Readers can believe two men want each other on page ten. They believe the men belong together only after they’ve watched them survive a Tuesday.
Chemistry is the easiest thing in romance to write convincingly and the easiest to mistake for the whole job. Two men meet, the air changes, the banter sharpens, and the reader leans in. Bodies are noticed. Glances last too long. The first touch arrives charged with everything the prose has been building. By the midpoint the men are in bed, and the sex is good, and the reader has no doubt that they want each other.
Then the book asks the reader to believe something much larger. It asks the reader to believe these two men should share a life—a kitchen, a calendar, a bank account, a family holiday, a bad year—and the evidence offered is mostly the same evidence that proved attraction. More heat. More longing. A declaration that this feeling is different. The reader may finish the book satisfied by the romance and unconvinced by the relationship, which is a strange outcome for a genre whose central promise is that the relationship will last.
Attraction answers whether two people want each other. A relationship answers whether they can live with each other, and the second question is built from different material. It’s built from whether their ordinary habits fit or grind, how they fight about dishes and money, what happens when they have to work together, and whether either man’s care holds when caring becomes inconvenient. None of that’s less romantic than desire. It’s the part of romance that lets a reader picture the epilogue as a life instead of a photograph.
The research in this essay comes from relationship science, a field that studies real couples over months and years. Fiction compresses those processes into scenes, and no study tells a writer how to dramatize a marriage. The findings are useful because they suggest which behaviors actually predict whether couples thrive, and those behaviors make excellent scene material. Several studies sampled mostly heterosexual couples; where research included gay couples, I say so. The craft inferences are mine.
Attraction is hard to predict and predicts less than you’d think
Relationship scientists have had surprising trouble predicting who will be drawn to whom. Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel asked speed-dating participants what they wanted in a partner, then measured whom they actually found attractive. The stated preferences that people reported beforehand barely predicted their real attraction to the partners they met.[1] In a later study, Samantha Joel, Eastwick, and Finkel gave a machine-learning model more than a hundred self-reported traits and preferences from speed daters. The model could predict how much a person tended to desire others in general and how desirable a person tended to be, but it couldn’t predict which pairs would click with each other beyond those general tendencies.[2]
That finding should comfort novelists, because it suggests chemistry really is somewhat mysterious, and writers are allowed to treat it that way. Two men can want each other for reasons neither could list in advance. The book doesn’t owe the reader a formula for the spark.
What predicts how a relationship goes once it exists is a different matter. Joel and a large team of collaborators pooled data from 43 longitudinal studies of couples and asked which self-reported variables best predicted relationship quality. The strongest predictors were perceptions about the relationship itself—how committed a person believed the partner was, how appreciated the person felt, sexual satisfaction, how satisfied the person believed the partner was, and levels of conflict. Individual traits of each partner predicted far less.[3] The samples were drawn mostly from North America and Western Europe and weren’t limited to any one kind of couple, so the findings describe broad patterns rather than rules for every pair.
For a writer, the two findings together sketch a useful division of labor. Chemistry can remain partly inexplicable. The relationship can’t, because readers believe a relationship when they see the behaviors that make partners feel committed to, appreciated by, and satisfied with each other. Those behaviors are observable, which means they can be dramatized. A book that spends all its scene time on chemistry has spent it on the part of love that explains the least about whether love will last.
This division also explains a common structural problem. Many romances sag in the middle because the book has proved chemistry by the midpoint and has nothing left to prove. The first kiss happened. The first night happened. The writer fills the next hundred pages with more longing or a manufactured misunderstanding, because the book doesn’t know what else a relationship is made of. The middle of a romance is where the relationship should be built. It’s the stretch in which the reader watches the men discover how they fit, where they grind, and whether they can carry each other through inconvenience. Treat the middle as construction rather than delay and it stops sagging.
Compatibility is a set of answers to ordinary questions
Romance often represents compatibility through matching tastes. Both men love the same obscure band, quote the same films, or share a passion for climbing. Shared tastes are pleasant and can create early connection, but they’re a weak foundation for the claim that two men belong together. Plenty of people who love the same music can’t share a bathroom.
Compatibility that convinces a reader lives in the answers to mundane questions. What time does each man wake up, and what does he need in the first hour? How does each handle money, and what did his family teach him about it? How loud is his life? How much time alone does he need, and does he ask for it or vanish? What does he do when he’s sick? Who in his family will be at the table at the holidays, and what will they say? How does he respond when plans change at the last minute? What does he want his life to look like in ten years, and does the other man fit inside that picture or have to be pried in?
