Fake Dating: When It Works (And When It’s Clickbait)
A craft breakdown of romance’s favorite shenanigan, with examples from The Love Hypothesis and more
I love a shenanigan. It’s one of the best parts of the romance genre, that we can add a layer of chaos into an ordinary scenario to make even the most straightforward-seeming couple memorable and dynamic. One of the best shenanigans in romance, in my un-humble opinion, and also the easiest to get totally wrong, is fake dating/fake engagement. So let’s break down what works about this trope in romance, and what the issue might be if yours just isn’t working yet.
When Fake Dating works
If they’re discovered, there’s a concrete consequence
We’ve talked at length about stakes – why something that happens in your book matters. What happens if a plan fails… or succeeds. This is where fake dating lives or dies, because a shenanigan is only as strong as the reason behind it; people doing insane things for no reason without consequence is frustrating and kind of boring, despite the insane things themselves being, technically, interesting. That’s plot. But people doing insane things (like pretending to date someone) with a very clear purpose for doing so is more than just interesting… it’s tense, because we’re constantly worried that being discovered will ruin more than just the current farce, but perhaps their lives??
A good example: Reluctantly Yours by Erin Hawkins*
In one corner of this enemies to lovers tale, we have Chloe, an aspiring editor and current editorial assistant to the queen of book publishing. She’s so close to getting a shot at the career she’s always dreamed of if she can just pay her dues a bit longer. But all that becomes endangered when she fails to confirm the reservation for her best friend’s bachelorette party and makes a last minute pivot… to her out of town boss’s penthouse apartment. No one will ever know!
Except… in the other corner, we have Barrett, Chloe’s boss’s son and the businessman trying to keep the whole media empire he inherited from his father afloat, who catches Chloe in the act. He makes her a deal- he’ll keep this indiscretion quiet from his mother so as not to blow her shot at a promotion, if she’ll pretend to be his girlfriend in order to woo a business deal into reality. It’s that classic “well how can I sell my business to a young single guy rather than a stable family man” set up, which I actually employed in my own debut romance.
The consequences: If Chloe doesn’t agree to fake date Barrett, she’ll get fired, or at minimum not get the promotion she’s seeking for a while more (if ever). If Barrett doesn’t convince Chloe to fake date him, he’ll have to do a ton more work to MAYBE get a different cooperative fake girlfriend who won’t real-fall-for-him (yuck, feelings!) and will possibly lose the massive business deal that will have radiating economic effects, not to mention effects on his pride.
And if they fail to convince people they’re really dating, the business deal is kaput anyways, and Chloe’s boss will be betrayed by the deception and she’ll lose her job anyways. A real lose-lose, unless this fake dating situation pans out!
If it’s on someone else’s behalf
A fun inversion of fake dating is when the relationship benefits other characters rather than the ones within the fake relationship. The stakes of successfully selling the relationship being externalized creates a whole extra layer that can’t be easily talked out of. You might be able to accept consequences if you’re the only one who suffers… but to commit to the suffering of someone else?
A good example: The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood*
With the movie adaptation just having hit screens, you know we had to mention this classic. Grad student Olive enters into a fake dating arrangement with Adam, everyone’s least favorite professor in an adjacent department, to ensure her friend doesn’t feel awkward about dating her ex. Olive is an awkward orphan scientist who finally found a smidge of community and when she sees how much her ex and her best friend seem to like each other, but how they’re not pursuing it because they don’t want to hurt her, she takes drastic action and surprise-kisses Dr. Kylo Ren Adam Carlsen in full view of her BFF to prove she’s totally moved on from her ex and that they should get together. Once the couple is together, though, Adam suggests they continue to fake date for his own reasons, which are similar to Reluctantly Yours because he is an archetypal romance hero misanthrope.
The consequences: her friends’ happiness and not losing her community (there’s definitely an angle in here about how Olive worries if she is the reason her friend doesn’t pursue her romantic interest, it’ll turn into quiet resentment against Olive, who cannot bear to lose said community). The consequence: if their fake dating is found out at the wrong time, the original stakes come into play. If their fake dating is found out later on, it makes them seem shady which will affect their personal and professional ambitions.
If it has to be a fake relationship rather than a non-romantic shenanigan
We’re talking romance tropes here, right? So by design, these tropes have to facilitate or complicate, specifically, a romantic/love set up. If the plot that leads to a fake dating agreement could be solved by a different set of hijinks, that’s a less compelling construction.
A good example: Go Fake Yourself by Elle Maxwell*
Successful romance author Victoria Trulette is out of ideas, so she does what any eccentric rich romance author would do and starts a human experiment. She hires Audrey, a down-on-her-luck fan, and Walker, an aspiring entrepreneur, to fake date while she observes from a distance in the hopes it’ll spark some inspiration. There’s $20k in it if they can make it the full two months of the experiment, and no pressure to actually fall for one another (which is what Victoria is testing). There’s just, you know, an apartment wired to the gills with listening devices and cameras and a grueling schedule of outings they must participate in with the express purpose of getting them to fall in love.
