His best friend exists to say “Just tell him how you feel.” His ex exists to be wrong. His mother exists to explain the book’s meaning over pie. None of them has ever wanted anything for themselves.
Every romance has them. The best friend who notices the attraction before the hero does and spends the book nudging him toward it. The ex who shows up to be cruel at exactly the moment the plot needs a setback, then disappears. The parent or grandparent who sits the hero down near the end and explains, in a few wise sentences, what the whole story has been about. The coworker who covers shifts so the lovers can be together. The sibling who exists to be happy for them at the wedding.
These characters know they’re in a romance novel. Everything they do serves the central couple. They have no agendas that conflict with the relationship, no lives that continue when the lovers are offstage, and no opinions that might be right when the hero is wrong. They’re furniture arranged to make the romance comfortable, and comfortable furniture makes a thin world.
The cost goes beyond flat secondary characters. A romance set in a world where everyone supports the couple, opposes them for transparently bad reasons, or simply doesn’t matter never tests whether the relationship can survive among other people. Real couples live inside networks of friends, families, coworkers, and exes who have their own interests, and those people shape whether relationships thrive. A book that gives its supporting cast real interests and real independence makes the central relationship face a world, and a relationship that holds up in a world is more convincing than one that only holds up in a vacuum.
This essay draws on literary criticism about minor characters and on relationship research about how social networks affect couples. The research can’t tell a writer how to build a supporting cast, and fiction must be more economical than life. It does suggest why the people around a couple matter so much, and what kinds of influence they actually exert. The craft conclusions are mine.
Minor characters compete for space
E. M. Forster’s distinction between flat and round characters remains useful nearly a century later. Flat characters are built around a single idea or quality and can often be summed up in a sentence; round characters are capable of surprising the reader in a convincing way.[1] Forster didn’t condemn flat characters. He thought they had real uses, especially in comic fiction, and that most novels need some of them.
Alex Woloch’s study of minor characters in the nineteenth-century novel offers a sharper lens. Woloch argued that characters in a novel compete for limited narrative attention, and that each character’s position in this “character-space” reflects a tension between the person the character could be and the role the narrative allows.[2] Minor characters, in his reading, often show signs of an interior life the novel doesn’t have room to explore, and the best novels let the reader feel the weight of unexplored lives at the margins.
That idea clarifies the problem with romance side characters who know they’re in a romance. It isn’t that they’re flat. Flat can be fine. It’s that they have no interior life pushing against their role. They don’t merely occupy limited space. They give the reader no sense that they’d want more. A matchmaking friend who exists only to match make has no edges where another story might begin.
The fix isn’t to make every secondary character round. A novel can’t afford that, and readers don’t want it. The fix is to give each significant supporting character at least one interest of his or her own that doesn’t simply serve the couple—an interest that might, under some circumstances, compete with it.
The people around a couple shape its future
Relationship researchers have long studied how friends and family affect romantic relationships, and their findings suggest that the people around a couple are more than background.
Susan Sprecher and Diane Felmlee followed dating couples over time and found that perceived approval from friends and family was associated with relationship quality and stability.[3] Felmlee later argued, drawing on a range of network data, that couples are embedded in social networks whose support or disapproval affects whether relationships last.[4] Christopher Agnew, Timothy Loving, and Stephen Drigotas found that friends’ assessments of a couple’s relationship predicted whether it would end better than the couple’s own assessments did.[5] Friends, it seems, sometimes see what the lovers can’t.
These studies sampled mostly young, heterosexual dating couples in the United States, and they describe average tendencies. Some couples thrive despite disapproval. Still, the findings are a direct challenge to the romance convention in which everyone around the couple either cheers or obstructs for bad reasons. Real friends and family exert influence, often subtle, sometimes accurate, and the couple has to deal with it.
The Agnew finding is especially useful for writers. A best friend who has doubts about the relationship, and who might be right, is far more interesting than one who simply wants the hero happy. If Gil’s oldest friend, Bex, thinks Teodor is wrong for him and says so, the book has a supporting character with judgment—and the reader has to wonder whether she sees something the lovers are missing.
Opposition doesn’t automatically bind lovers
Romance often depends on the idea that opposition strengthens love. If the family disapproves, the lovers cling tighter. Research once seemed to support this. Richard Driscoll, Keith Davis, and Milton Lipetz reported in 1972 that parental interference was associated with increased romantic love among couples they studied, and they called it the Romeo and Juliet effect.[6]
Decades later, H. Colleen Sinclair, Kristina Hood, and Brittany Wright tried to replicate and extend the finding with a much larger sample. They didn’t find the Romeo and Juliet effect. Disapproval from friends and family was associated with lower love, trust, and commitment, not higher—findings consistent with the network research suggesting social disapproval generally strains relationships.[7] The replication used online samples and different measures, and no single study settles the question, but the weight of evidence leans against the idea that opposition makes love stronger.