The answers don’t have to match. Some of the most convincing fictional couples differ sharply on several of these questions, and their differences are where the relationship lives on the page. What convinces the reader is watching the men discover their differences and work out what to do about them. A couple who never discovers a difference hasn’t been tested, and an untested couple is a premise.
Meet Nash, a chef opening his first restaurant, and Tobin, the contractor building it out. Their chemistry is easy to write. Tobin is good with his hands, Nash is good at feeding people, and they spend long nights in an unfinished room. Their compatibility is harder and more interesting. Nash runs on adrenaline and decides everything in the moment. Tobin plans, measures twice, and hates surprises. Nash grew up broke and spends money the second he has it, half from joy and half from fear it will disappear. Tobin grew up broke too and saves compulsively for the same reason. Both differences will matter far more to whether these men can share a life than whether they like the same music.
The writer’s job is to put those differences in scenes before the relationship is declared, so the reader has watched the men negotiate them by the time anyone says forever. Nash promises a supplier payment Tobin knows they can’t make. Tobin quietly fixes it with his own savings and doesn’t mention it, and Nash finds out. That isn’t a breakup plot. It’s a compatibility scene, and how they handle it tells the reader more about their future than any night in bed.
Compare two versions of the morning after Nash learns about the money.
Nash pulled him close. “You didn’t have to do that.” Tobin kissed him, and the rest of the morning disappeared.
“You paid Halvorsen.” Nash set the invoice on the counter between them. “With what?”
“With money I had.”
“That was your truck money.” Nash didn’t touch the coffee Tobin had poured him. “I’m paying it back. Don’t argue. I need to pay it back.”
The first version converts a compatibility problem into foreplay and erases it. The second keeps it on the counter. Nash isn’t ungrateful. He grew up in a house where being rescued meant being owed, and he can’t let Tobin become a creditor. Tobin isn’t controlling. He grew up in a house where money ran out, and he can’t watch it run out again. Neither man is wrong, and the reader can see that this disagreement will come back in every year of their life together. That’s exactly why the reader starts to believe in the life. The book has shown what it will be like.
Ordinary friction and how couples handle it
Every couple fights. What separates couples who thrive from couples who don’t is, to a large degree, how the fighting goes. John Gottman, Robert Levenson, and their colleagues observed gay, lesbian, and heterosexual couples discussing conflicts in the laboratory. In their samples, gay and lesbian couples tended to begin conflict discussions more positively and used more humor and affection during disagreement than the heterosexual married couples did.[4] The samples were modest and drawn from one region in the late 1980s and 1990s, so the comparison shouldn’t be generalized to every couple. The observation is still useful for M/M writers, because it suggests that fighting well is something real gay couples do and something a reader will recognize.
Friction in a novel often comes in two sizes. There’s the catastrophic conflict that drives the third act, and there’s nothing. The relationship is either perfect or collapsing. Real couples spend most of their lives in the territory between, arguing about chores, schedules, in-laws, and the thermostat, and most of those arguments end without anyone leaving. A book that shows only the catastrophe has skipped the evidence that would make the reader believe the couple can survive it.
Write the ordinary fight. Give it real stakes for the men even if the subject is mundane, because ordinary fights are rarely about their subjects. Nash and Tobin argue about whether the walk-in cooler should go on the east wall. The argument is really about whose restaurant this is, whether Tobin’s expertise counts in a room Nash will own, and whether Nash can take advice without feeling he’s failing. The reader watches them get angry, say something unfair, and find their way back. One of them makes a joke at the right moment. The other lets it work. That sequence is relationship evidence, and it’s more persuasive than a declaration because the reader saw it happen.
Gottman’s work also points toward a quieter kind of friction. In a study of newlywed couples observed during ordinary daily interactions, Janice Driver and Gottman examined what they called bids—attempts by one partner to get the other’s attention, interest, or support—and whether the other partner turned toward them. Couples who turned toward each other more during everyday moments showed more humor and affection during later conflict discussions.[5] The sample was heterosexual newlyweds, and the study shows association rather than cause. It still gives writers a scene type almost no romance uses enough.
A bid barely registers on the page. One man reads a line from the newspaper aloud. The other looks up, or doesn’t. One man mentions a pain in his shoulder. The other asks about it, or keeps scrolling. Those moments are nearly invisible as plot, but they accumulate into the reader’s sense of whether these men pay attention to each other when nothing is at stake. A relationship that the reader has watched turn toward itself fifty times can survive a crisis believably. A relationship that never turned toward itself in a quiet moment has given the reader no reason to think it will in a loud one.
