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42 Beginner Lo Love Interest Character

Love Interest

The character the protagonist falls for.

What it is

The love interest is the character your protagonist falls in love with. That definition is true, and on its own it tells you almost nothing, because the name covers two jobs that have almost nothing in common. No other element on this table changes size as much from one genre to the next.

In romance, the love interest is a co-lead. They are a second main character, not a supporting one, and they come with the full kit a main character gets: a goal, a wound, a lie they believe about themselves or about love, and a character arc that reaches its end. Most romance novels give them viewpoint chapters too, though that is a habit of the genre rather than a rule. The reason the second lead gets all this comes from the genre's reader promise. Romance Writers of America has defined the genre for a long time by two requirements: a love story at the center of the book, and an ending that satisfies emotionally and is optimistic. So the relationship is the main plot itself, never an ornament on it. The reader follows two people, and both of them have to be satisfied. If one lead is transformed and the other stays the same, the ending feels unearned no matter how good the prose is, because half the promise was never paid. In romance, the "other" person is really the other half. How a book carries two leads at once, as a matter of structure, is explained on the Protagonist page.

In every other genre the relationship is a subplot, and subplots have to pay for their space. Ask whether the romance makes the main plot harder, costlier, or more personal. "Is this sweet" is the wrong question. Picture a murder case with a romance running beside it, the two never touching. A developmental editor (an editor who works on the overall shape of a book) marks that romance as the first cut, and it usually comes to about twelve thousand words. The version that passes looks different. The detective now has something at risk in act three, or has to pick between the investigation and the lover. The romance then does something the main plot alone could not. The aim is to couple the two plots so that gaining in one means losing in the other. The Stakes page shows the mechanism.

One question tells you, in about ten seconds, whether you have written a person or a prize:

What does this character want that your protagonist is not involved in?

If the honest answer is nothing, you have an object, however well written. Every detail of them points back at the protagonist. You can see the symptoms on the page. Their scenes open when the lead walks in and close when the lead walks out. Their history exists only to explain why they are available. Their abilities exist only so they can be useful. Readers do not use those words. They say the romance felt flat, or that they had no idea what she saw in him, or, most often of all, that they got bored once the couple was established. Kristen Kieffer's checklist on Well-Storied, listed below, is built on the same test: does the character have an existence apart from the protagonist.

A character at the edge of the story becomes a person with a small want, even a trivial one. The night clerk who wants to finish his crossword is a person. A love interest stays on the page far longer and asks far more of the reader, so the want has to be bigger, and it has to have a future in it. A career three years along. A brother or sister who depends on them. A debt. A plan. An ambition the relationship might cost them. A relationship that puts something at risk is more interesting than one that costs nothing. The Supporting Cast page explains the goal rule underneath all this. Debra Dixon's book, listed below, is a short and direct system for giving the second lead an aim, a reason and a barrier, and that equipment is what keeps a character from being a trophy.

Then ask the follow-up. What is this character doing in the chapters where the protagonist is absent? If you have no answer, write one scene that shows it, a scene you will never use. The scene proves the person exists. Think of it as a diagnostic, never as material for the book.

Attraction has to be shown as evidence, and stating it only makes a claim. An inexplicable pull toward him. An indefinable something about her. She had never met anybody like him. A reader cannot be argued into a feeling. Evidence is specific. One of them notices something nobody else would. One watches the other be good at something while off guard. A joke lands only because of something forty pages earlier. A small act of attention: a detail remembered, the right thing brought, the question everybody else failed to ask. Specific attraction makes the pairing feel like this particular couple instead of any couple, and that feeling is what brings readers back to an author. Billy Mernit's book, listed below, shows the method: two leads designed to require each other, and attraction shown in action rather than announced. A related technique delivers the physical and emotional signals without naming them: a bodily reaction, or what a sentence leaves unsaid. Together those are show, don't tell plus subtext. Sustained across a book, it becomes chemistry, which is its own element and its own craft.

