'Moonlighting' syndrome

[resonant]

The spouse is reading a book about Shakespeare. It claims that Shakespeare must have had an unhappy marriage, because none of his plays are about happy marriages. The spouse scoffs at this. "Nobody wants to see a play that's like their marriage, and nobody wants their marriage to be like a play," he says. "If you're lucky, your marriage is the opposite of dramatic."

Remember "Moonlighting"? Remember how sexy Maddy and David were as they bickered and maneuvered and claimed not to feel what they were feeling? Remember how fast all that sexy went away as soon as they actually acted on what they felt?

And yet ... And yet. As a person, I like having a relationship that can be measured in decades. As a writer, I like a challenge. And I don't believe that there's no way to write an established relationship except as the grave of a romance or a backdrop for nonromantic derring-do.

You can write a long-term relationship that still has the romantic and sexual tension you need to keep the sex sexy. Not many people do, but you can.



Two things I don't mean:

Resolve the romantic tension, then put them in danger or give them a difficult project to do together. This works in the sense that the story can go on, but if your goal is a romance, it fails because it pushes the romance into the background, replacing "Will they be able to make it as a couple?" with "Will they live through this?" Adventure suspense is not the same thing as romantic suspense.

Try to duplicate the urgency of a first-time story by separating them for a long time, so that their desire is stoked to a fever pitch by the time they see each other. The problem with this is that even if they haven't had sex for months, it's still not going to be first-time sex, because there's no doubt. They're not wondering whether it's going to happen. They're just wondering when. Frustration is not the same thing as suspense.

So what do writers do to maintain the romantic suspense once the relationship starts?

1. Introduce a new conflict to push them further apart.

This is very common in romance novels. It can be done well, but it almost never is.

The usual romance-novel method is to have someone tell the heroine something awful about the hero, and have her believe it without asking him. Or to have her see him with another woman and jump to the conclusion that she has a rival.

This is dumb, of course. What works, I think, is to pick up a conflict that's inherent in the relationship itself. What you want is for the reader to think, not, "Where the hell did that come from?" or, "You idiot, just ask him," but, "Aww, I really thought they were going to be able to sneak past this, but I should have known it was too good to be true."

Conflicts like these:

Everything looks great now, but just wait till she has to choose between you and the Air Force.

You thought you could handle being the lover of an important public figure, but now you realize that your life is not your own.

Can you bear to watch him puts himself in danger?

You do realize, don't you, that his whole life back to age eighteen is classified, including the parts that make him wake up screaming.

2. Privilege one sex act and withhold it for a while.

Do people do this in romance novels? I've never seen it. It's extremely common in slash, of course, and that does have to affect how you approach it. You can either say, "That's a cliche, so I won't do it unless I can do it with a little twist," or else you can say, "That's a trope, so if I do it, I'm going to really go all the way with it. Push it to the limit, totally fulfill the kink, write the very best darned delayed-kissing story that anyone has ever written."

Of the two common approaches, one (withholding penetration) is often perfectly in character given the attitudes and experiences of the guys in question, and yet it bores me to tears. The other one (withholding kissing) is often totally implausible, and yet I have a great goofy love for it. So who knows.

3. My favorite: Find a new barrier to intimacy, and let us watch them try to push through it.

Romances often imply that two people can go from friendship to total honesty and communion in one step, but of course this isn't true. There are always new barriers, new ways that people save themselves from vulnerability by keeping their loved ones at a distance. Exploring these is a great way to keep the sexy suspense in an established relationship.

Some writers think they're doing this, but actually they're just introducing problems. "Let's complicate things the way real life complicates things," they think. "Chores, money, in-laws, work -- let's build their conflict out of real-life problems."

This can work, but usually it doesn't, because usually those aren't intimacy problems.

What are intimacy problems? Name a character, and think of ways that character will try to protect himself/herself from being truly, deeply known.

Benton Fraser? Won't sleep with you unless he's in love with you -- but mere true love isn't enough to make him admit that he's afraid, or that he needs something. (Another approach: It's also possible that his upbringing and experience have persuaded him that some of his sexual desires are natural and acceptable and others are dirty and disrespectful.)

John Sheppard? Probably has no problem having sex with someone he doesn't love, but may have a problem having sex with someone he does love. May also simply not know how to fight; either the relationship is running smoothly or he breaks it off.

Rodney McKay and Ray Kowalski strike me as people who would perform pre-emptive rejections; when you began to get so close that losing you would be unbearable, they would either split up with you or make themselves so obnoxious that you'd have to split up with them.

I admit I've never done this, but theoretically it ought to be possible for the tension to increase as the relationship continues. After all, the longer they've been together, the more they have to lose.

Comments

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

the tendency for major networks to avoid established relationships in favor of ever more implausible UST

There's definitely a limit beyond which the audience just starts to find it all comical. Voyager was the first fandom I read, and I followed cruisedirector's Janeway/Chakotay stories with great eagerness, and I remember this slow transition from "this is the setup we'll need to break down the wall and explain why this happens now" to the characters just looking at each other and going, "Why the hell not?"

For delayed kissing, paian's SG1 stories come to mind. The Night Beyond the Glass (http://paian.livejournal.com/25976.html) has a particularly gut-spiking example.

[blacksquirrel.livejournal.com]

Thanks