Good news belongs here too. Shelly Gable and her colleagues found that how a partner responds when someone shares something good—an enthusiastic, engaged response compared with a flat, distracted, or deflating one—was associated with relationship well-being, including intimacy and satisfaction.[6] Romance tends to test couples only with bad news. Test them with good news. When Nash gets a rave review, does Tobin celebrate it, shrug, or worry aloud about how long it will last? When Tobin lands a contract that will take him out of town, does Nash ask about the job or about himself? A man’s response to his partner’s success reveals generosity, insecurity, and competition faster than almost any crisis can.
Shared work shows who they are together
Desire can be written with the world removed. Two men alone in a room, the door shut, everything else in their lives suspended. Relationships happen with the world present, and one of the clearest ways to put the world back is to give the men something to do together.
Arthur Aron and his colleagues found that couples who took part in novel and arousing activities together reported higher relationship quality, and in a laboratory experiment, couples assigned to a novel, challenging task reported greater relationship satisfaction afterward than couples assigned to a mundane one.[7] The task in the experiment was a short, silly obstacle course, and the effect was measured over a single session, so it would be a stretch to treat it as proof that hard projects make strong marriages. As a craft cue, it points somewhere useful. Shared effort under mild challenge gives couples new experiences of each other, and new experiences of each other are what a midbook relationship needs.
Shared work reveals things solitary desire can’t. It shows whether the men respect each other’s competence or compete with it. The work also exposes how they divide labor, who takes the hard jobs, who notices when the other is struggling, and who takes credit. And it tests how each man behaves when he’s tired and the task isn’t finished. Nash and Tobin building a restaurant together will discover, in a hundred practical decisions, whether they can be partners in something besides bed. The reader discovers it with them.
Respect for competence is one of the clearest signals a reader gets. Tobin tells Nash the hood vent he wants will fail inspection. Nash can overrule him because it’s his money and his kitchen, or he can ask why, listen, and change the plan. Later, Tobin wants to cut a corner on the pass to save a day, and Nash explains why a cook needs those six extra inches at nine on a Saturday night. Each man defers to the other where the other knows more, and neither treats the deference as defeat. Readers trust a couple who trust each other’s judgment, because that trust is what a shared life runs on when no one has time to argue.
For M/M romance, the division of labor carries extra meaning. Lawrence Kurdek’s review of research on gay and lesbian couples concluded that their relationships work much like heterosexual ones in many respects, including what predicts satisfaction, while also noting differences such as a tendency toward more equal division of household labor and less support from family members.[8] The review summarizes U.S. research from before marriage equality, and the picture has kept changing. Still, it points to something writers can use. Two men can’t fall back on gendered defaults for who cooks, who earns, who handles feelings, or who calls the plumber. They have to negotiate, and the negotiation is relationship material that heterosexual romance often skips.
I’ve argued in Submission and Control that top and bottom don’t map onto masculine and feminine roles. The same is true outside the bedroom. If a book quietly assigns one man all the domestic care and the other all the earning and protecting, it has imported a template instead of building a partnership. Let the reader watch the men decide who does what, and let the decisions reflect who they are rather than which role the genre expects.
Care that survives inconvenience
Care is easy when it costs nothing. Bringing coffee to a man you want, staying the night when you’d like to stay, listening to a story when you’re interested—none of it tells the reader much. Care becomes evidence when it costs the giver something he’d rather keep.
Caryl Rusbult and her colleagues studied accommodation, the tendency to respond constructively when a partner behaves badly, rather than retaliating. When a partner snaps, sulks, or criticizes, the impulse is often to answer in kind. People who inhibited that impulse and responded constructively tended to report greater commitment and better relationship functioning.[9] Paul Van Lange and colleagues found that willingness to sacrifice personal interests for a partner was associated with stronger commitment and better couple well-being.[10] Both lines of work are correlational and rely on self-report, and they come from heterosexual samples. They give writers a clear behavioral target all the same.
Write the moment care becomes inconvenient. Nash comes home after a disastrous service and takes it out on Tobin, who hasn’t done anything wrong. Tobin has every right to answer sharply. Instead he puts a plate in front of Nash, says they’ll talk tomorrow, and goes to bed. That’s accommodation, and it tells the reader Tobin understands what the restaurant costs Nash. Or test sacrifice. Tobin is offered the contract of his career in another city, three months long, starting the week Nash opens. Whatever he decides, the reader learns what the relationship is worth to him in the currency he values most.