Romance has a structural problem built in. Two people who want each other must stay apart for three hundred pages, and the reader has to believe it. Where the obstacle comes from decides whether the book grips or irritates. A character-born obstacle follows from who the people are. He distrusts men in his own profession because of a previous bad experience. He refuses to live in the city she is tied to. She believes that love means being managed, so a competent partner feels like confinement. No single honest talk can dissolve any of those. The barrier is a belief, and beliefs need a whole book to shift. The contrivance is what romance readers named the Big Misunderstanding, or Big Mis: a conflict that rests on something one sentence from either party would resolve. The usual props are a remark half overheard or a letter never read. Misunderstandings are not banned. The condition is that the silence has to feel forced by who the characters are. A misunderstanding holds when asking the question would mean confessing that she cares, and she cannot confess that yet. A misunderstanding that survives only because nobody acts like an adult teaches the reader that the obstacle was never real. Once the reader suspects that, they stop worrying, and the tension is over. The same fault shows up as an act-three split that exists only to fill the dip a structure chart shows at that point. Beat templates tell you where the rupture goes, and Romancing the Beat is the one romance uses most. They cannot supply what the rupture is made of. That has to come from the two characters as you designed them. Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan's reader's-eye survey, listed below, covers the price of a Big Misunderstanding, how the romance hero changed over time, and the conventions today's readers reject.

Consent is first of all a craft matter, and the answer has shifted within living memory. Mass-market romance in its modern form starts from a pursuit plot no current publisher would take, Kathleen E. Woodiwiss's The Flame and the Flower (the full story is under Real-world examples). Through the 1970s and 1980s the outright assault gave way to what the genre itself called "forced seduction", where consent was murky instead of openly missing. Readers of that time took it differently from readers now, for reasons both legal and social: until 1993, some US states did not treat marital rape as a crime. The change came from inside the genre. At the 1985 Romance Writers of America conference, consent was debated so fiercely that some attendees left the room. In the 1990s the hero's own point of view became routine, and a coercive man is hard to keep likeable when the reader sits inside his head. Characters began discussing consent on the page. By the mid-2010s, explicit verbal consent in love scenes was commonplace, and nobody remarked on it.

Treat all of that as a fact about what readers expect rather than as a moral lesson, and two consequences follow. First, a refusal ignored makes the hero read as menacing rather than ardent, and the reviews say so. Persistence, one of the form's oldest engines, still works, as long as it stays open and leaves the other person free. The suitor who proposes, is turned down, and comes back a year later with something altered about himself is romantic. The suitor who strips away the other person's options is an antagonist the book failed to notice. Second, the darker variants, meaning dubious consent, captivity, and the alpha hero at his hardest, live in plainly labeled market niches, often with content notes, and readers choose them knowingly. Whatever the couple does, both choices must be visible to the reader. Agency for one lead only is not allowed.

Why it matters

In romance, the second lead is the whole book. A weak one has no plot to hide behind, so no plot can save it. The commonest cause of a sagging romance middle is one lead chasing while the other does not: scene after scene of her advancing and him reacting. The reader feels the book circle.

In every other genre, no part of a manuscript is wasted more often. Romance subplots get added on the assumption that every book needs one, and then they sit idle. Worse, an idle love interest turns into a channel for exposition. The lead explains the case in bed, and two hundred words of dialogue become a briefing. A subplot that raises the main plot's stakes pays for itself. One that does not is the easiest cut in revision. Trisha Jenn Loehr's piece on Jane Friedman's site, listed below, is for non-romance writers who want closeness between characters without the genre's machinery, which is exactly where romance subplots in other genres usually fail.

Series bring two different problems. In a couple-per-book romance series, the first book's love interest comes back as supporting cast in the second, and readers expect proof that the couple is still happy. The task there is a settled couple who stay interesting. In a single-lead crime or fantasy series, the romance is often the main thing bringing readers back, and if you mishandle its resolution the whole line can go flat. Both problems get easier if the love interest had an independent life from the start. Someone with their own project keeps producing scenes after the kiss. The long-run version is on the Series page.

Prolific authors rebuild this character from habit. If you write several books a year, the love interest is the character most likely to be reconstructed from memory of the last one: the guarded competence again, the deadpan again, the one good shirt again. Readers spot the repetition across your backlist sooner than they would inside one novel. One line per second lead in your character bible, recording the separate want, is a cheap safeguard.

Attitudes date faster than style. Prose style goes stale slowly. Attitudes to what one lover may do to another go stale fast, and fifty years of romance-market history are the public proof. An unexamined pursuit plot is the single likeliest thing to turn a well-made novel into a museum piece.

Real-world examples

Dorothy L. Sayers's Harriet Vane (1930 to 1937): three books to build an equal

Harriet Vane first appears in Strong Poison (1930), on trial for murdering her lover with poison. Lord Peter Wimsey, already the hero of four earlier novels, falls for her, clears her, and proposes. She turns him down. She keeps turning him down through Have His Carcase (1932) and through most of Gaudy Night (1935).

