In Defense of Love Triangles

Two years ago, I didn't think I cared much about love triangles.

I don't even recall the first one I encountered. Was it Luke-Han-Leia in Star Wars? (I was a child of the '80s and managed to experience the triangle free of spoilers.) Was it Phantom-Christine-Raoul in The Phantom of the Opera? (I was a child of the '80s, and I loved all things Andrew Lloyd Weber.) Or was it Olivia-Viola-Orsino in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night? (This has nothing to do with being a child of the '80s.) It could have been one of those or one of dozens of others. Whichever was the first, I grew up with stories that wielded love triangles marvelously.

But even though I was a consumer of the love triangle, I didn't think I had an opinion—good or bad—about it as a trope. At least not until I noticed the criticism directed toward manifestations of the love triangle in young adult literature. I doubt you could find a topic as polarizing as YA love triangles. Critics use the trope to trivialize YA fiction as a whole, and readers include love triangle warnings in their reviews of individual novels.

When I encountered this debate, I basically "Hulked out" with a rage I didn't fully understand—and spent a good 15 minutes shouting at my friends about tropes and feminism and romance.

So, it turned out, I did have a few feelings about the love triangle. And when I descended from my private rage planet, I realized the best way to engage with the conversation about love triangles and YA literature was to build an anthology. Now, as the anthology is about to be released, I'm just as excited to be joining the debate as I was when I pitched the project.

The love triangle has suffered from a stagnant definition in recent years. In fact, the minute someone mentions "love triangles" and "young adult" in the same sentence, we can't help but think of Edward-Bella-Jacob and Peeta-Katniss-Gale. They have come to fix our notion of the YA love triangle as one girl (usually white, cisgender, and heteronormative) choosing between two boys, each representing the version of herself she wants to be.

These manifestations of the love triangle are like the sun. They fill up the sky so completely, we sometimes forget that there are millions of stars out there offering a different quality of light.

Yes, there was an explosion of love triangles in the wake of both Twilight and The Hunger Games, but be wary of discounting the love triangles of the future.

This is a trope with so much more to offer.

I invited my anthology contributors to twist, expand, or explode the love triangle in a short story genre of their choice, and they delivered in full force. This collection demonstrates the multifaceted potential of the love triangle. I won't claim that it's a comprehensive compendium of all possible love triangles because 1) it's not and 2) I sincerely hope the possibilities of this trope are endless. What I will claim is that these love triangles take the trope through its paces. These stories are romantic and angry, they are political and introspective, and they are adventurous and heartbreaking.

In the process of editing this anthology, I discovered something I suspected all along: that as young adult literature strives toward stories that are inclusive and that challenge the status quo, the tropes we're so familiar with will change before our eyes.

The love triangle is a narrative tool. It's part of the emotional fabric of the story, and as YA expands in a thousand new ways, I suspect the love triangle will, too.


Three Sides of a Heart: Stories About Love Triangles hits bookshelves on December 19. Add it to your Want to Read shelf here.

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