As a side note, I found the Green-Eyed Epiphany trope. This story about Alice/Bob/Charlie is a subversion/inversion of that trope - heck, Bob initially thinks he's having Green-Eyed Epiphany, and comes up with all sorts of excuses for his emotions ("Wait, I feel romantic when I see Alice with Charlie? I must be projecting myself onto Charlie, imagining Charlie to be me instead") until he realizes it's not what he thinks it is.
What sort of event would make it realistic for Bob to realize he's in love with both Alice and Charlie? How should I display Alice's and Charlie's love epiphanies such that their resulting three-way relationship doesn't appear to be an ass pull?
Huh, I would have never thought of that! The idea's that since it's a polyamorous relationship, Charlie is an essential part of the relationship as much as Alice and Bob are. As long as Alice and Bob are shown to be rather friendly and open to each other already, just that they're missing the spark called Charlie, I think it'll be alright.
I'm not sure what the 'status quo of being friends' means here, to be honest. My plan was that Alice and Bob tried a romantic relationship, but the romance just faded off and left an amicable best-friends relation. If you ask them, they'll shrug and say 'no spark'. I figured having the love 'fade off' gently would be the best way to have amciable exes.
If I'm going with the 'status quo' thing, I'll have to think about why Alice and Bob wanted to keep the best-friends status quo. It'll likely be related to the extra responsibilities a romantic relationship brings along. And if I'm going to write about the reaponsibilities of a romantic relationship... does anyone have any advice about writing that sort of thing?
edited 11th Jan '16 10:41:20 PM by hellomoto
Sorry for the slow response, I'd been waiting to see if someone else would possibly reply to that one because this last question does touch the topic of romance as it is (rather than just relationships), and I did say ... well, write, that romance is something I am bad at.
That being said, since nobody else came in and said anything, I'll try to answer the question to the best of my ability. Just, you know, if someone says I'm wrong and presents an alternate version that makes sense they're probably right.
I would've linked to Just Friends, but this case doesn't seem to be that trope. Best I can find is Amicable Exes, although they don't consider themselves exes at all. Since their brief moment of love is rather (what else?) brief, they pass it off as temporary infatuation that results when you've been surrounded by unattractive-in-personality people.
Until they met Charlie.
To start with, I'll have to say that as far as I see it you'll have to play such a thing carefully. Because if Charlie is what it took to make the whole relationship and any related romance be at all, then some people might take that to mean that Charlie is some magical romance-related cure-it-all, and people generally tend to be more critical towards characters perceived that way.
That is, unless you do make it clear that what occurs after they get Charlie is not really a romance as it is, but simply a three-way friendship with benefits that does resemble romance because people are arbitrarily assigning it that label. In other words, a group of friends, with "benefits", who are invested with each other emotionally in a way that makes them true friends and the romance (or facsimile of it, as it may be) is just an extension of that. Well, I did write something like that earlier on, but I am reiterating it since I'd rather say too much than not enough.
And if you are looking for tropes to use to describe it, you probably want an unusual (or not; who's to say what is unusual in such a thing at all) variant of Friends with Benefits rather than anything else: the moment of romance was there, they went back to being friends and remained friends while not being averse to sleeping with each other once they pulled Charlie into the whole thing, and the period of abstinence in-between was just them not being exactly sure where they lie and thus mutually not wanting to push too hard. At least that's how I see it, though to be honest it's not like tropes really matter all that much aside from serving as a database of things that roughly match certain patterns that one could study in-depth while trying to create something similar.
Although the idea of them being Friends with Benefits who aren't getting the benefits because they don't want to change the status quo where they are friends by pushing too much, only for them to get over the notion once Charlie gets into the picture because his appearance already changed the status quo (thus putting the merit of changing it not on Charlie but on his appearance) and thus was enough for them to move forward, is probably a good idea. I think if you write that properly it's going to be a fairly realistic thing, and something that could really happen.