Sayers explained what had happened in an essay, also titled "Gaudy Night", published in 1937 in the collection Titles to Fame. She had invented Harriet as a way to marry Wimsey off and be done with him. It could not be done. Every wording of Harriet's acceptance that she tried failed her own standard, which was that Harriet had to say yes "without loss of self-respect". A woman handed to the wealthy aristocrat who had saved her from the gallows would be swallowed by gratitude. She cannot simply be presented to a rich aristocrat as a prize.

Solving it took three books, and the solution is this element's whole lesson. First, Harriet has a profession she excels at. She is a detective novelist, with an income and a name that are her own. Second, in Gaudy Night, she gets an investigation of her own. Someone is sending anonymous malicious letters at the Oxford college she attended, and Harriet handles most of the case alone. Wimsey arrives late and assists. The book is a detective story and an argument at the same time, and the argument is whether a woman can marry and keep her own work. That argument, and no contrivance, is what keeps the couple apart. When Harriet finally says yes, hers is an equal's yes, and the earlier books built the equality.

Then Sayers wrote Busman's Honeymoon (1937), subtitled "A Love Story with Detective Interruptions". The subject is the marriage itself, and the murder is a nuisance. A novel about the couple after the yes is the rarest thing in series fiction.

The lesson for your book: if self-respect has to be supplied before the ending can work, the character was built as a reward and has to be rebuilt. The repair, almost without exception, is employment plus an investigation that belongs to them.

Lois McMaster Bujold's Komarr and A Civil Campaign (1998, 1999): the subplot that fires into the main plot

Komarr (Baen, 1998) is science fiction, part of Bujold's Vorkosigan series. Miles Vorkosigan, an investigator of political trouble, is assigned to an accident at a terraforming station (terraforming is engineering a planet so people can live on it). The viewpoint is shared between Miles and Ekaterin Vorsoisson, the unhappy wife of an engineer at the station. Ekaterin exists before Miles ever meets her. She has a son. She stays in her marriage for reasons the novel treats seriously. Her husband is hiding two things, a hereditary illness and bribe money that papered over a failed investment. The investigation plot and the domestic plot turn out to coincide, because the husband's secret is the conspirators' leverage. Halfway through the book a turn kills him, and Ekaterin's widowhood opens the way to the next novel.

A Civil Campaign (Baen, September 1999) carries the subtitle "A Comedy of Biology and Manners" and is dedicated to Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Georgette Heyer and Dorothy L. Sayers. In 2000, the year after it came out, it was a finalist for the Hugo, the Nebula and the Locus Award. The two wants are worth studying side by side. Hers is to study horticulture and have a working life of her own, which her first marriage never gave her. His is courtship. His device is a commission to design his garden, which buys him her company without a confession. The disaster comes from character alone. At a dinner party he gives, the secret is exposed in front of everyone. He makes a panicked proposal. She leaves in a fury, because being managed was the one thing she had sworn off forever. No stray letter, no half-heard sentence. The obstacle is Miles's compulsion to manage everything, the flaw that powers the whole series, colliding with someone who is finished with being managed. Then the wreck feeds the politics. His enemies spread a rumor that he arranged her husband's death. The subplot fires into the main plot instead of sitting beside it.

Casey McQuiston's Red, White & Royal Blue (2019): one viewpoint, two wants

Red, White & Royal Blue (St. Martin's Griffin, May 14, 2019) was McQuiston's debut, a New York Times bestseller, and the winner of a 2020 Alex Award. It pairs Alex Claremont-Diaz, the US president's son, with Prince Henry, fourth in line to the British throne. The narration is close third person, and nearly all of it is Alex's.

Many writers assume a full second lead needs two viewpoints. Henry narrates nothing at length, yet he is a complete second lead. Every requirement of the model is met and delivered by other means. His wound is a dead father and a grief the family never processed. His lie is that performing for the institution is the only life available to him. His goal, independent of the plot, is to get out, a want that would exist without Alex. His interior reaches the reader through the correspondence between the two men, the letters and messages. Viewpoint by other means.

The practical rule for single-viewpoint romance is to build a channel for the second lead's own voice: correspondence, text messages, a diary, speech overheard, a chapter late in the book. Apply the test to Henry, "what does he want that Alex is not involved in", and the answer is his abdication. The result is an ending in which two people choose, rather than one person being awarded to the other.

The pursuit plot, 1972 to now: how fast readers changed their minds

This example is about a convention rather than one book, and its content includes sexual violence.

