There’s a particular problem with being in a happy relationship when you write romance.

Nobody is giving you anything to work with.

No agonising over unanswered messages. No dramatic declarations at two in the morning. No staring out of a train window wondering whether you’ve made the biggest mistake of your life.

Just someone asking whether we need more washing-up liquid.

Which is lovely, obviously. But it’s not exactly chapter twelve material.

I’ve been thinking about this lately because I was working on a scene in which two characters are supposed to be desperately attracted to each other but absolutely determined not to admit it.

And I couldn’t get it right.

They kept behaving like reasonable adults.

Honestly, the nerve.

Have I Become Too Emotionally Stable to Write Romance?

I used to think heartbreak was excellent material for fiction. Not while it was happening, obviously. At the time, I was far too busy listening to sad music and making terrible decisions.

But afterwards? Wonderful.

Every unanswered text became a potential plot point. Every awkward encounter had narrative possibilities. Even the embarrassing conversations I replayed in my head for months eventually found their way into something useful.

There’s a reason so many love stories begin with longing. Longing gives you something to write towards.

When you’re happy, that particular kind of longing tends to disappear.

You don’t spend an afternoon wondering whether someone likes you when they’re sitting opposite you eating toast and telling you about a problem with the car.

You already know.

Or at least you hope you do.

And that’s when I started wondering whether being content had made me a less interesting romance writer.

A slightly depressing thought, considering contentment is supposed to be the goal.

The Trouble With Knowing How the Story Ends

In real life, I’m rather fond of emotional security.

I like knowing where I stand. I like people saying what they mean. I like disagreements that don’t end with someone storming out into the rain.

In fiction, however, I apparently want everyone to suffer.

Not terribly. Just enough to make the eventual happiness feel deserved.

The trouble is that when you’ve been in a comfortable relationship for a while, you can forget how exhausting the early stages of falling in love actually were.

The constant interpretation of tiny gestures.

Did he touch my arm because he likes me, or because he was trying to get past me to reach the olives?

Was that a meaningful silence, or had the conversation simply run out?

Why did he say see you soon instead of see you tomorrow?

It’s ridiculous when you look back on it.

It’s also brilliant material.

I wrote about this sort of uncertainty in The Slow Burn: Why Patience in Romance Pays Off, because romantic tension often depends on characters not quite understanding what is happening between them.

But lately I’ve realised something else.

You don’t have to be experiencing that uncertainty yourself to remember it.

And you certainly don’t have to go looking for it again.

Thank goodness.

Happiness Isn’t the Absence of Conflict

Here’s where I think I was getting things wrong.

I’d started treating happy relationships as though they were emotionally uneventful.

Which is nonsense.

Two people can love each other enormously and still disagree about money, work, family, where to live, whether to have children or whose turn it is to deal with the enormous spider in the bathroom.

Love doesn’t magically make people compatible in every possible way.

Sometimes it makes their differences more obvious.

Because once you’re committed to someone, you have to work out how to live alongside all the bits of them that don’t fit neatly with your own expectations.

The romantic hero who always knows exactly what to say is lovely in theory.

In practice, I think I’d find him unbearable.

Imagine trying to have a perfectly ordinary disagreement and being met with a beautifully constructed speech about vulnerability.

I’d probably throw a cushion at him.

Real intimacy is much less polished.

It’s being annoyed with someone and still remembering to buy the yoghurt they like.

It’s knowing they’re having a difficult day before they’ve said anything.

It’s discovering that the person you adore has an inexplicable way of loading the dishwasher and deciding, after several years, that this is not a hill worth dying on.

These things might not look particularly romantic.

But I think they’re where some of the best stories begin.

You Can Be Happy and Still Remember What Hurt

One of the stranger things about writing fiction is how easily old feelings return.

Not necessarily the people. Sometimes I can barely remember why I was so upset about someone in the first place.

But the feelings?

Those are annoyingly well preserved.

The embarrassment of realising you liked someone more than they liked you.

The horrible little drop in your stomach when a conversation suddenly changed direction.

The relief of discovering you’d misunderstood something.

The jealousy you were absolutely determined not to admit.

I can still find those feelings when I need them.

And sometimes writing about them is easier now because there’s a bit of distance.

I’m no longer trying to prove that I was right, that someone else was wrong or that a particular relationship should have worked.

I can look at the situation and see two flawed people making decisions with incomplete information.

Which, when you think about it, describes most romantic fiction.

In When Characters Lie (And Why Romance Needs That Moment), I explored how characters sometimes hide their feelings because admitting them would make everything more complicated.

I understand that instinct much better now than I did when I was younger.

And I think understanding it is more useful than having to experience it all over again.

The Dangerous Temptation to Make Everyone Sensible

There is one thing I have to watch, though.

My characters have become suspiciously good at communicating.

I’ll write a disagreement and halfway through one of them will say something like:

“I think we’re approaching this from different perspectives. Perhaps we should talk about what we’re both afraid of.”

Oh, for God’s sake.

They’re supposed to be falling in love, not attending couples counselling.

I have to remind myself that characters aren’t obliged to possess whatever emotional maturity I’ve acquired.

They can be jealous.

They can misunderstand things.

They can say something stupid because they’re tired, frightened or too proud to admit what they want.

They can make precisely the mistakes I would advise a friend not to make.

That’s part of the pleasure of fiction.

I don’t have to approve of everything my characters do.

I just have to understand why they do it.

And if they make terrible decisions, I can enjoy the consequences from the safety of my desk.

Much cheaper than therapy.

Maybe Being Loved Makes You a Better Observer

Something interesting happens when you stop spending so much energy wondering whether someone loves you.

You start noticing other things.

How people show affection without saying anything.

How couples develop their own peculiar language.

How two people can have completely different memories of the same conversation.

How someone can be furious with their partner at breakfast and quietly reach for their hand that evening.

I find these details fascinating now.

They’re also the sorts of details that can make fictional relationships feel believable.

I touched on this in Love on the Page: How I Write Romantic Chemistry That Feels Real, because chemistry isn’t simply a matter of putting two attractive characters in a room and hoping for the best.

It’s about how they affect each other.

And perhaps being in a happy relationship gives you a better understanding of what happens after the initial attraction.

After the dramatic kiss.

After the confession.

After the point where most romantic comedies roll the credits.

There’s an entire relationship waiting on the other side.

And it isn’t necessarily less interesting.

So, Do You Need a Broken Heart to Write a Good Love Story?

I don’t think so.

Although I suspect a broken heart can occasionally provide a useful first draft.

What you need is curiosity about people.

You need to remember that love can make sensible people behave strangely. That wanting something badly can make you frightened of getting it. That two people can care deeply about each other and still have absolutely no idea how to make things work.

You need imagination, memory and a willingness to let your characters make a complete mess of things.

And perhaps you need to resist the temptation to solve all their problems by page forty.

I’m still working on that last one.

The scene I was struggling with earlier is better now, incidentally.

I stopped trying to make the characters behave like people who’d been together for years. I let one of them misunderstand a perfectly innocent remark. The other responded badly. Neither apologised when they should have.

Suddenly, they had something to work through.

I wouldn’t want to spend an evening with either of them.

But I do want to find out what happens next.

And that’s probably a good sign.

As for my own romantic life, I’m perfectly happy for it to remain boring.

Someone’s just asked whether I want a cup of tea.

Yes, actually.

I do.