Enemies to Lovers: Deconstructing a Timeless Trope

Image description: Noah and Allie from “The Notebook” are in a verbal altercation with a heart enveloping them. To their right, text reads, “a love story of today.”

Enemies to lovers is easily written off as a tired trope oversaturating its own market and overstaying its welcome in the public imagination. This criticism is not without truth; the trope is pervasive and perennial, growing like garden weeds in every corner of the Internet. It notoriously flourishes in Wattpad fanfiction, #BookTok recommendation lists vying for Colleen Hoover’s sponsorship, and CapCut edits of Rory Gilmore and Jess Mariano, Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett, and Kate Sharma and Anthony Bridgerton. However, the trope is not a novelty, nor is it a frivolous indulgence. From William Shakespeare’s ““Much Ado About Nothing”” and Jane Austen’s ““Pride and Prejudice”” to 1930s cross-class romances and 1960s interracial love stories, the trope proves itself an enduring cultural phenomenon inseparable from its historical context. Across periods of time, enemies to lovers contrives in romantic love a dangerously transcendental power— one which eclipses economic, racial, and relational unrest. 

At its most sinister, the trope is a political tool, palliating the severity of systemic inequalities by ascribing remedial power to true love’s kiss. This creed underlies what American author Ruth Mckenney called “the immense body of propaganda for the dream world of romantic love.” Great Depression-era cross-class romances kept audiences fixated on the dream world, notwithstanding their dismal material reality. For the small price of blind faith, 1930s studios sold moviegoers a distorted, technicolor rendering of love packaged seamlessly into a 90-minute picture. 

If studios could revitalize belief in traditional American institutions and ideals -heterosexual marriage, a capitalist economy, and unrelenting individualism- they could curb the disillusionment that followed financial destitution. Women in particular were lulled out of lucidity, compelled to keep their heads down and their aspirations within four pure white walls following a wartime period of burgeoning economic and vocational opportunity. The bulk of these films featured a wealthy man’s pursuit of a lower-class woman, explicitly gendered to confine women to material success that came by virtue of, not at the expense of a man. “Private Number” (1936) is one distorted depiction of class relations Hollywood churned out during its Golden Age. A wealthy and unemployed Richard (Robert Taylor) tells his parlor maid Ellen (Loretta Young) that “it’s just an accident I’m not working for your family.” When she says she cannot join him and swim in the mansion’s lake outside of the servants’ designated hour, he dismisses her with a borderline satirical “in this day and age we believe in social equality.” Paradigmatic to cross-class romances, the poor woman is quickly swayed and the couple must fight to gain the blessing of the affluent man’s family. Makeshift villains in the shape of pretentious parents-in-law and hedonistic youths were the essence of illusory upper-class critiques, so deliberately vacuous that moviegoers reached the end credits without encountering a morsel of meaningful, class-conscious dialogue. 

“Happiness Ahead” (1934), released when nearly a quarter of the civilian labor force was unemployed, completely omits the Depression from its storyline. In it, heiress Josephine Hutcherson (Joan Bradford) frees herself from dreary affluence to masquerade as part of the carefree, lively working-class. With love as its vehicle, “Happiness Ahead” projects harmony at the height of class warfare; 1934 saw nearly 1.5 million workers engage in 1,856 strikes and lockouts across the county. When stripped of their shiny makeup, elaborate ensembles, and the backdrop of the dream world, it becomes clear that enemies to lovers narratives are grounded in denial. Within the premise of conflict being integral to a successful relationship lies a willingness to obscure issues and excuse transgressions in favor of a paper-thin resolution. “Happiness Ahead” sees Josephine liberated by her romance with office worker Bob Lane (Dick Powell) while Bob achieves upward mobility by going into business with her father after her mother reluctantly accedes to their love. 

