I have a confession to make: My love life is boring, and it’s affecting my writing.

A Satisfying Reality Makes for a Dull Fantasy

Make no mistake; I have a great love life. I’ve been happily married to my high school sweetheart for almost 20 years. We still go on dates, write each other love letters, and generally can’t get enough of one another. Objectively speaking, I have what many people would consider the ideal love life. I wouldn’t change it for the world.

That’s the problem: My satisfaction with my love life is equaled only by my deer-in-headlights resignation that it is a terrible model for writing romance. Here are a few wild, potentially inaccurate comparisons between romance in reality versus books.

Books: Relationships are built on dramatic, life-changing events.
Reality: Relationships are built on thousands of ordinary, everyday events.

Books: Good romances are filled with drama, uncertainty, ups and downs.
Reality: Good romances are filled with stability and support.

Books: A kiss fills you with a sense of catharsis and triumph (perhaps something more intimate depending on the scene).
Reality: A kiss fills you with a sense of warm familiarity (and, yeah, maybe the other thing depending on the situation).

Books: An admission of love is accompanied by events of substance and character growth.
Reality: Admissions of love happen every day for things as simple as doing the dishes, or even for no reason at all.

Sex in LitRPGs

Okay, so my own lack of real-life experience with dramatic storybook romance is one problem. Another is the litRPG genre’s relationship with the subject.

The problem as I see it is sex. Sex is a standard part of romance, arguably a very important part of it whether it’s in or out of a book. Compound that with the fact that litRPG often involves escapism and power fantasies and you have a recipe with predictable outcomes. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that there’s a (very popular) sub-genre of litRPG dedicated to harems.

This isn’t meant to criticize sex or even harems in litRPG. Far from it. More power to you if that’s your thing. My point is that an emphasis on sex can be as much a barrier to compelling romance in a story as it is in real life, and the genre has a strong tendency to do just that. Many seem to conflate the two.

On the one hand, you could say that makes a litRPG author’s job easier; the bar is set so low that any serious attempt at romance is bound to turn out fine by comparison. All you have to do is emphasize the emotional over the physical and you’ll stand apart from the crowd.

On the other hand, this could run afoul of audience expectations. When your readers are avid fans of harem litRPGs where the main character is sleeping with one or more buxom love interests within the first few chapters, those readers might be turned off by something less erotically-inclined. What, then, is a litRPG author to do?

Ike and Ada’s Relationship

All of this brings me back to my own main character and leading lady. I decided to depart from steamier litRPG tropes and make their relationship a slow burn. Throughout the first book, they have fun together, get to know each other, and bond through shared joys and hardships. In the latter third of the book, they admit their feelings for one another and kiss for the first time, which was as far as I cared to take it.

Did I get it all right? Hell no. Outside the context of a game that plays matchmaker in a sufficiently-advanced-technology-indistinguishable-from-magic sort of way that puts any modern service to shame, the speed with which their relationship progresses begs credulity. Many of Ike’s early impressions and dialog toward Ada had to be edited after the first draft; however accurately they may have portrayed a typical cis/hetero male’s perspective, my beta readers were kind enough to point out it wasn’t very appealing to cis/hetero female readers. And I still have misgivings about how I wrote their kokuhaku in chapter 23.

Relic Tamer will undoubtedly contain other mistakes. Ada and Ike are dealing with the insecurities of potential romantic rivals, the pressures of being a couple in the public eye, the delicate dance of figuring out if/when to sleep together, and the undercurrent unique to the genre: If it’s all just a game, how real is their relationship? It’s fair to call these things a fun challenge to write, but it doesn’t change the fact that they’re outside my experience as well as litRPG norms.

I will fumble with these and other issues as the story progresses. In the meantime, if you have thoughts on love, sex, or romance in litRPG, please share them in the comments below.