I am a huge fan of rom-coms and have watched my fair share of them, and out of all of them, my favorite trope has to be friends-to-lovers.
I was once told that friendship is the best foundation for a relationship. Without a solid foundation of companionship, it won’t work. Friends to lovers in itself is a unique type of trope. Instead of two individuals initially seeing each other as potential lovers, they go through a different process. They are more fond of their personalities, not even thinking about the possibility of dating. They are captivated by each other as people, and I think that is so underappreciated.
Modern dating is more concerned with looks, status, and materialistic concepts instead of with who we are as individuals. We look at people and try to find the possibility of living a future with them as their significant other instead of having pure intentions of becoming friends.
I will say that the amount of DENIAL the characters go through is the funniest part of a friends-to-lovers trope. It’s like the five stages of grief, except without the anger and depression, and the denial stage lasts a hilariously ridiculous amount of time. It’s even to the point where everyone else around them can see that they belong together, yet despite the uncountable number of times they’re told, the two characters are always making up some excuse.
The friends-to-lovers trope is usually a little cheesy, but one thing is true; we will painfully wait in agony for the two to get together. It’s almost impossible for a friends-to-lovers trope to escalate quickly. Usually, something called a “slow burn” takes place, where the platonic feelings slowly transform into romantic ones over an excruciating amount of time(we get it already).
My favorite example of a friends-to-lovers slow burn is Ron and Hermione from Harry Potter. Their slow burn could not have been written ANY SLOWER (at least for me personally I’m a little impatient), but when they finally ended up together it felt like the sun was out after a biting winter.
Sometimes in this trope, the two people don’t make sense to others. That’s because they’re not thinking about how they look together. If they’re friends, they already are familiar with each other, so it won’t matter what other people think. They just work together, and that is more meaningful than other people’s opinions.
Using Ron and Hermione as an example of this is perfect. To many, it made more sense that Harry and Hermione ended up together. She’s smart and strong-willed while Harry is brave and the “hero.” Ron is clumsy, and sensitive, and can sometimes be timid. On the outside, Harry and Hermione would’ve been the “power couple,” but that’s what made Hermione and Ron work so well together. Their previously established friendship made their two differing personalities click once they realized they had feelings for each other. They knew each other as friends first, which contributed the most to their compatibility together in their relationship.
My favorite part of a friends-to-lovers trope is the moment when the two characters finally realize they see each other more than friends. That moment is always portrayed in a beautiful cinematic moment, the type where fireworks are going off in the background after an epiphany years in the making occurs.
Another one of my favorite friends-to-lovers tropes for sitcom fans is Nick and Jess from New Girl. Their relationship was a little complicated, and without going into too much detail, their realization that they had feelings for each other might have taken almost 40 episodes (which actually isn’t a lot) but it definitely made the slightly delusional girl in me happy.
Now I’m writing this article with some unfortunate news, so take this with a grain of salt. Sometimes platonic relationships are meant to stay platonic! However, in the beautiful world of cinema and literature, I am a huge fan-girl for these tropes. The friends-to-lovers trope is a classic reminder that sometimes what you’re looking for might have been right in front of you the entire time.
