A look at popular romance tropes 2

ft. a brief prologue: The excruciating pain of waiting.

There is something excruciatingly painful about waiting.

Like the mental unrest when you send an important email applying for a role and you have to wait for a response. You check your mail everyday, just in case you missed the notification. Weeks pass and you decide to let it go, you accept you’ve already been rejected and will never get a reply but you ensure you keep checking your mail occasionally because hope can be a bitch.

Hope keeps you in the wait. Like a plectrum on a guitar she plucks your heart strings, keeping the vibratory pain of waiting alive. “Why let go today, when tomorrow can be the day?”, she sings.

Unfortunately, you can’t not hope. It makes you human. You need hope to flourish, which is why you hoped for the best when my lover ghosted me. The first few hours after I texted, I thought they hadn’t seen my message, then hours became days and I began to worry. “What if something bad happened? What if she is sick or she got into an accident?”. I called, many times. No response. Eventually, I begin to accept the small possibility that maybe I’ve been ghosted but what if something bad actually happened to her, so I called again a week later, and a month later, and yesterday🤦🏾‍♂️.

Waiting for mail responses and replies from lovers pale in comparison to waiting for God. Like when you asked God for a miracle, to take away your eye defect. You stop wearing your glasses and start praying about it everyday. Every morning you wake up, you try to read the chart across the room, hoping this is the morning you can finally read it all. You have your testimony all planned out already. After telling everyone what God has done for you, you’ll break your glasses in half on the stage then do a Bellingham celebration. So you pray for months, soon you’ve prayed for a year. You begin to accept that maybe it’ll never happen, Yinka Ayefele is still on a wheelchair after all and there are countless Christians who use glasses. So you pick your glasses back up and start wearing them again, you don’t stop praying though. You keep praying, each time believing a little less that it’ll ever happen, but what shall come of a man who abandons the wait and loses hope?

There is something excruciatingly painful about waiting, but no one knows it better than the woman who lost her daughter. Not lost as in she died, but lost as in she went missing. For days, she cries, involving friends, families and the police, hoping someone would find her baby. She has been crying for five years now. Still, she can’t help but wonder if it’s too early to wipe her tears. To begin to mourn her daughter. When would enough time have gone by for her to wipe her tears and accept her daughter is never coming home. When would hope leave her alone and allow her to grief?

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There is something excruciatingly painful about waiting, so I apologize for making you wait so long for my next post. Anyways, enough of all that, let’s go back to talking about romance tropes.

  **This is a continuation of a previous post. You can read the previous post here⬇️**

A look at popular romance tropes

7. Enemies to Lovers

Now this is a tricky trope because depending on the type of enemy, enemies-to-lovers stories can range from cute to ‘these people are not love at home’.

To demonstrate let’s look at two stories.

Story 1: Marcus and Lily are from two groups that hate each other. Maybe Marcus a witch-hunter, Lily is a witch or they’re from two families that don’t like each other or Marcus just grew up in an extremely racist home and was taught to hate Lily’s people. Marcus and Lily meet and despite initial hostilities, they find out the other person isn’t that bad and we know how the rest of the story goes¹. You see this. This can be cute!

Story 2: Here, Marcus’ people and Lily’s people were in a war that ended up with Marcus killing her entire family and taking her as a trophy of war then marrying her. Lily please explain to me why this book is telling me that this man is sending tingles through your body and you’re falling for him and other jargon like that.

Another one is, Lily and Marcus went to high school together and back then Marcus used to bully her, body-shame her, this guy was pretty much her worst nightmare and she hated him. Then post-high-school, she had a massive glow-up and she meets Marcus again and now he’s moving to her and she’s FALLINGGG!!!!

As I’m writing this I’m angry all over again. Bully-to-lovers books need to be banned. Anyways, story 2 right here is 'these people are not loved at home' (even the authors, I don’t believe they’re loved at home).

Rating: Problem with enemies-to-lovers is that they can almost never be very good but they can definitely be very bad. I’ll just say a 5/10.

8. Second-Chance Trope

I actually don’t think I’ve ever read a book or watched a movie with a second-chance trope. Second-chance trope is basically just where Marcus and Lily had been together before, it didn’t work out for one reason or the other, then they eventually try again.

Personally, I don’t believe in rigid rules with no flexibility when it comes to social and human relations. So stuff like NEVER date your course-mate, NEVER date your friend’s ex, NEVER date your friend’s sibling, NEVER get back together with an ex and all those NEVER rules from an imaginary constitution have never held water to me.

I’m of the opinion that even if it’s a bad idea 99% of the time, you shouldn’t cut a cloth and force it on everyone so if you want to give an ex a second chance, who am I to stop you?

In real life, I’d say seek God’s guidance. In fiction, I’d say YOU DO YOU!

Rating: Never read or watched one, can’t really say. I don’t see how they’ll be entertaining though. 5/10.

9. Stockholm Syndrome Romance

You and who?

Rating: 0/10 with a recommendation to see a psychologist.

10. No Strings Attached/Situation-ship to Lovers

Na here some of you dey. May strings attach in Jesus name.

This is the one where Marcos and Lily are doing relationship things together and they both swear they don’t want a relationship but one (or both) of them was lying all along. Eventually, they figure it out after 'years?' of overthinking, deciding to leave but not leaving, and just a whole bunch of stuff that’s clearly not good for their mental health.

I just want to put it out there for anyone who has read the book that Ugly Love by Colleen Hoover is the worst book I’ve ever read. That girl had me screaming “where the hell is your pride and dignity?” for over 200 pages.

Rating: 4/10. To be fair, they’re usually realistic because so many people are living this trope detail for detail. You’ll be reading a situationship trope book and you’ll be judging the character like mad then you’ll realize you’re doing exactly what the character is doing and you’d start wondering what is wrong with you.

Would you end the situation-ship though? NO.²

That’s all the romance tropes we would be reviewing. Don’t forget to drop a comment, like and share (your comments and feedback are so important please, scatter the comment section with everything that’s on your mind).

See you next time✌.

1. It’s giving Serpent and Dove by Shelby Mahurin, Romeo and Juliet, or even Adam by Jacquelin Frank (can’t remember anything about this book but I think the shoe fits).

2. One day I’ll write an article on how modern romantic love actually mirrors all the features of addictions. Point is, the feeling of 'being in love' has effects on your brain that is very similar with the effects of addictions of your brain, a claim that can be proven scientifically.

Second point then is, everyone should be careful and introspective when it comes to their relationship with romance, especially in a time when we’re generally over-consuming romance and the idea of love that is being put out by social media and the entertainment industry.