Basic Trope: A character who wants to help two characters hook up, but ends up falling in love with one of them.
- Straight: Alice agrees to help her friend Carol get together with Bob, but ends up falling in love with him.
- Exaggerated:
- There are multiple matchmakers trying to set up other people together, and all of them invariably falls in love with the people they want to ship off with someone else, thus creating an extremely confusing Love Dodecahedron. Alice wants to help Carol get together with Bob and falls in love with him. Bob's friend Dylan tries to do the same, but finds himself attracted to Carol. Bob thinks Dylan and Emily should totally get together, and finds himself in love with the latter. Eric, who mistakenly thinks that Bob and Carol are already a couple, pushes Bob to be with Alice so that he can get Carol for himself, only to realize that Alice is a better option than Carol.
- Alice develops a crush on Bob and Carol, which they both secretly reciprocate. By the end of it all, no one knows who they actually want to ask out, and resolve to just start dating each other.
- Downplayed: After getting to know Bob, Alice starts to see him as a good boyfriend material but doesn't actually fall in love with him.
- Justified: Alice's role as The Matchmaker involves Playing Cyrano for Carol. As she interacts more and more with Bob, she begins to see the qualities that made Carol fall in love with him.
- Inverted:
- Alice, who is in love with Bob, tries to draw him away from her friend Carol (whom she knows is exactly his type), so that she can have a better chance with him. But she realises later on that they complement each other better than she ever could, and decides to play The Matchmaker for them instead.
- Bob falls in love with Alice instead of the other way around.
- Alice tries to hook up Carol with Bob because of her attraction "I know she will like him, I like him".
- Subverted:
- Alice starts to grow closer to Bob while playing The Matchmaker for him and Carol, but her feelings towards him are entirely platonic.
- Not long after agreeing to help Carol pursue Bob, Alice tells her to back away from him. Carol accuses Alice for trying to steal Bob for herself, but Bob turns out to be a Jerkass and a womanizer, and Alice is simply trying to protect her friend from being tied to such a man.
- Double Subverted:
- Alice is in denial because she doesn't want to hurt Carol's feelings. Her affections for Bob is really romantic.
- Alice is lying to convince Carol to give up Bob. She actually does want to steal Bob for herself.
- Parodied: Bob doesn't exist, and is just a figment of Carol's imagination. Carol is too much of a Shrinking Violet to get an imaginary boyfriend love her back without a friend's help, and Alice still ends up falling in love with "him" and feels bad about it.
- Zig Zagged: Alice, playing matchmaker for her friend Carol, meets Bob for the first time and finds him quite charming, but decides that he's not really her type. However, Alice is just denying her feelings to protect Carol's, and she actually is attracted to Bob. After getting to know him better, though, she realizes that he's a Jerkass, and warns Carol about this. Bob overhears Alice's complaints about his bad personality, gets a Heel Realization, and tries to change himself for the better, causing Alice to fall in love with the changed man.
- Averted: Carol wants to pursue Bob and asks Alice—who is already in a relationship with Daniel—for advice. No one plays matchmaker.
- Enforced: "We need to spice things up a bit, add a little more drama. What if Alice started having feelings for Bob too?"
- Lampshaded: "I feel like things would be a lot simpler if you just asked Bob out yourself instead of going through all of this trouble to pair him up with someone."
- Invoked: Alice is in love with Bob and offers to help the painfully shy Carol (who is already well-acquainted with Bob) to act as her wingman to get an excuse of getting closer to him.
- Exploited: Bob isn't really Carol's type, so she convinces Alice to act on her feelings instead to resolve the matter amicably.
- Defied: Realizing that Bob is a pretty cool guy, and that she might fall in love with him if he interacts with her too much, Alice decides to stop interacting with him, instead encouraging Carol to pursue him without her help.
- Discussed: Alice, confiding to her other friend Emily, "What should I do? I think I'm in love with Bob... but I can't betray Carol like this. I'm supposed to be her wingman."
- Conversed: "Wanna bet that Alice will fall in love with Bob after all this?"
- Deconstructed: Alice suffers from crippling self-worth issues and thinks she'd make a terrible partner. Playing matchmaker for Bob is actually a very painful experience for her because of this, and this causes no shortage of turmoil in their friendship.
- Reconstructed:
- Bob realizes something's wrong with Alice, and that the matchmaking is making her upset. He puts it on hold so he can figure out what's making her so upset. After a long heart to heart she reluctantly confesses her feelings to him, causing Bob to admit he also likes her but had similar reservations about confessing. They decide to go out for real, putting the whole matchmaking business behind them.
- Alice accepts Bob and Carol's relationship, her crush on him is the very reason she finds them attractive as a couple.
- Played For Laughs: A Running Gag is made of Alice trying to talk up Bob to Carol, only to become increasingly flustered as she talks about all of the things she likes about Bob, complete with Luminescent Blush. Carol lets her keep it up because it's funny.
- Played For Drama: Carol feels betrayed by Alice and breaks off their friendship. Alice's subsequent relationship with Bob is haunted by her guilt at her lost friendship, and this causes a lot of conflict between the couple. Alice and Bob eventually break up and no one is happy.
Go back to Matchmaker Crush.