“The Notebook” (2004), based on the 1996 novel by Nicholas Sparks, is a contemporary cross-class romance with the same pitfalls as its predecessors. The film features a volatile romance between Noah (Ryan Gosling), a lumber mill worker, and Allie (Rachel McAdams), a wealthy heiress. Through disapproving parents, economic inequality manifests as an external threat to their bond, and the film fails to critically assess the culture of their relationship. Like all great love stories, Noah and Allie’s begins with him threatening to hurl himself off of a ferris wheel until she agrees to date him. Noah and Allie share vulnerable moments only in passing, fleeting candle flames smothered by a destructive dynamic. For example, Allie tells Noah she feels suffocated under the weight of her rigid schedule. To remind her she has free will, he persuades her to lie in the middle of the road with him until a car almost kills them. 

The explosive potential of Noah and Allie’s relationship is presented as normal, aspirational even. To elucidate it, Nicholas Sparks wrote, “They didn’t agree on much. In fact, they didn’t agree on anything. They fought all the time and challenged each other every day. But despite their differences, they had one important thing in common. They were crazy about each other.” This concerning conflation of volatility with passion is apparently vital to the execution of an enemies to lovers narrative. It prevails such that “The Notebook” contains no conflicting dialogue, no hint of a suggestion that love should not have to be so emotionally taxing. This conclusion is cemented when Allie terminates her engagement with Lon (James Marsden), a sweet, grounded, charismatic soldier whose only flaw is that he can offer none of the thinly veiled instability Noah brings. Movies like “The Notebook” at once patronize and illude the audience, as relational abuse rears its ugly head and we are meant to see beauty written across its face. Still, the most perilous part of these stories is not the lies they tell but the truths they speak to. Clinical psychologist Dr. Tony Ortega refutes the notion that enemies to lovers dynamics are exclusive to fiction, claiming “if (a) pattern of verbal sparring is consistent and well-tolerated by both parties, it will build up to become stimulating…it almost provides a safer outlet than love to be passionate with someone you can’t stand.” Here, Dr. Ortega necessarily differentiates love from unhealthy attachment– a line ordinarily opaque in enemies to lovers narratives. He also demonstrates the ease with which relational turbulence can become addictive. Take the aphorism that “love conquers all.” Unconsciously, we imagine love as a conqueror— tyrannical, unforgiving, all-consuming, and all-powerful. There is a violence within its portrayal that deserves careful scrutiny. Passion is the essence of the mythology around love. It is the reason we enshrine love in films, novels, and poems. Passion becomes a misshapen shadow of itself in tumultuous relationships both on and off-screen when it supersedes “care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust– ” six facets social critic bell hooks deems integral to love. 

In 1960s interracial love stories, passion prevailed. These tales engaged in a predative kind of mimicry– seamlessly camouflaged, shrouded in unifying messaging, they made themselves appear innocuous. In actuality, they espoused a colorblind rhetoric coated in denial and fashioned ahistorical accounts from tenuous threads. However, even the most misinformed depictions of interracial romances were impermissible under Hollywood’s Motion Picture Production Code, or Hays Code. Introduced in 1930, the Hays Code imposed stringent moral regulations to avert audiences’ sympathies from what they deemed “the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil, or sin.” Cinematic portrayals of relationships between Black and white individuals were fixed firmly on this side until a 1956 revision eliminated the Hays Code’s anti-miscegenation clause. Interracial marriage remained illegal until Loving v. Virginia’s momentous conclusion in 1967, in which the Supreme Court ruled restrictions on interracial marriage infringements the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.