This is a bit of a meta-example, but it’s also explicitly romantic. There’s no solution to Audrey and Walker’s problems (tfw no money) that will be as efficient as doing this weird experiment, which is a romantic test by a romance author. They can’t tell her that they’ll do the Stanford Prison Experiment while she watches in exchange for cash. They can’t propose they clean her house and do her laundry instead. Their prospects elsewhere will take too long to get this infusion of cash. She is a romance author with a romance problem, so the only solution is MORE ROMANCE!
Take Barrett and Chloe for instance as well… Barrett’s issue is that he’s trying to do a merger with an old-fashioned businessman who has specifically called him out for being unattached and therefore possibly not serious about his business. Old-fashioned and misguided? Sure. But he’s been told specifically that a lack of a stable romantic life is a red flag for this business deal that Barrett really needs to work out, so he invents a fiancé on a whim and then has to find one that’ll go along with it. Barrett can’t just make a better argument (how boring of a book would that be) or increase sales or whatever- the thing standing in the way of his goal (successful business deal) is his lack of a serious romantic partner. So a romantic shenanigan is the only thing that’ll fix it!
When Fake Dating doesn’t work
If they weren’t doing it, it would change nothing
I’m not going to name names, but I read a fake dating book recently, by an author I usually love, that was absolutely maddening. Broadly speaking, it was a book where the hero lied to his mother when he thought she was dying that he’d gotten engaged, because she was stressing on her literal deathbed that he’d be alone once she passed. Then, she got better, and was like “hey where’s that fiancé, let’s plan you a wedding!”
The original lie makes sense- his mom worried about him and it was causing her additional pain, so he lied to bring her peace, thinking there would be no consequences. But now she’s fit and fancy free [of sickness] and he continues to lie to her… but the stakes of the original lie are gone. Not to mention, the plan, as he tells it eventually to the heroine he ropes into this, is that he’ll let his mom throw them some parties or whatever and then they’ll dramatically fake break up a few months later and everything will be fine and dandy.
But… if he’s already planning to break up with the fake fiancé and isn’t concerned it will harm his mother… then why do a whole farce to begin with? Why not fake break up with the fake fiancé now? There is literally no textual reason, no stakes, to this decision.
How to fix: It all goes back to stakes and concrete consequences (and I don’t count having to have an awkward “oops I lied haha how random” conversation to be a real consequence) if they’re discovered, such as loss of a job or opportunity, loss of a different relationship, etc. Better yet, if there are consequences for both halves of the fake relationship, and the blame/consequences aren’t all piled on just one of them.
If they’re the wrong couple… because they’re too right
For a fake relationship to hit, there needs to be a compelling reason that it’s fake. If they want to be together already, if they’re both already totally ready for a relationship, if no one cares if they’re together or not… they are not right for this trope!
This doesn’t mean you don’t have a compelling romance on your hands… it just means perhaps you’ve chosen the wrong trope. The fun and tension of fake dating comes from the fact that it can’t be real at first… until.
In Reluctantly Yours, Erin and Barrett make no sense together on a personality or class level, not to mention Barrett starts their relationship by literally blackmailing her.
In The Love Hypothesis, Adam and Olive don’t even know each other at the start of the book, and all of Olive’s friends lowkey hate Adam because he’s kinda harsh with his students (and she accidentally chose him, because he happened to be nearby when she needed to make her move, which makes having to stay with him and fake it all the harder).
In Go Fake Yourself, similarly, Audrey and Walker are strangers. They aren’t doing this as a convoluted way to meet a fellow eligible single person- they need cash, and there happens to be some other person there also vying for this reward.
How to fix: you have a few options here.
- At least one of the fakers is uninterested either in love (period) or in their faker-in-crime. Better if this is true for both characters- two love haters faking being in love! Can you even imagine!
- At least one of the fakers is faking to get the attention of another potential love interest. Howdy, Off Campus on Amazon Prime! It doesn’t matter if our fakers seem perfect for each other at the start if their true pursuit is (at first) someone entirely different.
- If both characters are pining… there has to be a compelling reason why they can’t admit that they’d like this to be for real. Obviously this will be something that occurs by the end of any fake dating book, but if you want to lead with pining… something’s gotta be in the way (they overheard the other person once saying they had no interest in them, they have low self esteem and don’t think their feelings can possibly be reciprocated, one is already in a relationship, etc etc etc)
- An external party does NOT want them together… and they’ve got a point. Their family or friends disapprove, the other faker has wronged someone they care about, marriage or a relationship would complicate a different partnership/relationship (think workplace romances where it’s against company policy), or there’s some other taboo at play. An age gap or power differential, for instance.
What’s fun about romance is that while we have the soft landing of the guaranteed HEA, what sets each story using the same beloved stakes apart is how they do their darndest to convince us there’s simply no way this can reach a happy ending. If there’s a clear path to success from the start… why bother reading? Throw as many roadblocks as you can, because a happy ending is only as satisfying as its rough starts.
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