Coworkers. Best friends. Roommates. Skeptics. In this ongoing personal-essay series on real-life friends-to-lovers stories, inspired by #Polin’s season of Bridgerton, people regale us with the tale of how their friendship budded into something more and what came after.
In our favorite media, romance consumers clamor for various narrative pairings: grumpy and sunshine, enemies to lovers, and fake relationships (the list goes on and on!). But none is quite as popular as the concept of friends to lovers — across BookTok, Bookstagram, and other fandom spaces, this specific trope has soared in popularity, tagged in millions of posts across social media.
This isn’t solely due to readers craving more of this type of story — it’s partly due to a marketing shift incentivizing authors and creators to emphasize such tropes — but the hunger still reflects a fascination with a dynamic that modern dating practices have only made more perilous. Romantic edits of Penelope and Colin from Shondaland’s Bridgerton set to yearning, soulful ballads attain millions of likes and views.
Colin Bridgerton (Luke Newton) and Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan)
Fiction can be a rich place to explore challenges and conflicts we shrink away from in reality. Reading actually activates mirror neurons in our brains, feeding us the rush of falling in love for the first time, the thrill of conquering an enemy in a high-stakes duel, or the angst of coming-of-age without any of the assorted real-life consequences. Personally, I crave friends-to-lovers stories because the dynamic is accessible in fiction but far less frequent in our modern dating practices.
In college, I made the mistake of dating my best friend of three years, whom I’d met on the first day of freshman year. He sidled up to me to tell me that there was a typo on the book review blog I’d been running for years. We went to a small enough school that the entering class had all internet-stalked one another before our arrival. Somehow, this first impression worked. Over the following months, he and I became really close. We all spent nearly every night watching movies together, studying, or chatting in his room. He was a wrestler, consumed by his sport, and although I had zero interest, I went to as many matches as I could to support him. His dedication was, to put it lightly, extremely attractive.
I started noticing his kindness toward others, his passion for volunteering, his diligence; he could immediately shut down his desires to get his tasks done too, and I marveled at his grit and self-control. I was much less logical, more easily swayed by moods and distractions, although our capacity for tunnel vision was partly why we understood each other so deeply; we both sacrificed practically everything else for our interests and projects.
We were touch and go throughout the first year, unsure if we had crushes or were simply friends, but we gravitated toward each other constantly. On the last night of the year, I remember leaning into each other on his futon, miserably tired but unwilling to say goodnight for the last time until the fall. Then, when we were back the first week of sophom*ore year, I immediately started looking for him upon our return — nothing else seemed to matter until I got that hello hug, squeezed so tightly my feet lifted off the ground. Our smiles were blinding. It was almost another full year before we got together, both scared of the change but unable to stop ourselves.
When our relationship eventually crumbled, I grieved for months — not over losing the romance but over losing access to my favorite person. I’d never had someone other than my identical twin sister understand me so thoroughly before (back when he and I were “just friends”), and that sense of being fully seen was partly why I’d fallen for him. We had plenty of friction, sure, but we seemed alike in all the ways that mattered.
We broke up for an assortment of reasons, all of which I thought were fixable and he didn’t. He was worried about post-grad, feeling boxed in by horror stories peers told of his ensuing banking job: suffocating hours, an obliterated social life, and unending stress for the hell period of two years. He’d just been injured, jeopardizing his wrestling season. He was feeling stuck, and I seemed to be the one changeable factor that he thought might refresh his life some.
Admittedly, I’d been having a rough semester with my immediate friend group all being abroad, so I’d been leaning on him more than ever. I’m not surprised it was all suddenly too intense; I regulated myself much less back then, my highs higher and my lows lower, and that winter, there’d been a lot of lows.
Now, I look back and think our differences in handling conflicts were the kiss of death; I’d rather iron out complexity by getting through it, and he’d rather simplify by getting rid of it.
My immediate thought post-breakup was that we could salvage our connection. He thought it was better that we have a clean break because it was “too painful” to be around me in the aftermath, while I thought I’d rather have him back as a friend someday. Didn’t we mean that much to each other? He was the one breaking up with me. Shouldn’t I be the one deciding what felt too raw? (With hindsight and maturity, I ultimately accepted it; I wasn’t entitled to his time or attention, and he was allowed to grieve.) But in that initial post-breakup haze, I couldn’t understand how someone could say they love you but then cut you off. His stubbornness, the reason we related to each other so well initially, suddenly condemned us. And yet I knew him well enough to know that when he made a decision, he rarely reversed it.
The breakup’s ripple effects shifted the landscape of my college experience. Emotions ran high as we avoided each other at parties. Each annual event felt transparent, memories of the previous years’ iterations we’d spent together still visible underneath. Subtly, I was no longer as welcome in the coed group to which I was closest. Although I could still hang out with everyone individually, larger gatherings typically formed around him because he’d been the one to initially start our group message thread early in his freshman year. By the end of college, I regretted losing such a valuable friendship, wishing I’d never risked losing such an important person, although our romance had been in many ways inevitable. Naively, I’d gone into it expecting we’d be able to repair the friendship if our romance ever ended, but I’d also hoped it never would. I’d been all in.
I’ve come to realize that the risk of friends-to-lovers was actually more about the difficulty in going from lovers back to friends. In television shows, exes linger in the cast because audiences don’t want to keep up with so many characters, with roles shifting repeatedly for the ease of casting and memorization. Also, if exes stick around, it means they could potentially end up together again seasons later. In reality, remaining friends with a failed romantic prospect is practically taboo under modern standards. It’s common for partners to ask each other to delete exes’ numbers, block them, remove all photos of them on social media, or even unfollow certain accounts.