Justin Lehmiller and Christopher Agnew studied what they called marginalized relationships, including same-sex relationships, interracial relationships, and relationships with large age gaps. People who perceived more social disapproval of their relationships reported lower commitment, an effect explained in part by reduced investment and more attention to alternatives.[8] The research described couples in one period, and attitudes toward same-sex relationships have changed in many places since. The finding still matters for M/M romance, because many of these books are set in families, workplaces, or communities where disapproval remains real.
For a writer, the research suggests that opposition shouldn’t be a free source of romantic intensity. Disapproval costs the couple something. It makes them doubt, argue, retreat, or invest less. A book that shows that cost and then shows the couple surviving it earns its ending. A book that uses opposition only to make the lovers more devoted has used a convention the evidence doesn’t support, and readers who’ve lived through disapproval may find it hollow.
The matchmaking friend
The matchmaking friend is the most common side character in romance and often the least alive. She—or he—notices the attraction early, teases the hero, offers advice, and sometimes engineers situations to bring the lovers together. Then, once the couple forms, the friend recedes, mission accomplished.
Give the friend an interest the romance might threaten. Bex has been Gil’s best friend since college. They share an apartment, a dog, and a standing Sunday dinner. If Gil falls for Teodor, Bex stands to lose her roommate, her routine, and her place as the most important person in Gil’s life. She may want Gil happy. She may also, without fully admitting it, want things to stay as they are. That doesn’t make her a villain. It makes her a person whose love for Gil comes with self-interest, as most love does.
Now her advice carries tension. When Bex tells Gil to slow down, is she protecting him or protecting herself? When she invites Teodor to Sunday dinner, is she welcoming him or testing him? Gil doesn’t know, and neither does the reader. Bex has become a character with a stake in the outcome, and her presence makes the relationship work harder.
The friend can also simply be right. If Bex sees that Teodor avoids every conversation about the future, and she says so, and she turns out to be correct, the book has given her judgment real weight. The couple has to answer her concern, not merely dismiss it. A best friend whose doubts are never vindicated is just a speed bump.
The conveniently cruel ex
The ex in romance usually exists to make the new partner look better. He’s controlling, faithless, or contemptuous, and he appears at the worst moment to remind everyone why the hero deserves someone kinder. Once he has served that function, he vanishes.
A more interesting ex has reasons. Hollis, Gil’s ex, left him three years ago. Gil tells the story as abandonment. Hollis tells it differently. He left because Gil never let anyone in, because he chose work over every plan they made, because after five years Hollis still didn’t know what Gil wanted. Some of that’s self-serving, and some of it’s true. When Hollis reappears, he isn’t cruel. He’s honest in a way that hurts, and Teodor hears it.
That ex does more for the book than a villain could. He offers an outside view of the hero that may be accurate. He raises the question of whether Gil has changed or whether Teodor is about to discover the same wall Hollis hit. He gives the reader information about Gil’s pattern that Gil himself won’t provide. And he’s a person with his own life—maybe a new partner, maybe regret, maybe relief—rather than a plot device that appears on cue.
If an ex genuinely was abusive or cruel, the book can portray that truthfully. Not every ex has a point. But the ex who exists only to be wrong, and whose wrongness conveniently confirms the hero’s virtues, is a missed opportunity. Even a cruel ex can have reasons, a history, and a life that makes his cruelty more than a prop.
The parent who delivers the theme
Near the end of many romances, a parent, grandparent, or wise elder sits the hero down and explains what love really means. The speech is often lovely and almost always unnecessary. It tells the reader what the book should have shown, and it reduces the elder to a mouthpiece.
Give the parent a life the hero’s romance touches. Teodor’s mother runs the family restaurant he’s supposed to take over. If Teodor commits to Gil, who lives three states away, the restaurant’s future is in question. She loves her son. She also has thirty years of work at stake, employees who depend on her, and a retirement she’s been planning around his return. Her response to the relationship won’t be a speech about love. It will be complicated, sometimes unfair, and fully human.