The Flame and the Flower (Avon, April 1972) by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss is the pivot of the modern romance market. Hardcover houses turned it down as too long, so it was bought for paperback first, and it became the first full-length romance whose original edition was a paperback with no hardcover. It sold millions of copies through dozens of printings. Its template ruled historical romance for a decade and a half, and the erotic historical romance it created dominated the next fifteen years. Within its first fifty pages the hero rapes the heroine, and the book treats this as the beginning of the love story.

What came after is documented change, the clearest proof you can find that reader tolerance shifts. Through the 1970s and 1980s the assault softened into "forced seduction". Until 1993, some US states did not treat marital rape as a crime. The 1985 Romance Writers of America conference argued over consent until some attendees walked out. In the 1990s the hero's point of view became standard, a technical change with a moral effect, since a coercive man is hard to keep likeable from inside his own head. By the mid-2010s, explicit verbal consent in love scenes was commonplace and nobody commented. Nikki DeMarco's 2022 article on Book Riot, listed below, gives a dated and sourced account of the whole shift.

Pursuit itself still works. Wimsey spent five years courting Harriet, and that courtship ranks among the most admired in English crime fiction. It works because refusal stays open to her at every approach, and she uses it. What shifted is that coercion now reads as danger rather than passion. A hero whose grand gesture overrides a stated wish gets reviews that call him a threat. The appetite for darker material persists, and readers reach it through clear labels and content notes, by opting in. In every case, both parties' choosing must be visible.

Ilona Andrews's Kate Daniels books (2007 to 2018): resolved in book four of ten

Ilona Andrews is a joint pen name. Behind it are Ilona Gordon and Andrew Gordon, a married couple. Their Kate Daniels series runs ten books, from Magic Bites (2007) to Magic Triumphs (2018), and after that the same cast carries on elsewhere, in a fresh setting. Series writers commonly assume the romance has to stretch across the whole run, because resolving it kills the tension. This series settles it in the fourth book, Magic Bleeds (2010), where Kate and Curran stop circling and pair off. Six novels follow.

It works because the pairing loads Kate with obligations instead of draining the tension. Curran is the alpha of the Pack, the shapeshifters' political body, and pairing with him makes Kate its alpha female, which is a political office: duties, enemies, people who answer to her. Her private life has turned into a public institution. "Will they" has been replaced by an engine for plot. Every later book carries the same recurring problem, her obligation to the Pack against her obligation to herself. Magic Binds (2016) brings the wedding, itself a plot event with political fallout, and the story continues past it.

The move transfers to your series. Reluctance to resolve a series romance usually betrays a couple whose only function was suspense. Attach a cost to the pairing, such as a role, a dependent, a shared secret, in-laws with agendas, or a professional conflict of interest. Then the settled pair keeps generating scenes, and their story does not stop. Romance series reach the same place from the opposite direction. Nalini Singh's Psy-Changeling books, which open with Slave to Sensation (Berkley, 2006), give each novel a fresh couple while the earlier couples stay on as supporting characters, and readers buy the books partly to see those earlier couples still content.

An everyday scenario: the paramedic whose chapters get skipped

Picture a made-up thriller of eighty thousand words. Margo Deng, a fraud investigator, is the lead. Callum Rask, a paramedic, is her love interest. The beta readers all say the same two things: he is likeable, and they skipped his chapters.

Run the test. Callum's honest want is "to be supportive". He has no investigation, no deadline-driven ambition, no dependents. His function is to comfort Margo or to receive her explanation of the plot, and each of his scenes begins as she walks in. Now the subplot invoice, meaning the bill the romance presents to the main plot. The romance costs the main plot nothing. Delete Callum and the fraud case proceeds identically. A subplot that pays nothing looks exactly like that.

The repair is two decisions, and neither needs a rewrite. Decision one gives him a want with a clock. Callum has applied for a job on an air ambulance crew, four hours away, with the interview six weeks out. Now he has a destination that has nothing to do with Margo, and their scenes run against a clock she never set. Decision two puts one bolt between the plots. A subject of Margo's investigation is the referee Callum needs. Her case can now cost him his goal. He asks her to tread carefully. She lies to him about how the case is going. Conflict created, fraud-plot stakes raised, and act three has a real choice in it. The prose was untouched. Two facts about Callum changed.

Try it yourself

Work on the book you are writing now. There are nine steps. Steps 1, 2, 3, 4, 8 and 9 apply to any genre; steps 5 and 6 are for romance only; step 7 is for everything else.

