Basic Trope: Most or all of a cast is connected through some form of romance, unrequited or not.
- Straight: Alice and Bob are Happily Married, until Bob becomes tempted by the spicy Christabel. Christabel is also in love with brothers Danny and Ethan, and Danny's in love with Alice. Ethan is in love with Franklin, Gilda, and Hannah, the latter two are both in love with Danny. Imogen is in love with Jasper, who is in love with Kay, who is in love with Bob, Danny, Ethan, and Franklin. Luke is in love with Marcy, who is married to Norman but wants to start an affair with Owen. Luke also has a crush on Phoebe, who kind of loves him back but they never seem to be on the same page.
- Exaggerated: ...And Queenie and Ross try to start a relationship, but both are tempted by Suzannah, Queenie spends the better part of a season coming to terms with her bisexuality and also confesses her love for Hannah. Terrence drunkenly confesses his love to Gilda, but no one knows if he really meant it. Ulla is pregnant with Franklin's child after a one night stand. Victor wants to marry Ulla to keep her honor, but wants to stay faithful to his long-distance love Wendy. Xavier is in love with all of the above listed girls, and at least Kay and Phoebe are confirmed to love him back. Zara is an egoist and loves only herself.
- Downplayed: Just the first half of the Straight Trope occurs, and it is the entire focus of the series.
- Justified: It's a Long Runner romance.
- Inverted: The characters are involved in complex webs of feuding and hatred.
- Subverted:
- The characters enter the story with a complex web of relationships, but it turns out they were all Undercover as Lovers and no one understood who was supposed to be who's lover in the plan.
- Turns out that all of the characters are in a big, consensual, polyamory relationship.
- Double Subverted:
- But once the plan is over, and they have free time, they soon get themselves into a Love Dodecahedron for real.
- ...that breaks apart due to jealousy.
- Parodied:
- Yvette and Zachary are a Happily Married couple with no other temptations, and they lampshade it frequently.
- Twenty characters form an exact topological relational dodecahedron, in which connections may be one-way crushes, lovers, friends with benefits, fuckbuddies, significant others, and even spouses. Each character has three links, even if they're unaware of some of them. Alice through Edgar are probably the lead characters, while Fred through Oliver are secondary, supporting characters, and Patricia through Tim are background characters.
- Alice-Bob are together, Alice-Fred are FwBs, and Alice is unaware of Edgar's crush on her. Meanwhile, Bob-Hannah are also together, and Bob has a crush on Carol. Carol-Donna are together, and Carol-Jill are FwBs. Donna has a crush on Edgar, who has a crush on Alice. Donna-Luke are lovers, and Edgar-Nancy are fuckbuddies.
- Fred is linked with Oliver and Grace, Hannah with Grace and Ida, Jill with Ida and Kathy, Luke with Kathy and Mary, and Nancy with Mary and Oliver. In addition to those already specified, Oliver-Patricia are linked, as are Grace-Quimby, Ida-Ruth, Kathy-Sam, and Mary-Tim.
- Patricia is linked with Quimby, linked with Ruth, linked with Sam, linked with Tim, linked with Patricia.
- We might have a Love BuckyBallnote with sixty characters, each having three boyfriends, girlfriends, or unrequited crushes.
- We might have a Love Tesseract, with "only" sixteen characters, but each has four boyfriends, girlfriends, unrequited crushes (either way), or unaware crushes.
- Zigzagged: Some episodes don't deal with the romances.
- Averted: All the romances are fairly stable and functional and don't ever overlap.
- Enforced: The producers want to keep audience attention.
- Lampshaded: Yvette: Zachary, you're lucky, I'm the only woman on this block who doesn't want to jump in bed with Xavier!
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: Christabel flirts with Xavier to make Kay and Phoebe jealous.
- Discussed: "And Wendy is in love with — gah! Can someone make a flowchart?"
- Conversed: "Romance stories bite off more than they can chew, don't they?"
- Implied:
- "Abuela is always watching these telanovelas, but I can never keep track of what's going on in them."
- Aphrodite, who speaks in rebuses, includes a Gordian Knot glyph in her speech bubble when speaking about the large cast.
- Deconstructed:
- Alice and Bob's marriage is ruined by Christabel, so she takes solace in the arms of Luke, and that makes the entire dodecahedron collapse in on itself.
- Due to All Love Is Unrequited and many people already in unwanted relationships, everyone is unhappy.
- People outside of the dodecahedron get involved, things escalate, and by the end of the series everyone's relationships are utterly ruined.
- Reconstructed: Everyone breaks up with everyone else for the mental health of everyone involved.
- Played for Laughs: Many farces use this trope for laughs.
- Played for Drama: No one is happy with the people they are with and they can't do anything about it.
Back to Love Dodecahedron, who is in love with Chromatic Arrangement, who is stringing along Bring My Red Jacket and Broke the Rating Scale...