Care also has to be the right care. Gifts that answer the giver’s needs instead of the receiver’s are a recurring failure in romance. The rich hero buys the expensive thing; the grumpy one fixes the broken thing; neither asks what the other man needed. Convincing care is informed by attention. Tobin knows Nash can’t eat before service and will forget to eat after, so he leaves food where Nash will find it at one in the morning. Nobody needs to comment on it. The reader who notices it the third time knows these men are already living together, whatever the plot has declared.
Some of the most persuasive care in fiction is bureaucratic. Who is listed as the emergency contact? Whose name is on the lease? Who has a key, who knows the medication schedule, who gets called when the car breaks down at two in the morning? These details read as paperwork, and that’s their power. They show a relationship that has already entered the systems that run a life. My short story The Emergency Contact begins with a hospital call that reaches a man who hasn’t been part of the other man’s life for years, and the form that still carries his name says more about what the relationship was than either man is ready to admit.
The opposite test matters too. The reader should see each man receive care, and receiving can be harder than giving. A man who can nurse his partner through the flu but can’t let anyone bring him soup is a man with a problem the relationship will eventually have to solve. Watching him accept care for the first time, badly and with visible discomfort, can be among the most intimate scenes in a book.
A relationship has to enter a world
Chemistry can exist in a sealed room. A relationship has to walk out of it and meet the people already in each man’s life. Friends, family, coworkers, exes, and the regulars at the bar all have opinions, claims, and histories, and a couple who never has to deal with any of them hasn’t yet proved it can exist outside the plot.
For M/M romance, this test carries more weight than it does in many heterosexual stories. One man’s family may welcome the other. Another family may tolerate him at a distance, or refuse to acknowledge him, or not know he exists. Chosen family may matter more than blood, and the friends who saw a man through coming out may be slow to trust someone who could hurt him. Each of those situations gives the writer scenes in which the relationship has to make choices about visibility, loyalty, and belonging. Does Tobin bring Nash to his brother’s wedding? Does Nash’s sous chef, who has watched three relationships wreck his boss, get a vote? What happens the first time someone at the restaurant makes a remark about the two of them?
Integration is also where incompatibility often surfaces. A man may be charming alone and impossible at a family table. Another may love his partner and still refuse to defend him to a parent. Each of these discoveries is relationship evidence. The reader learns what the men will protect for each other and what they won’t, and those answers predict the future more reliably than any confession.
I’ll take up supporting characters at greater length in another essay. For now, the principle is simple. Put the couple among people who have their own interests and watch what the couple does. A relationship that holds its shape in a crowded room has earned more of the reader’s belief than one that only exists when the door is shut.
Readers believe what they’ve watched repeat
A single grand gesture proves that one man was capable of one grand gesture. Repeated ordinary acts prove a pattern, and readers believe patterns. The Tuesday matters because it happens every week.
Writers have several ways to show repetition without boring the reader. A routine can be established in a scene and then compressed into summary, so the reader knows it continues. A recurring phrase or object can carry history, so that the third time it appears the reader feels everything the first two times built. A routine can be disrupted, which proves the routine existed by making its absence felt. If Tobin has left food out every night for two months and one night he doesn’t, the empty counter tells Nash, and the reader, that something has gone wrong.
Private language works the same way. Couples build vocabulary—nicknames, shorthand, jokes that only make sense to the two of them. A reader who has watched that vocabulary form believes the relationship is real, because the vocabulary is evidence of time spent together that the book didn’t have to narrate. When a third character doesn’t understand the joke, the reader feels the couple’s privacy as a closed door.
Desire deserves its place in this pattern too, and the research is kinder to long-term passion than cynics expect. Bianca Acevedo and Arthur Aron reviewed studies suggesting that romantic love with intensity, engagement, and sexual interest, though usually without the obsessive anxiety of early infatuation, can persist in long-term relationships and is associated with satisfaction.[11] For a writer, that means chemistry doesn’t have to fade for the relationship to deepen. The best late-book love scenes are charged by everything the reader has watched the men build between the early ones. Sex between men who now know each other’s worst weeks can carry more than sex between men who know only each other’s bodies.
Revising a romance that’s all chemistry
These questions help locate where a book has proved attraction and stopped.
- What does a normal Tuesday look like for these men together, and has the reader seen one?