  1. Run the offstage test. Write one sentence naming what the love interest wants that excludes the protagonist. "To be with her" and anything like it is not allowed. A blank is the diagnosis, and the rest of the steps are the cure.
  2. Write the throwaway scene. Put the love interest alone, or with someone from their own world (a colleague, a brother or sister, a competitor), chasing that want, with the protagonist absent. Five hundred words. You will never use it in the book. Its purpose is to prove the person exists. It usually yields two or three usable facts, which you then deploy in the chapters you keep.
  3. Fill four boxes. One line each for the second lead: goal (what they are pursuing now), motivation (why it matters to them), conflict (what blocks it), and wound (the old damage that hardens the conflict). An empty box, or an answer that involves the protagonist, gets rewritten until it is neither. Paste this and fill the blanks.

Love interest: Wants: Because: In the way: Old injury: What they believe about love that is not true: What the relationship could cost them: What they are doing in chapters 4, 11 and 19:

  1. Keep an attraction ledger. List three concrete moments that would convince a reader of the pairing. Moments rather than feelings: a detail only one of them notices, a skill the other observes, a small attentive act. If you wrote adjectives instead of events, the attraction is stated, not shown.
  2. Audit the obstacle (romance). Script the one conversation that would settle everything. Then state what stops each character from having it. If the answer is "because they have not gotten around to it", you have a Big Misunderstanding and a cheap third act. If the block is a conviction that only a whole book can move, you have a plot.
  3. Check both arcs (romance). Write down how each lead is different on the last page. You need two answers. If the second lead's answer is "he got the girl", there is no second arc yet.
  4. Send the subplot invoice (non-romance). Complete this sentence: because of the romance, the main plot becomes harder in that __________. If you cannot, pick one point of contact and fasten the plots there: a shared dependency, a conflict of interest, a person both plots require. Then ask whether the lead ever has to choose between the person and the goal. If never, consider forcing it.
  5. Do a consent pass. Find every scene in which one lead pushes and the other resists. For each one, ask whether refusal is clearly available and whether a reader will see two people choosing. The check is about the reading experience more than morality. It takes around twenty minutes.
  6. Ask the series question. Once the couple is together, what do they produce in the next book? Name a duty, a cost or a role that comes with the pairing. If there is none, suspense was the couple's only function, and the temptation will be years of artificial separation.

Common mistakes and misunderstandings

The prize. The most frequent fault, and the hardest to detect, because from inside the lead's viewpoint a desired object looks like a character. The signs: no scenes without the protagonist, no independent relationships, no plans beyond the ending. The remedy is a want plus a clock.

Two viewpoints mistaken for two protagonists. Alternating chapters confer no arc by themselves. Many dual-POV romances have one driver and one commentator. The reverse holds too: a single-POV romance can hold a whole second lead if a channel exists. Multi-POV is a delivery decision. The arc is a design decision.

A Big Misunderstanding placed where the beat sheet wants a low point. Structure tells you where the rupture goes. What the rupture is made of has to come from the characters. A rupture that one plain sentence would mend tells the reader nothing was ever in danger.

Assertion instead of evidence. "She had never felt anything like it" is the writer dictating a feeling. The check: remove every sentence that names the attraction and see whether anything remains that shows it.

Niceness to the protagonist as the only trait. Niceness is not a personality. A character without edges leaves the couple nothing to resolve. Give them a flaw with a price for the protagonist, plus an opinion they hold stubbornly.

Confusing the love interest with a foil or a mentor. The roles can overlap, but the jobs are distinct. A foil is a contrast that reveals the lead. A mentor is a teacher. A love interest is a whole second person, and the relationship flows in both directions. A love interest whose sole function is to teach the lead a lesson has become a device.

Treating the romance subplot as mandatory. Plenty of excellent novels have none. A subplot whose only justification is "readers expect one" is more likely to dilute the book than broaden it. Those words serve better elsewhere.

Assuming persistence reads as devotion. It may read as menace instead. The deciding factors are respected refusals and the other person's retained options. Expectations here changed within living memory, so writers trained on older books get caught.

The resolved couple as furniture. After the pairing, their own scenes dry up, and the book, or book six, falls silent where it once crackled. The relationship has to keep issuing duties, and reassurance alone will not do it.

Perfection at first sight, with the conflict outsourced. Two flawless leads parted only by circumstance make a story about logistics. In romance, the internal obstacles are the strong ones, which is why want vs need and internal conflict carry so much of the load.

Forgetting the love interest is someone's whole book elsewhere. In a couple-per-book series, the current second lead is the next book's protagonist, and the previous one is now a supporting player whose contentment readers will check. Record every such character's independent want in the character bible at the time. Reconstructing it three books later costs heavily.

Related elements