"The very essence of romance is uncertainty."
— Algernon, The Importance of Being Earnest
"Healthy relationships are boring. Better make it a veneer for seething resentment and maybe some attempted murder."
Audiences are only interested in the beginnings and endings of relationships, not all the tedious good times in the middle. [...] No one is living out that lustful, unstoppable, consistently passionate version of love endorsed by films because we have to live it for a lot longer than 90 minutes and that would be exhausting.
"...as Chris Rock put it best, 'Good relationships are boring.' The problem is that good relationships are also almost always an inverted spectrum of the rocky courtship, happy marriage process we see in movies. In fact, any list of reasons why people get divorced suggests that dating is too easy. The problem is not that good couples get screwed over by circumstances. Love, like a cocaine addict, will find a way. The real problem is that couples pass through the dating process, arrive at the part where they're supposed to live Happily Ever After and find themselves blindsided by things like differences over money or the fact that one doesn't want kids and the other is a Mormon."
"You can be married and bored, or single and lonely. Ain't no happiness nowhere!"
"...The nature of comics is much like the Soap Opera in that any marriage is doomed to failure because a marriage can be scattered. But I think you do need to have those characters once in a while that stay married because you need those lynchpins in order to show that those marriages that don't work, they don't work for a reason. If no marriages work, it kind of becomes meaningless."
— Comics writer James Robinson
"What's a love story? There is only one love story. It has been written over and over for generations, and it will probably be saleable for more generations. The plot in its bare outline is simply this: A beautiful female creature meets a beautiful male creature. They do not at once, fall in love; but it is obvious to the reader that they ought to fall in love. Because readers are like that they will be overjoyed and for some pathological reason downright surprised when, after carrying your story along through the opening pages, you do have the beautiful male and female creatures fall in love.
Know what sadism is? Well, if you don't, don't be embarrassed; nobody else knows, for sure, either. It is a strange latency in the human mind, strong in some, weak in others, which makes the average reader become restless if the Course of True Love runs smoothly. You have opened your story with a beautiful male creature and a beautiful female creature who ought to fall in love. You have teased the reader a bit about this, and then had your two characters sure enough fall in love. Now, something dark and threatening must fall athwart their love. Editors call this the "complication" because they like to say complicated things about simple matters. In this complication, it will appear to the reader that the two creatures of the opposite sex (this is very important) who have fallen in love, are not going to be able to get together in a satisfactory manner. Here a very strange psychological thing occurs. The reader knows perfectly well that the pair will marry or arrive at a less complex adjustment in the end, according as to whether it is a pure love story or a naughty one; yet, despite his knowledge, nay, downright certainty of this, he will worry about the complication. Why this should be only Heaven knows. But it is quite true.
If you are a person of intelligence, you will have a hard time convincing yourself, as you come to write your first stories that readers are going to be silly enough to get worked up over your complication when they very well know that everything is going to come out all right in the end. They will get worked up over it. Have no doubt at all about that."
Know what sadism is? Well, if you don't, don't be embarrassed; nobody else knows, for sure, either. It is a strange latency in the human mind, strong in some, weak in others, which makes the average reader become restless if the Course of True Love runs smoothly. You have opened your story with a beautiful male creature and a beautiful female creature who ought to fall in love. You have teased the reader a bit about this, and then had your two characters sure enough fall in love. Now, something dark and threatening must fall athwart their love. Editors call this the "complication" because they like to say complicated things about simple matters. In this complication, it will appear to the reader that the two creatures of the opposite sex (this is very important) who have fallen in love, are not going to be able to get together in a satisfactory manner. Here a very strange psychological thing occurs. The reader knows perfectly well that the pair will marry or arrive at a less complex adjustment in the end, according as to whether it is a pure love story or a naughty one; yet, despite his knowledge, nay, downright certainty of this, he will worry about the complication. Why this should be only Heaven knows. But it is quite true.
If you are a person of intelligence, you will have a hard time convincing yourself, as you come to write your first stories that readers are going to be silly enough to get worked up over your complication when they very well know that everything is going to come out all right in the end. They will get worked up over it. Have no doubt at all about that."
— Jack Woodford, Trial and Error: Writing and Selling
True love, like any other strong and addicting drug, is boring, once the tale of encounter and discovery is told, kisses quickly grow stale and caresses tiresome... except, of course, to those who share the kisses, who give and take the caresses while every sound and color of the world seems to deepen and brighten around them. As with any other strong drug, true first love is really only interesting to those who have become its prisoners.
Clearly we don't need healthy romantic couples in anime. Healthy romantic couples don't have meaningless teenager drama over every single trivial thing. Writers would be forced to write deeper scenarios if they had to deal with mentally sane characters.
—A Reddit User on r/anime, this thread