Parents also carry their own histories with love. Teodor’s mother might have given up something for a relationship, or refused to, and her advice will reflect that history rather than universal wisdom. She might tell him not to give up his life for a man, because she gave up hers for his father and regrets it. That isn’t the book’s theme. It’s her experience, and Teodor has to decide whether it applies to him.
For M/M romance, parents carry additional weight. A parent may be fully accepting, quietly uncomfortable, openly hostile, or somewhere between. Each position gives the parent a stake. An accepting parent who worries that Gil isn’t good enough for her son has a stake. A parent who accepts her son’s sexuality but not this man has a stake. A parent who hasn’t accepted either, and who now has to decide whether to come to the wedding, has the biggest stake of all. The parent becomes a person with something to lose, and the couple has to deal with that person rather than with a theme.
Chosen family is still family
Many M/M romances include chosen family—the friends, mentors, and community members who become kin, especially for characters whose families of origin rejected them. Kath Weston’s ethnographic study of lesbian and gay kinship in the 1980s documented how gay men and lesbians built families of friends, lovers, and ex-lovers, often in response to rejection by biological families.[9] Her work described one time and place, but the concept has become central to how many queer people understand belonging.
Chosen family is a beautiful thing to write. It’s also vulnerable to the same flattening as any other supporting cast. If the chosen family exists only to cheer, comfort, and celebrate, it becomes a chorus rather than a family. Real families, chosen or not, have opinions, conflicts, jealousies, and claims.
Gil’s chosen family might include a mentor who took him in when his parents didn’t, and who now feels that Teodor is taking Gil away from the community that saved him. An older friend who has buried too many people may be protective to the point of hostility. And a former lover, now a friend, may still carry feelings that aren’t entirely resolved. Each of these people loves Gil. Each has interests that might conflict with his romance. That’s what makes them family rather than a support group.
Competing interests make a world
The core technique is simple to state. Every significant supporting character should want something of his or her own, and at least some of those wants should be affected, positively or negatively, by the central relationship.
A coworker might want the promotion one of the lovers is up for. Elsewhere, a sibling needs financial help that one lover’s commitment to the other makes harder to give, or the landlord wants the apartment back. One lover’s business partner needs him to stay in a city the other wants to leave. A friend going through a divorce needs support at the exact moment the hero is falling in love. None of these characters is opposing the romance. Each is living a life the romance happens to touch.
Those competing interests create scenes that test the relationship without contrived conflict. When Bex’s mother falls ill and Gil has to choose between flying to her and a weekend Teodor has planned for months, the relationship faces a real question. When Teodor’s mother needs him at the restaurant during Gil’s birthday, the couple has to negotiate their place among other obligations. These aren’t dramatic betrayals. They’re ordinary claims, and how the couple handles them reveals whether the relationship can survive in a world that doesn’t revolve around it.
Competing interests also make the book feel larger than its central couple. Readers sense that the world contains other stories. That sense gives the romance weight, because the reader knows the lovers have chosen each other in a place where other things also matter.
Independence means lives that continue offstage
A side character who knows he’s in a romance freezes when the lovers leave the room. He appears in the same state each time, waiting to serve his function. An independent side character keeps living. When the reader sees him again, something has happened to him.
By the midpoint, Bex is dating someone new, and her own relationship starts to affect how she sees Gil’s. When Gil finally needs to talk to Hollis, Hollis has moved to another city. Teodor’s mother hires a manager in his absence, which changes everything about his choice. The reader learns about these changes in passing, often in a line or two, and the world feels alive.
Supporting characters can also change their minds. Bex’s doubts about Teodor might soften after she watches him care for Gil through a bad week. Teodor’s mother might come around, or might not. Hollis might apologize, or might double down. Characters who change in response to events demonstrate that they’re thinking, and thinking characters make the world feel populated by minds rather than props.
Economy still matters. Not every side character needs an arc, and a romance that gives every friend a full subplot can lose its focus. The goal is a sense of independence, not an equal share of the page. A single line revealing that the bartender has finally quit to open his own place can do more for the world than a chapter devoted to him.
Who knows, and what it costs them
In M/M romance, supporting characters often control something the central couple can’t—knowledge. Who knows about the relationship, who suspects, and who must not find out can shape every scene the lovers share in public. That gives side characters a kind of power heterosexual romance rarely hands them.
A coworker who sees Gil and Teodor together at a bar now holds information. What she does with it depends on her own interests. She might be an ally who keeps the secret and resents having to, or a rival who sees an opportunity. Or she’s simply careless, mentioning it in front of the wrong person without meaning harm. Each choice turns a background figure into a participant in the couple’s safety.