 “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” (1967) was released exactly six months after the landmark decision, when a meager 20% of the American population endorsed marriage between Black and white people. From beginning to end, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” is at odds with its own historical context, a dissonance rooted in its want for white appraisal. In the film, John Prentice (Sindey Poitier), a Black doctor, challenges the prejudices and wins the affections of his white fiancé’s parents. John gains acceptance from his parents-in-law and the apprehensive white viewers they represent through his proximity to institutions from which African-Americans were traditionally excluded; these include the prestigious education he attained at Johns Hopkins University and the generational wealth that made it possible. To rectify the warped perception of Black masculinity in racist cinema like “Birth of a Nation” (1915), director Stanley Kramer fabricated a “distinguished, race-neutral Black man.” In a heated conversation with his father, John explicitly espouses the post-racial rhetoric at the heart of the film. John tells him, “you think of yourself as a colored man. I think of myself as a man,”  a hollow trademark of the color-blind youth culture the film projects. The film is also set exclusively in San Francisco and Geneva, a strategic choice by the filmmakers to absolve themselves of the responsibility to confront harsher racial realities plaguing the American South. For director Stanley Kramer, John’s marriage to Joanna (Katharine Houghton) represents the power of love to erode racial boundaries. Ultimately, John’s character serves as a mouthpiece for gradual integration against the backdrop of a burgeoning Black Power movement. In parallel with cross-class romances, careless omission of institutional racism corrodes any semblance of progressive messaging that the filmmakers of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” present.

“Purple Hearts” (2022) is a love story that reinscribes its social context with a similar imprudence. Beset by financial troubles, Cassie (Sofia Carson) a liberal singer and Luke, a conservative marine trainee (Nicholas Galzantine) initiate a fraudulent romance to reap marriage benefits from the military. As their relationship sheds its artificiality, it fosters a culture of contempt that is familiarly and wrongfully framed as a passionate love. With director Elizabeth Allen Rosenbaum at the helm, the film treats Luke’s disrespect towards Cassie as a necessary evil to mold her liberal inclinations into a resigned centrism. Rosenbaum states, “for the red heart and the blue heart to… turn purple, you have to have them be kind of extreme… they learn to become more moderate and to listen to each other and to love.” If we continue to follow bell hooks’ parameters, we know that abuse and neglect negate love and therefore rule out such a classification of Luke and Cassie’s attachment. On one occasion, Luke disparages Cassie’s mother for immigrating without the required documents. When she challenges his marine friend’s blatant Islamophobia, Luke commands Cassie to take a seat, slams his fist on the table, and deserts the room after his outburst. Domineering to a dangerous degree, he exhibits rage any time she makes a choice independent of him. These are not opportunities for compromise as Rosenbaum suggests, nor are they little sparks of passion. His bouts of violence are solar flares and we risk Icarus’ fate when we indulge them or even think to construe them romantically. The enemies to lovers trope too often ensnares one or both partners and suspends them in a cycle of abuse. In this story, unabating victimization wears Cassie down as she grows increasingly permissive of Luke’s bigotry. In a particularly unnerving scene, Cassie serenades Luke with the words, “my thoughts aren’t mine now. They’re yours.” As in many enemies to lovers narratives, the manipulation at play here is twofold, preying not only on Cassie but also on the audience. Viewers are expected to sanction the atrocities born of American militarism, most pertinently its indefensible assault on Iraqi civilians. The film’s conclusion is so fundamentally irresponsible that it almost appears to satirize its own subject matter; unfortunately, it lacks that kind of depth. As a final charade of mutual understanding, an American flag joins Cassie’s front yard display next to her Pride and Black Lives Matter flags. 

Despite their glaring flaws, people continue to consume stories where enmity or social stratification builds the foundation of a romance on fault lines. This is because the transparency and predictability of this friction sedates the fear with which many of us approach relationships. When we can anticipate the friction within fiction, we feel a sense of safety and a degree of control that is entirely unsound. Narratives built around systemic inequality and relational abuse are rarely handled with the nuance and care they require. In many renditions of the enemies to lovers trope, the language around love becomes oppressive and its portrayal deceptive. In 1930s cross-class romances, 1960s interracial love stories, and their modern iterations, we have developed entire narratives around our perception of love as a conqueror. Love loses its integrity when it becomes an agent of destruction, eroding autonomy and denying systemic inequality and abuse out of existence.