This again? Tired tropes it’s time to retire in the romance genre

Instead of surprising new directions like these, however, most films of this genre rely on a series of clichés that were already becoming tired in the 1930s. The rich girl in love with the poor boy. The accidental meet-cute. The whirlwind romance followed by a misunderstanding. The public declaration of love.

These are the most tiresome, but there are many more (bursting into a wedding, some form of horse or horse-carriage ride, a plot that hinges on mistaken identities or mistaken intentions).

Here’s our list of five tired tropes we’d like to see retired.

The love triangle

It’s simply lazy storytelling. The love triangle is an “enduring trope” because it works. People line up to watch one beautiful person forced to pick between two others, as everyone on-screen gets increasingly distraught and overwrought in the process.

Think of The Truth About Cats & Dogs (1996), Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), the Twilight films (2008-12). Now, there’s a way to do the love triangle right. Think of Cyrano, the heart-wrenching classic full of poetry and pathos, retold over and over for the screen.

If one cannot reach those levels of moonlit heartache and tragic verse, perhaps it is best to find a way to have boy meet girl without another person in the mix. Because if the third person cannot turn their story into an examination of how they see themselves, what they seek, and why they are willing to settle for less than another would, it’s not cinema. It’s just an endless pageant of over-the-top gestures and pros-and-cons lists. And people are so tired of that trope that even actors are fighting back.

Jenna Ortega, who plays the titular character in the Netflix series Wednesday (2022-), finds two boys — a sweet barista and a misunderstood artist — vying for her affection in the Addams Family spinoff. “I’ve always been against the love triangle idea. As far as the boys went, I had to accept it,” she said, speaking to ETalk in November, “but honestly, I’m going to fight this love triangle thing so hard. Because I don’t think Wednesday would ever be in a love triangle.”

Enemies to lovers

How often do people fall in love with their nemesis; begin to stare longingly at the person they were until recently doing all they could to avoid? In the movies, far too often. The rivalry may be academic, athletic or professional, but it’s nothing a sudden road trip or two-person project can’t fix.

This is an easy way to build sexual and dramatic tension, but such a weak foundation for a plot that the narrative almost always begins to wobble halfway through. Think of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003); The Ugly Truth with Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler (2009; she’s a news producer, he’s her misogynistic colleague); Life as We Know It (2010), with Heigl and Josh Duhamel, where a disastrous first date ends with the duo being appointed caregivers to their friends’ orphaned baby. It’s a long and sad list.

Woman to the rescue

We see fewer manic pixie dream girls these days, which is a relief. That term was coined by film critic Nathan Rabin in his review of the film Elizabethtown (2005), in which Kirsten Dunst plays a bubbly, quirky flight attendant whose role is to give one of her fliers, a suicidal fellow played by Orlando Bloom, a reason to live.

The trope, of course, far predates the film. Goldie Hawn was a manic pixie dream girl in the 1972 film Butterflies Are Free, her presence as the happy hippie Jill serving only one purpose: to help the protagonist find his true self. Perhaps the best example is Belle from Beauty and the Beast (some of the worst tropes have their roots in fairy tales).

There’s even a nonsense term for it: opposites attract. Which, in the real world, means that someone who lives for art and music might live a long and happy life with someone who prefers to binge-watch Our Flag Means Death (which, of course, is art of a different kind). In no world, not even the imaginary, should the opposites be a person who is nice and one who just isn’t.

The I-can’t-carry-on kind of love

Romeo and Juliet, Jack and Rose, the feuding families and the blessed door… it’s been nice to have a break from the cinematic trope of love so all-consuming that life without it loses all meaning. A refreshing twist on that cliché came via La La Land (2016). What does it really look like when a great love meets an obstacle it cannot overcome? How does one choose between “us” and “me”? It’s a wrench of an ending, but much more resonant. Because life really does go on, doesn’t it?

See also, The Half of It (2020) andLa La Land (2020-21), both same-sex romcoms where young love is presented in all its impermanence, as something one doesn’t stab oneself over with a dagger but rather expects to look back on in bittersweet wonder, decades later, when the fleeting sunlit days of one’s youth are gone.

The endless will-they-won’t-they

Furtive glances, near-misses, torturous dates with other people, all just to manufacture dramatic and sexual tension. It’s such a trite way to wait out the clock when a plot has faltered and has nowhere to go. Perhaps the most annoying examples are from the 1990s: the Ross and Rachel subplot from the TV series Friends, and the Mulder and Scully one from The X-Files. More recently, it took four seasons of heavy flirting between a crime novelist and a homicide detective until Richard and Kate finally got together in Castle (2009-2016). Why do filmmakers and TV producers do it? There are some lovely clues in the sitcom Episodes (2011-17), in which Matt LeBlanc plays himself, as a canny but out-of-his-depth American star transplanted into a very successful British series as Hollywood tries to make the series its own.