by Lynette M. Burrows

Relationships are a large part of what your readers relate to because we can’t escape them. We all have relationships with other people. Whether they are friends, acquaintances, enemies, or lovers, your characters’ relationships can break a reader’s suspension of disbelief or indelibly mark your reader’s heart. This is the second of a two-part series to help you treat relationships in your story as their own entities and how to create character relationships that will make your readers want more.

In Part One, we discussed treating your primary character’s key relationships as an entity of its own, types of relationships that are possible, how many relationships to cover in your story, and how to make the most of those relationships. This month we’re discussing what makes the relationships you create between your characters believably real to your readers. 

Please note: I use the phrase parties or pair when discussing the relationship. Be aware that this is for clarity, but relationship entities can have any number of individuals with in it.

Commonality

In any relationship, the two parties have something in common. It’s often the reason they are together, why they like each other. Commonalities can be they’re interested in the same esoteric art. They share a hobby, a craft, or a skill. Perhaps they bonded over being the “new kid” in school, or a dislike of the same thing or people. The stronger or more bonded the relationship, the more things they share in common. 

For each significant relationship you show on the pages of your story, know what that commonality is and what it means to each character. It does not need to mean the same thing to both parties. In fact, it’s often more interesting in one character has a stronger feeling about that commonality than the other. 

You can also increase tensions. Perhaps the bond happened in the past and during the story, one of the two parties realizes she no longer feels the same way about their relationship.

The Glue Between Them

The commonality between the parties in a relationship is mostly about “why they connected.” Differences in personalities, trials and tribulations, growth of an individual, and outside influences challenge every relationship. If the relationship you’ve created is a long-erm or a forever-more relationship, there needs to be a sense of what keeps the parties bonded. What is the glue that binds characters together?

There are many things that can bind a relationship, including:

Family relationships

Family relationships are often determined by marriage or shared parentage. Families are also people with whom you have no shared genetics, but you grew up together (Foster kids, adopted, the sibling from another mother). Sometimes the friends you make become family. Think about how family relationships work in your life.

Psychological (and sometimes physical) needs

There are three universal psychological needs all humans have: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. They are necessary for our well-being. Often we have difficulty identifying our psychological needs correctly, but our needs steer us to make connections in order to fulfill those needs. In this, opposites really do attract.

John Watson and Sherlock Holmes are bound by their need for each other. Watson provides Holmes with a sense of humanity, a voice of reason, and occasional inspiration. Watson also has medical knowledge that Sherlock lacks. Holmes is a source of fascination and excitement for Watson. But Watson also needs a sense that he’s serving a greater purpose. He not only helps Holmes, he helps keep the greater community safer, and he records the cases Holmes solves to inspire and teach others.

In Lord of the Rings, Sam has been Frodo’s gardener for a long time. As they journey, Frodo depends on Sam to care for him. Without Sam’s loyalty and hope, Frodo wouldn’t have finished his task. Without Frodo’s example, Sam would not have developed the courage to try new things and neither of them would have survived.

In the movie, Rear Window, Jimmy Stewart’s character has both legs in a cast and depends on his nurse’s help. He physically cannot do most personal care tasks by himself. The thing to remember about this kind of relationship is that both parties need to derive something from the relationship. In this example, at first the nurse does not have psychological needs that get filled by the relationship, but she gets gainful employment and a client she likes and respects.

Time Already Invested 

This refers to those situations where two parties have been together so long that neither of them can think about separating from the relationship, even when it’s not the same as when it started. Think old married couple type of relationships. You know, the friendships where you’ve known each other so long that you complete each other’s sentences. 

Routines and Rituals

Routines and rituals are not the same thing. Routines are regular and necessary interactions for the relationship to work. A ritual is something significant to the relationship and each of the parties.

For example, for a busy working couple, one partner may be in charge of fixing breakfasts through the week, because the job doesn’t start until later in the morning. The other partner then fixes breakfast on weekends. Or in a relationship between friends, their routine may include gathering at one of the parties’ homes for a card game every Thursday night.

Rituals are things like a certain birthday toast made between friends. For a romantic couple, a weekly ritual might be date night or a candlelight dinner.

Shared History

Shared history can include shared trauma, an experience they shared that makes them feel disconnected from everyone else, or the day-to-day struggles of life. Friends might share the same teachers throughout elementary school. Or they might have worked the same after-school job. Perhaps they served in the army together.

Meaningful Differences

You don’t want any pair or group of characters to be too similar. Their differences in style, speech, and behaviors help your readers identify them. This is true particularly in relationships between your characters. You don’t want the individuals in a relationship to be alike, but making them different just to be different isn’t enough. The differences must be meaningful. 

How do you make meaningful differences? Let the differences between your individuals complement or challenge the relationship in ways that reflect the theme or are integral to the plot. You can express their differences in many ways, including in their strengths and weaknesses, their personalities, their skills, the way they resolve conflicts or approach new experiences or idea and their typical way of reacting to people and events.

Give Them a History

Every relationship, even new ones, has a history. This is more than a shared history. This is the history of how they met, things they did together, and times they bonded more or they parted ways for a bit. The reader needs to understand the history of the relationship, but if you dump in the whole history, it will distance your reader instead of draw her in.

There are many ways, other than using an info dump, to reveal the history of a relationship.

An Inside Joke or Code

We humans look for shortcuts everywhere, even in relationships. In a relationship, the shortcut is often an inside joke or a code word or phrase. 

An Ongoing Thing

Many relationships have an ongoing thing they do or say. It can be an argument, typically over something silly. Such as a memory a couple repeatedly shares with others, but one party always insists the event happened in the winter and the other party always replies, “but it was June.” 

