The Absent Love Interest

 I made rice last night! And I missed doing that. I made a little too much because I’m hoping to share it at some point. Hopefully, I also get to grill this weekend! If not, well then that’s too bad but there will still be delicious food.

This week I read The Lies of Locke Lamora, which was fun! And it inspired this Saturday Note.

On the Absent Love Interest

Something interesting about The Lies of Locke Lamora is that the title character’s love interest, Sabetha, isn’t in the book. At all. I don’t mean that he doesn’t meet her until after the events of the novel–he already has met her, and several characters comment on how smitten he is with her. But she doesn’t have a single scene in the book. Even all the flashback scenes explaining Locke’s backstory don’t have her in them. She’s generally off doing something else when he’s being trained as a thief or getting apprenticed somewhere.

This is an interesting approach. If this wasn’t a series, I’d say it was bad writing, but it’s clearly the first in a series of fantasy novels, so it’s excusable. But it got me thinking about this idea: writing an installment or two of a story in which the love interest is not actually in that installment. It’s not common–again, one of the cheapest ways that writers try to make protagonists likable is to give them love interests, and then kill them for motivation in the following story. But it happens every so often.

This isn’t a bad, writing choice, necessarily, but it IS challenging and risky.

I remember, for instance, back when How I Met Your Mother was airing that people were worried about this. The entire point of the show was that Ted was telling his kids how he met their mother, and so said mother couldn’t appear until the end of the series. The show kept hyping up how incredible this woman was, Ted’s ultimate soul mate, who would blend in great with the group and be basically everything he ever wanted in a wife. Basically everyone who watched this show thought that there was no way that the Mother would ever live up to audience expectations.

And yet, she did? When she finally appears in the final season, played by Cristin Milioti, most watches actually liked her and thought she was a likable character with plenty of chemistry with the other cast members.

[SPOILER ALERT! The problem became then that they instantly wasted the character by revealing she had been dead all along while Ted was telling this story, and people hated the finale.]

Another risk you have is that you may have the audience wondering why the protagonist likes this person so much, because we, the audience, haven’t seen them. In Lies of Locke Lamora, it’s not too much of a problem because while his love for Sabetha is a large part of his character, it’s not really a large part of the Plot, and you don’t actually need it in order to understand the story. Locke being not the kind of guy to talk about it, you can let it slide. 

But a problem (or maybe this is a Me Problem, I don’t know) some writers have is making the love interest make sense. Very often I watch shows or movies and wonder why it is these two people like each other. Tons of writers don’t really go for a lot of work other than telling us that the two attractive people of compatible orientation are going to make out. This is going to be even more difficult with the love interest not actually being on-page/on-screen, because you, the audience, don't get a chance or reason to care about the character.

So while I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to not have the love interest there, I think it’s a tricky bit of writing in order to pull it off. You’ve got to show the love interest eventually, or else the audience will feel cheated. But for a series, you can put it off until a dramatic point; just be aware that every time said love interest is mentioned, the audience will start building up an image in their heads, and how well that character as-written matches that mental image will lead to certain reactions. 

I would not recommend doing this, because of how difficult it is to pull off, but it’s doable.

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