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I am in love with love, from the pining, the tension and the simple acts of kindness. Love makes me swoon, but there is one thing that does not tickle my fancy.
“Enemies to lovers” is a trope in the media where, just like the name, two characters who previously hated each other fall in love. This trope is seen in books, movies and TV Shows. I specifically think this trope is overrated in books. The opposite trope to enemies-to-lovers is friends-to-lovers, where the love interests have pined over each other for ages and soon realize they are actually in love with each other and cannot continue solely being friends.
Despite the popularity of enemies to lovers, since the trope makes its readers believe that bullying is a healthy way of showing and receiving love, friends-to-lovers is superior.
Ever since girls were little, they were told that if a boy teases them, he has a crush on them. This engraves a mentality that teasing, bullying and hateful language is a proper way to share love–WHICH IS FALSE.
Enemies-to-lovers supports this mentality because in the build up to the relationship, the love interests constantly make fun of each other and all of a sudden decide that spewing hate at each other and pointing out each other’s insecurities was their way of disguising their love.
On the other hand, the friends to lovers trope is cute instead of dark and mean. I love the inside jokes and how they know the little things about each other, such as how someone takes their coffee or their favorite book.
Another problem I have with enemies-to-lovers is that sometimes the relationship is very underdeveloped. The main characters go from hating each other one second and then confessing their love the next.
This would never happen in real life.
Humans have conflicting feelings that they have to think over and question. It is not realistic to say that in the span of one month people can go from hatred to love.
Although I love the book “Shatter Me” by Tahereh Mafi, the enemies-to-lovers arc is a little messy. Juliette, the main character who is a girl with special powers that hurts anyone she touches, first falls in love with this man named Adam who saved her from prison. She then gets kidnapped again by the leader of her district, Aaron Warner. Spoiler alert! Juliette falls for Aaron Warner, despite him literally kidnapping her.
All this enemies-to-lovers arc really does is show young adults that people who have been nothing but cruel to them might be in love with them. Kidnapping someone is not how healthy and sane people show love–it is how they traumatize people.
Now this is the extreme level where the enemies-to-lovers trope is very harmful. On the contrary, I have seen books where the relationship can be healthy and only stems from rivalry in school, where they did not put each other down through hate.
“Shatter Me” has 628,452 ratings on Goodreads, meaning a large group of people have read and had opinions about the book. Readers of this book have been shown an unhealthy and negative example of what a relationship looks like.
A great example of a healthy relationship is the relationship between Percy and Annabeth in “Percy Jackson.”
Over the course of many years, from the ages 12 to 16 they were friends that slowly came to terms with their feelings for each other as they got older, instead of over the course of one month where they went from detesting each other to being absolutely in love. Percy and Annabeth showed their love by supporting each other, for instance, helping each other while fighting sea monsters.
Unlike enemies-to-lovers where characters show their love through insulting comments, friends to lovers encourages readers to share their love in a healthy way.
I encourage you to think over what type of media you consume and decide if this is truly doing you any good or if it is detrimental to the way you perceive love.