Friends To Lovers By Rosalie Stanton

21 February 2017

“Men and women can't be friends. So where does it leave us?”

Rosalie Stanton

- When Harry Met Sally

I didn’t believe Harry when he said this. I still don’t, and I’m friends with several heterosexual men. But anyone who knows me also knows that friends-to-lovers is my ultimate trope. I loved reading it well before I started writing it, and over the years, I have found that making my characters friends first is the best way for my muse to get in the game.

There are disadvantages to this, of course. It’s difficult to write a friends-to-lovers story where the friends don’t have non-platonic feelings for each other going in. It’s also hard to make the “he’s secretly in love with her” storyline consistently fresh. I’ve written friends-to-lovers over several subgenres. In my inaugural publication, Firsts, I set about this with a rather straightforward approach—he loves her, she’s clueless; she asks him to take her virginity before college, and things escalate. It was a ton of fun to write, and pretty much sealed my fate as a friends-to-lovers troper for life.

The next friends-to-lovers story came in the form of Lost Wages of Sin. I had just created this new world full of angels, demons, where Lucifer and Jehovah were estranged BFFs, and I needed a romance to tie it all together. In this case, we were talking supernatural beings who have been friends for centuries, where the chemistry was very charged and the feelings mutual but buried under baggage. Getting Ava and Dante together was one of my favorite romance journeys, and just served to make me even hungrier for the trope.

A few months after Lost Wages of Sin came out, my editor at Totally Entwined Group invited me to participate in a motorcycle club anthology. That was all well and good, but I didn’t (and really still don’t) know anything about motorcycle clubs, despite the genre being a hot one. I’d never so much as watched an episode of Sons of Anarchy. So I started with what I did know: Midwestern religion and friends-to-lovers romances. Two friends separated by circumstance for years, reunited in a terrible situation. She the daughter of a conservative preacher, he the screw-up bad boy whose life took a wrong turn. I’m still not sure if the motorcycle club part of the story worked, but I enjoyed getting them where they needed to be.

So by this point, I had three titles behind me that featured a friends-to-lovers story. The first one, a straightforward tale of unrequited love; the second, two paranormal creatures who have been in each other’s lives for centuries, but emotionally strained due to misunderstandings; the third, good girl and the bad boy separated by circumstance and time, only to be thrown together at the worst possible moment. So yes, I’d done it to death.

Here’s the thing about your favorite trope: you never get tired of it. So when my muse needed another kick in the pants, it relied on what it knew to get started. My favorite paranormal creatures are angels and demons, so why not? Why not make an angels and demons paranormal romance with a friends-to-lovers twist? That was how Hellion was born.

Fast-forward to last year. My wonderful publisher puts out a call for BDSM stories. I have read my fair share of BDSM stories, but I’d never written one. At that time, my muse had been rather stagnant—as we can all universally agree, 2016 was a crappy year. So I considered the challenge, wondered if this was the kick-in-the-pants my muse needed to get in the mood.

Magic ingredient? Three guesses.

An Intimate Friendship is the fifth story to feature this trope. Will it be the last? I doubt it. I love finding new ways to bring friends together. Sasha and Walker, like those couples who came before them, brought new energy to my favorite trope. Because even if the trope is the same, the characters are always different. Their journeys to each other have been their own, so for me, it never gets old.

In my writing universe, men and women can be friends…but it’s more fun when they’re more than that.

Rosalie Stanton is an award winning erotic romance author in the paranormal and contemporary genres. A lifelong enthusiast of larger than life characters, Rosalie enjoys building worlds filled with strong heroes and heroines of all backgrounds.

Rosalie lives in Missouri with her husband. At an early age, she discovered a talent for creating worlds, which evolved into a love of words and storytelling. Rosalie graduated with a degree in English. As the granddaughter of an evangelical minister, Rosalie applied herself equally in school in the creative writing and religious studies departments, which had an interesting impact on her writing. When her attention is not engaged by writing or editing, she enjoys spending time with close friends and family.