- Which mundane differences—sleep, money, noise, family, time alone—has the book made them discover and negotiate?
- Has the reader watched them have an ordinary fight and find their way back?
- Where does one man turn toward the other in a moment with nothing at stake?
- How does each man respond to the other’s good news?
- What work have they done together, and what did it reveal about how they divide labor and credit?
- When did caring for the other man cost one of them something he’d rather have kept?
- Has each man had to receive care, not just give it?
- What routines and private language has the reader watched form?
- If you removed every sex scene and every declaration, what evidence would remain that these men belong in each other’s lives?
The last question is the hardest. Remove the heat and the declarations from many romances and almost nothing is left, because the book spent its pages proving the part readers would have granted on credit. Fill those pages instead with negotiation, attention, shared effort, and costly care, and the heat lands harder, because the reader knows what the men stand to lose.
Give the reader a life to believe in
Chemistry tells the reader why two men end up in bed. The relationship tells the reader why they get up the next morning and make breakfast in the same kitchen without anyone having to decide to. Both belong in a romance. Only one of them makes the happy ending credible.
Write the spark, and enjoy it. Then write the cooler on the wrong wall, the supplier payment, the bad service, the good review, the plate left out at one in the morning, the contract in another city, and the night one man has to let the other take care of him. By the end, the reader shouldn’t need anyone to declare that these men belong together. The reader should already have watched them live as if they do.
Sources
These works inform my craft argument; none is offered as proof of how a fictional relationship must unfold. Most samples were heterosexual; studies that included gay couples are identified in the text.
- Paul W. Eastwick and Eli J. Finkel, “Sex Differences in Mate Preferences Revisited: Do People Know What They Initially Desire in a Romantic Partner?,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 94, no. 2 (2008): 245–64, https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.94.2.245. ↩
- Samantha Joel, Paul W. Eastwick, and Eli J. Finkel, “Is Romantic Desire Predictable? Machine Learning Applied to Initial Romantic Attraction,” Psychological Science 28, no. 10 (2017): 1478–89, https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617714580. ↩
- Samantha Joel et al., “Machine Learning Uncovers the Most Robust Self-Report Predictors of Relationship Quality Across 43 Longitudinal Couples Studies,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117, no. 32 (2020): 19061–71, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1917036117. ↩
- John M. Gottman, Robert W. Levenson, Catherine Swanson, Kristin Swanson, Rebecca Tyson, and Dan Yoshimoto, “Observing Gay, Lesbian and Heterosexual Couples’ Relationships: Mathematical Modeling of Conflict Interaction,” Journal of Homosexuality 45, no. 1 (2003): 65–91, https://doi.org/10.1300/J082v45n01_04. ↩
- Janice L. Driver and John M. Gottman, “Daily Marital Interactions and Positive Affect During Marital Conflict Among Newlywed Couples,” Family Process 43, no. 3 (2004): 301–14, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1545-5300.2004.00024.x. ↩
- Shelly L. Gable, Harry T. Reis, Emily A. Impett, and Evan R. Asher, “What Do You Do When Things Go Right? The Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Benefits of Sharing Positive Events,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 87, no. 2 (2004): 228–45, https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.87.2.228. ↩
- Arthur Aron, Christina C. Norman, Elaine N. Aron, Colin McKenna, and Richard E. Heyman, “Couples’ Shared Participation in Novel and Arousing Activities and Experienced Relationship Quality,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 78, no. 2 (2000): 273–84, https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.78.2.273. ↩
- Lawrence A. Kurdek, “What Do We Know About Gay and Lesbian Couples?,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 14, no. 5 (2005): 251–54, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0963-7214.2005.00375.x. ↩
- Caryl E. Rusbult, Julie Verette, Gregory A. Whitney, Linda F. Slovik, and Isaac Lipkus, “Accommodation Processes in Close Relationships: Theory and Preliminary Empirical Evidence,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60, no. 1 (1991): 53–78, https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.60.1.53. ↩
- Paul A. M. Van Lange, Caryl E. Rusbult, Stephen M. Drigotas, Ximena B. Arriaga, Betty S. Witcher, and Chante L. Cox, “Willingness to Sacrifice in Close Relationships,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 72, no. 6 (1997): 1373–95, https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.72.6.1373. ↩
- Bianca P. Acevedo and Arthur Aron, “Does a Long-Term Relationship Kill Romantic Love?,” Review of General Psychology 13, no. 1 (2009): 59–65, https://doi.org/10.1037/a0014226. ↩