Fake-Dating (a.k.a. Pretending To Be In Love While Trying Very Hard NOT to Fall In Love)? Yeah, Good Luck With That

Hello everyone. Welcome back to My Library Blog. In this post, I’ll be talking about a popular romance trope: fake-dating. This article addresses what fake-dating is, when it works in a book, when it doesn’t work and other tropes that can be used with it. Let’s begin:

Popular Books That Use the Fake-Dating Trope

What is the Fake-Dating Trope?

Fake-Dating is a popular romance trope where two characters agree to pretend to be a (romantic) couple for mutual benefit before developing true feelings for each other and falling in love for real.

Characters are pretending to be in love while trying very hard not to fall in love. And yet,

The forced proximity/intimacy they have to show in public to make their relationship credible forces them to skip the awkward early stages of romance; any sort of PDA makes them behave in ways they wouldn’t otherwise, and the more convincing that performance is, the harder it gets to separate what is fake and what is not.

Some of the early stages of romance that this trope forces characters to skip include, i.e., vulnerability and consent. When you like someone, for example, it is hard to admit it. Because, what if they don’t like you back? Or, if you want to ask them out, you put yourself on the spot and risk rejection. It is a moment of vulnerability.

Yet, fake-dating is a trope about vulnerability. Characters are placed in uncomfortable situations before they are ready to admit their feelings to themselves and be honest about them to the other person.  And this builds both emotional pressure and unexpressed sexual tension (UST) between the two leads of the story. Moreover, this allows the author to postpone the ultimate vulnerable moment when both characters admit to one another their feelings for one another. 

Forced intimacy bypasses consent because characters can usually just do anything to each other at any moment to preserve the fake-relationship and keep up the illusion.  But what is more, because you have to keep up the pretense in front of friends and family, the characters can often not reasonably say no to something without shattering that illusion and outing themselves as liars.

Uncomfortable murky consent situations (fake-dating done wrong), however, can make or kill a book. For example, when a secondary character (like the FMC’s best friend) forces the couple to do something in public that makes them cringe or it is something that they didn’t explicitly agree to do; when what they’re doing is not done by their own initiative (I provide an example of this down below). Miscommunication is another way to do fake-dating wrong. When an author relies too much on miscommunication to create drama (and not advance the plot), it is just bad writing. And boring for the reader.

When Does Fake-Dating Work?

Fake-Dating is done right when the following three things occur:

The agreement between the leads has to cost something.  In The Paradise Problem by Christina Lauren, the cost for Liam is his $100-million grandfather’s trust inheritance, which stipulates that he needs to have been happily married for at least five years.  Anna, the female main character, on the other hand, accepts the payout of $100,000 dollars in exchange for playing the role of Liam’s wife because the money will help her pay off her father’s medical debt and she won’t have to live paycheck-to-paycheck as a struggling artist.

The chemistry between the female and male main characters has to be undeniable before either one of them admits it. This is where the emotional pressure and unexpressed sexual tension start to make themselves present. In The Paradise Problem, Liam and Anna get married during college to afford subsidized family housing. During the two years that they live together, though, neither one pays much attention to the other. They are just roommates. Each one lives their own life; there is no attraction between the two of them whatsoever. Three years later, however, when Liam knocks on Anna’s door with a proposal she, “thinks he’s hot…that he looks like a real man. A manly man. A professional man. A man who doesn’t get high at ten a.m. and eat cereal out of a mixing bowl (like she is),” while he thinks that “beneath the baked, unshowered disarray, Anna is still a beautiful woman, with enormous brown eyes, creamy skin, and long, willowy limbs” and he’s always been “fascinated with the perfect beauty mark just above her lip.” This lets us know that Liam noticed Anna while they were living together more than she noticed him, and the tension between them starts to ramp up. Every time each one notices something new about the other, that (sexual) tension escalates. Tension needs progression; sometimes, though, it doesn’t and the pacing of the (romance) story starts to drag.

The confession has to be harder than the fake relationship itself. A couple may know that they’re falling in love with one another, but admitting it is hard. Neither one of them is ready to confront their feelings and they avoid them. Neither one of them is emotionally mature yet to do so.

When Does Fake-Dating Not Work?

When the setup isn’t convincing enough or is hard to believe. A good setup is important to make this trope work. If a reader can’t suspend disbelief (because none of the situations that lead to fake-dating in romance novels are healthy in real life), then the book falls apart and the reader will not like the book. This happened to me recently with Bridesmaid for Hire by Meghan Quinn. Despite the laugh-out moments and the likeable male protagonist in this book, I actually had a very hard time connecting and rooting for the female protagonist because her Ordinary World (before meeting the MMC) was lackluster and unremarkable. When she agrees to fake-date the male protagonist, the cost for her isn’t that substantial or life-altering. In other words, the stakes aren’t high enough. Yes, she wants to expand her business and open a storefront but that is something we learn about much later on in the novel. It isn’t something on the line until after she has agreed to fake-date the male protagonist and is discovered by the antagonist. So, yeah, the setup here could’ve been better.

The emotional progression stagnates. When the emotional tension stops escalating, it loops. The characters “fake flirt, panic internally, insist the feelings aren’t real, and then repeat the cycle for 200 pages” (The Editor’s Lens). This happens when the characters fall in an endless loop of miscommunication, for example, and the story doesn’t go anywhere for pages on end. This is very exasperating and many a time have I thrown a book against the wall for this very reason. Miscommunication is prominent, for instance, in Yours Truly by Abby Jimenez. The miscommunication between this couple was so frustrating, I couldn’t understand how they could read each other so wrong despite being so in love with one another. It was mind blowing and all I wanted to do was yell at them: “Talk! Just talk!” It was so bad it bordered on unbelievable, and I almost did not finish this book for this very reason.

Murky consent situations. When the characters are forced to do something that they haven’t agreed to beforehand, we enter murky consent territory. This happens (a lot) in The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood. I didn’t like this book. But one of the biggest red flags in this story are all the awkward situations Olive’s best friend forces her into; like telling her to put sunscreen on Adam in front of all of their coworkers at a park outing for work or when she “suggests” Olive sit on Adam’s lap during a conference at the university because the auditorium was full and there were no more seats available. Uh…what? No. Olive and Adam are always put on the spot and they never consent to doing any of those things. Her friend is terrible. This book has so many things wrong with it though, it was actually one my worst reads of 2022 and it eschewed me away from the romance genre for several years.

Characters are too focused on maintaining the fake relationship they stop behaving like real people.     

Other Tropes Used with Fake-Dating

Other tropes used with fake-dating include slow burn romance, forbidden love, arranged marriage, and billionaire catch. The Paradise Problem by Christina Lauren, for example, uses the fake-dating trope with arranged marriage and billionaire catch. Bridesmaid for Hire by Meghan Quinn, on the other hand, uses the fake-dating trope with enemies-to-lovers and forbidden love. A slow burn romance is The Flatshare by Beth O’Leary. It doesn’t use the fake-dating trope, but it does use the Only One Bed trope.

The strongest fake-dating trope books are those in which the “setup creates genuine pressure, the characters have believable reasons to maintain the arrangement, the emotional dynamic evolves constantly, i.e., it doesn’t remain static, and the fake relationship reveals something true” (The Editor’s Lens).

Which Book with the Fake-Dating Trope is my Favorite?

A Proposal They Can’t Refuse by Natalie Caña. What books with the fake-dating trope would you recommend?

The pictures in this post are mine.