Keeping a secret also costs the people who keep it. A brother who covers for his sibling with their parents carries that weight at every family dinner. A friend who lies to protect a closeted man may begin to feel used, or may begin to feel that the lie implicates her in a shame she doesn’t share. When the book shows those costs, the supporting cast stops being scenery around the couple’s visibility and becomes part of the story of it. I’ve written about how visibility shapes risk in Writing the Lives Between Duty and Desire. Side characters are often the ones who carry that risk alongside the lovers.
Sequel bait and walking trailers
Series romance gives supporting characters another job. The best friend in book one is often the hero of book two, and authors understandably want readers to fall for him early. The risk is that he becomes a trailer for his own book, appearing in scenes mainly to be charming, mysterious, or wounded in ways that set up his future romance.
A future hero who knows he’s in a series is just as hollow as a friend who knows he’s in a romance. Readers can feel the setup. The fix is the same. Give him interests in this book that matter in this book. Let him want something from the current couple, compete with one of them, give bad advice, or be wrong about something. Let his own unresolved story leak through the edges of his role without becoming the point of every scene he’s in.
Paradoxically, a supporting character who isn’t constantly being set up often generates more interest in his eventual book. Readers want to know more about someone who seemed to have a life of his own, not someone who seemed to be waiting for his turn. Woloch’s idea of minor characters straining against their limited space is, among other things, an excellent marketing principle.
Revising a supporting cast that knows it’s in a romance
These questions help identify where supporting characters have become furniture.
- What does each significant side character want for himself or herself?
- Which of those wants does the central relationship threaten or help?
- Does the best friend have any stake in the romance besides the hero’s happiness?
- Could the friend’s doubts ever be right, and does the book let them be?
- Does the ex have reasons, and does he offer any accurate view of the hero?
- Does any character explain the book’s theme in a speech?
- What do the parents stand to lose or gain, apart from the hero’s happiness?
- Does the chosen family ever disagree, compete, or make claims?
- What has happened to each supporting character between appearances?
- Does disapproval cost the couple something, or does it only make them more devoted?
Make the world push back
A romance is the story of two people, but two people never live alone. They live among friends who worry, exes who remember, parents who hope and fear, coworkers who need things, and communities with their own claims. When those people know they’re in a romance novel, the world becomes a stage set built for the couple. When they have lives of their own, the world pushes back, and the couple has to make room for itself in it.
Give every important supporting character something to want. Let some of those wants collide with the romance. Let a friend be right, an ex be fair, a parent be complicated, and a chosen family be as demanding as any other. Then let the lovers find their way through all of it together. A relationship that survives a populated world is one the reader can believe will last outside the book.
Sources
These works inform my craft argument; none is offered as proof of how a fictional cast must be built. Most network research sampled young heterosexual dating couples.
- E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (Edward Arnold, 1927). ↩
- Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton University Press, 2003). ↩
- Susan Sprecher and Diane Felmlee, “The Influence of Parents and Friends on the Quality and Stability of Romantic Relationships: A Three-Wave Longitudinal Investigation,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 54, no. 4 (1992): 888–900, https://doi.org/10.2307/353170. ↩
- Diane H. Felmlee, “No Couple Is an Island: A Social Network Perspective on Dyadic Stability,” Social Forces 79, no. 4 (2001): 1259–87, https://doi.org/10.1353/sof.2001.0039. ↩
- Christopher R. Agnew, Timothy J. Loving, and Stephen M. Drigotas, “Substituting the Forest for the Trees: Social Networks and the Prediction of Romantic Relationship State and Fate,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81, no. 6 (2001): 1042–57, https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.81.6.1042. ↩
- Richard Driscoll, Keith E. Davis, and Milton E. Lipetz, “Parental Interference and Romantic Love: The Romeo and Juliet Effect,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 24, no. 1 (1972): 1–10, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0033373. ↩
- H. Colleen Sinclair, Kristina B. Hood, and Brittany L. Wright, “Revisiting the Romeo and Juliet Effect (Driscoll, Davis, & Lipetz, 1972): Reexamining the Links Between Social Network Opinions and Romantic Relationship Outcomes,” Social Psychology 45, no. 3 (2014): 170–78, https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-9335/a000181. ↩
- Justin J. Lehmiller and Christopher R. Agnew, “Marginalized Relationships: The Impact of Social Disapproval on Romantic Relationship Commitment,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 32, no. 1 (2006): 40–51, https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167205278710. ↩
- Kath Weston, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (Columbia University Press, 1991). ↩