Duo Dymanics

The true meaning of love is teaming up to fight crime. Everything else, as the Talmud says, is commentary.

If you ever find yourself questioning the status of a relationship ("Where do we go from here?" "Is s/he the one?" "Is this love or lust?"), try this little test: imagine you and your partner taking on Doctor Doom. Can you imagine teaming up to defeat him? Or does your imagination turn to you rescuing your partner from evil's clutches, or vice versa, or (the very worst) you sacrificing yourself to save your partner from a fate worse than death?

In the terms of fan fiction: If you and your partner together fulfill all the requirements of a Mary Sue, congratulations—it's true love!

Mrs. Oblimo puts it this way: If you want to write a believable romance, your romantic leads must share a problem in common. Sharing a problem in common is a required catalyst of romantic chemistry between two characters. It's not sufficient for romantic chemistry, but it is necessary. In other words, a shared problem in common isn't always enough to create believable romance between two characters, but it needs to be there, or the reader won't buy into the pairing. The corollary: the best way to write a believable break-up is to remove a shared problem in common between two characters.

The phrase "shared problem in common" may sound redundant, but it isn't meant to be. If I lose my wallet and you help me find it, we share a problem. If we've both lost our wallets, we have a problem in common. But if both of our wallets were stolen by the same pickpocket, we've got a shared problem in common. And if the pickpocket sells our wallets to Doctor Doom, who, through a masterful identity theft, frames us for killing the Hulk's Chihuahua, we've got ourselves an early-1990s Sandra Bullocky romantic comedy/action vehicle, starring us.

But I get to be early-1990s Bullock, 'kay?