an author who wants them to hook up in a healthy relationship.

Also, this applies just as strongly to the simpler “Enemies to Friends” trope. Which I think has to apply to every well-done case of “Enemies to Lovers” with basic friendship as a necessary intermediary step.

-Don’t skip right from enemies to lovers, have casual friendship in between. It needs to gradually progress as they get to know each other better, in order to be believable.

-Have a scene with heartfelt apologies and then one (or both) of them confesses love. For the relationship to not appear toxic or abusive, both characters need to admit and feel remorse for any hurt caused to each other in the past, and be willing to treat each other better.

-Make sure the characters have a balance; meaning they should have enough things in common to understand & respect each other, while still having a few big differences that complement each other’s weak spots.

-Both characters need to have some kind of goals/values in common.

-There needs to be some kind of a trust connection, like where they tell each other secrets.

-Include a bit of light-hearted teasing, but not crossing the line into bullying. This still makes it exciting.