 Familiar behavior

This refers to how the parties in a relationship address one another. Maybe they use nicknames like honey-bun and Tweety. Or they may use a formal way to refer to one of the party who isn’t present, such as “Me and the Missus.” It’s a way of addressing one another that no non-group member uses.

Familiar behavior also includes the tone of voice used, how often they touch (or don’t touch) one another, how they touch—is it intimate or casual? 

In long-term relationships, the parties know each other’s likes, dislikes, and habits. You can convey this by having one party cut the other’s sandwich into asymmetical parts because she knows that’s how party B likes it. 

Nonverbal Communication

We humans use nonverbal communication every day. Parties that have known each other for a long time have developed several ways to communicate nonverbally. You can use sustained eye contact or a “knowing look” to convey that two parties have known each other for a long time. A pat on the hand can mean calm down.

Doing something uncharacteristic for that person can also be a form of nonverbal communication. Think about things like how your character would feel if the partner who is habitually late every time, shows up early to an event that is important to her. 

How the Relationship has Changed

Time changes us all. Friends, frenemies or enemies…no relationship is remains unchanged either. Hint or show your reader how the relationship has changed since your characters first met. Don’t tell us about every minute change, only give your reader the significant ones. Sometimes a hint that it has changed is all you need.

Meaningful Scenes

A meaningful scene can be a big event or a tiny one. The meaning or significance comes from what your viewpoint characters think and feel about the event and how it influences the relationship between the characters and or the plot. A small but significant scene happens between Frodo and Sam at Bilbo’s birthday party. Sam pines after Rosie from a distance and Frodo encourages him to ask her for a dance. The scene in Little Women where Amy burns Jo’s manuscript is a more significant event to both characters. They each have to grow enough to move past their own hurt and anger.

Complicate Things

The members of any relationship do not always get along. In any good relationship, there is tension, minor and major disagreements, and moments where the platonic or sexual love between the parties is strong. 

For example, Frodo and Sam didn’t agree on whether to bring Gollum along on their journey. Frodo grows to distrust Sam and Sam grows more determined to protect Frodo from Gollum. When Gollum betrays Frodo, Sam does everything he can to save his friend and Frodo gains a new understanding of friendship.

You can also add incorrect assumptions, misunderstandings or conflicting motives to complicate the relationship. 

Time Apart

Testing your character relationships with time apart gives you opportunities to deepen character development, create tension, explore how each individual grows, and how time apart plays with their emotions. Make the time apart about the relationship. 

Give the characters time to reflect on their feelings about the relationship. Use that to help your characters get new perspectives on themselves as individuals and as part of a relationship. Use uncertainty and longing, internal conflict, and / or external obstacles to heighten the stakes, add complexity to their understanding of the relationship, and test their commitment and resilience.

Make the Relationship Matter

Making the relationship matter to your characters will make it matter to your readers. But how do you do that? 

Develop an understanding of the deep-down needs of the individual characters in the relationship.

Figure out how the other party in the relationship will meet that need.

Make the relationship challenge the individual members of the group.

The key to making the relationship matter is to let the relationship develop over the course of the story. Use dialogue and body language to convey what the relationship means to the individuals. Show the growing intensity of connection and meaning through changes in the dialogue and body language. 

The bottom line is connection. Connect your reader to your characters and show how the connections in your characters’ lives matter to them. Since your reader cares about your characters, they care about the people important to your characters.

Create a Relationship Arc

Finally, when you treat a relationship as its own entity, it needs an arc similar to a character arc. Figure out if the relationship will fall apart or still be strong at the end of the story. No matter the fate of that relationship, it does not need to have all the above attributes to be irresistible to your reader. In fact, too much detail may work to make the relationship appear unbelievable. Whatever you determine is the glue that holds your story relationships together, be certain it is strong enough to be believable within your story world. 

Ask yourself the following questions.

• Does the relationship get stronger or get destroyed by the end of the story? 
• What situation will make or break the relationship?
• How has the character of the relationship changed at the end of the story? 
• How has each party’s feelings and understanding of the relationship changed?

Creating Irresistible Relationships

Readers know their real-life relationships are complex so when they find fictional characters in similar situations, they can't get enough. 

Even in a story about a man alone on an island (Cast Away) there is a complex relationship. Tom Hanks plays Noland, whose connections in life are superficial. When he gets stranded alone on an island, his need for a relationship grows so intense, he turns a ball into a companion named Wilson. We infer Wilson’s personality from the dialogue and behaviors of Noland. We relate to Noland and feel his desperation not to lose his only companion. We grieve with Noland when he does lose Wilson and we cheer when after Noland is rescued he realizes he has hope and the skills for a better, more connected life in the future.

For your story to matter to your reader, they must care about your characters. Seed in bits and pieces that hint of complex relationships that matter to your characters and you will have character relationships your readers find irresistible.  

How do your favorite character relationships (in something you’ve written or read) show their complexity?

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About Lynette

Lynette M. Burrows is an author, blogger, creativity advocate, and Yorkie wrangler. She survived moving seventeen times between kindergarten and her high school graduation. This alone makes her uniquely qualified to write an adventure or two.

Her Fellowship series is a “chillingly realistic” alternate history in 1961 Fellowship America where even the elite can be judged a sinner and pursued by the Angels of Death. Books one and two, My Soul to Keep, and  If I Should Die, are available everywhere books are sold online. Book three, And When I Wake, is scheduled to be published in early 2025.

Lynette lives in the land of OZ. She is a certifiable chocoholic and coffee lover. When she’s not blogging or writing or researching her next book, she avoids housework and plays with her two Yorkshire terriers. You can find Lynette online on Facebook or on her website.