Basic Trope: A pair of siblings marry another pair of siblings.
- Straight: Alice and Bob marry; Alice's brother David marries Bob's sister Carol.
- Exaggerated: Seven brothers marry seven sisters, creating a seven-fold in-law marriage.
- Downplayed:
- Alice and Bob marry; Alice's brother David marries Bob's first cousin Carol.
- Alice and Bob marry; Alice's brother David dates Bob's sister Carol, but they don't marry.
- Justified:
- The two families are very close, and the sibling pairs naturally gravitated to each other.
- The story is set in Ancient Rome, and the daughters are traded by the fathers to become the wives of each other's sons.
- Inverted: Alice and Bob get divorced, or one or both of them dies, and so do Carol and David.
- Subverted:
- David and Carol call off their engagement and break up.
- Bob and Carol turn out to be Not Blood Siblings.
- Double Subverted:
- Having broken up, David and Carol get back together, or David becomes engaged to another of Bob's sisters.
- Bob and Carol may have discovered they are not blood siblings, but they are so much Like Brother and Sister that the in-law implications still apply.
- Parodied: Whenever two people with one or more siblings marry each other, the siblings are promptly paired.
- Zig-Zagged: David and Carol, and possibly also Alice and Bob, repeatedly break up and get back together.
- Averted:
- There are no sibling relationships between the four characters.
- The characters do not marry.
- Enforced:
- The writer wants to add another thread to the growing relationship between Carol and David by making them siblings-in-law, with the story culminating in their marriage.
- The adaptation turns Eileen and Frank's parents into their Uncle and Aunt, but need to remain blood related.
- Lampshaded:
- David: "Hey, Bob, I'm marrying your sister."
- Carol: "Hey, Alice, I'm marrying your brother."
- Invoked: Alice, Bob, Carol and/or David want their families to be very close, and ensure that their children are double cousins.
- Exploited: ???
- Defied:
- Carol has been set up with an Arranged Marriage to her brother's wife's brother David, but runs away with someone else instead.
- Carol must wait a year before she can marry David.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Played for Drama: Later on, it seems that attraction happening between members of the two families is a trend for both lineages, since Alice and Bob's kid falls in love with David and Carol's kid. This complicates things greatly since the risk of producing deformed children is enhanced thanks to them being double cousins. What makes things worse is when their parents try to convince them to break off the relationship, they justify it by bringing up the close bond between the two families, and even use their parents' own marriages as an example.
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