With the internet making it easier to cultivate a wide network, accessibility to others who don’t provoke emotional baggage incentivizes us to curate and separate out people as needed. It seems stranger and even downright unnecessary for two exes to keep in touch. “When we dated, it was much more relaxed,” a family friend in her 60s told me once over dinner. “We’d just go on casual dates [with each other]. If a date didn’t work out, it wasn’t really a problem. You’d see them later.” Now, we seem to keep our dates and friends more separate than people in previous eras did.
Before the internet bled so thoroughly into our lives, people often found their dates via friends’ setups, proximity, weddings, or the local watering hole, meaning their dates likely occupied similar orbits. You’d run into them at the park à la Bridgerton, work in the same workplace as in Grey’s Anatomy, or pass along a failed match to them in the hopes they might connect.
The original ensemble cast of Grey’s Anatomy.
We’re more likely to avoid someone after a sparkless date than try to imagine them in our orbit in any other way. For this reason, many of my friends actually consciously aim to date only people they don’t know or wouldn’t encounter otherwise. Rachel (not her real name), a 26-year-old based in Jerusalem, told me she’s been on dates with men she thought she could befriend instead but would never actually do so. “Instead, it’s like, ‘I met you with this purpose in mind, and if we don’t connect on that level, goodbye.’ It’s polite and aboveboard, but it’s not holistic — like, ‘How could this person fit into my life?’ You can definitely keep things very separate these days.”
It’s so easy to source a date whom you’ll never have to engage with again should it fail, but the bar to ask out a friend is higher. It feels much more serious to take someone you already know well on a date rather than a stranger you can ghost, cut off, or relegate to situationship status, so you’d better be sure before you rock the boat. So, why would you risk losing someone you care so much about? Our modern dating habits are, to put it simply, risk averse.
For the five years since my ex and I broke up, my love life has been a total catch-22. Although I suspect a friends-to-lovers trajectory is the only way my brain will forge sparks, I have no desire to ever gamble on losing a friendship again after the shrapnel of my previous relationship. Its failure isn’t the only factor keeping me from dating — I travel and move often, spend most of my non-work hours revising my novel, and am frankly an extremely independent person — but it is significant on the occasions I feel the rare flicker of curiosity or the pressure of societal timelines. Since my graduation, I’ve kissed only two people, one of whom I’d kissed years earlier, exempting him from my paralysis. I simply don’t know how to date a stranger.
“The question becomes what can someone do for you instead of who are they? But the whole point of friends-to-lovers is that we can’t plan who someone will be to us. Our favorite people sometimes take us by surprise.
As an identical twin often confused for my sister, I’m especially sensitive to any perceived interchangeability, making apps my own personal hell. I scoff (unfairly) at those chasing “the feeling” over “the person.” Wanting to date someone just to date has never made sense to me. I need a crush that makes me feel struck by lightning, and that only happens if I’ve spent months getting to know another person deeply.
I’ve been on only two dates with strangers, and I spent the first almost entirely silent. One, I met on an app, and the other was a roommate’s colleague I’d met only once before. Neither of us contacted the other upon its conclusion. On the second date, I bolted to my car the moment we entered the parking lot, afraid he might try to kiss me when we said goodbye. He’d been kind, and it was a nice enough experience, but I couldn’t enter romantic territory with someone I didn’t know well already. The entire time, I thought, “You don’t know me.”
"On the off chance I did let someone in enough to be emotionally close, I wouldn’t want to risk changing the relationship. The result is a slow, frustrating trudge toward possible intimacy that pleases no one and makes men impatient. Maybe friends-to-lovers only works once."
My process is contradictory and a little unfair, requiring a healthy dose of obliviousness to function properly. It was the same back in 2016 too, at the beginning of my college romance. I’d been pleasantly stupid enough to not fully know what we were hurtling toward. Now, I’m too aware of the dynamics, to my own detriment. If I suspect someone’s only befriending me with the end goal of romance, I pull back. On the off chance I did let someone in enough to be emotionally close, I wouldn’t want to risk changing the relationship. The result is a slow, frustrating trudge toward possible intimacy that pleases no one and makes men impatient. Maybe friends-to-lovers only works once.
My frustration with the current dating climate boils down to the rigidity of defining others immediately and not giving them the potential to change. If we sort everyone based on the role we think they’ll fill in our life at first glance and never let the groups overlap, we flatten our relationships overall by reducing others to their supposed contribution. The question becomes what can someone do for you instead of who are they? But the whole point of friends-to-lovers is that we can’t plan who someone will be to us. Our favorite people sometimes take us by surprise.
My ex was a force who shaped my coming-of-age, but I might not have said yes to a second date if we’d been strangers on the first. I’d have said he was too black-and-white while I lived in shades of gray, and that our opinions might diverge too much to find common ground. Those two things ended up being true, but our relationship still felt good and healthy based on everything else that mitigated our differences. While that relationship is still my most formative romantic experience, I wish it’d never happened at all because I would have loved to know him for longer or considered him a lifetime friend. Still, I’m not sure I could have stopped myself from falling.
Grace Smith is a freelance journalist who got her start on the book blog she started in the seventh grade — and still runs. Since then, she's written about travel, style, entertainment, and more for The Wall Street Journal, Cosmopolitan, Lonely Planet, and others. She’s represented by William Morris Endeavor for her novels and their film/TV rights.
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