[Note from Frolic: Today, we welcome author Alanna Martin to the site. She’s talking all things forbidden love. Take it away, Alanna!]
Forbidden love—why are the people we’re not supposed to want often the most enticing? Well, probably for the same reason that the easiest way to discover you want something is for someone to tell you that you can’t have it. Every parent knows that the moment you tell a child “no” is the moment the forbidden object becomes the most tempting. Or how about those occasions when you can’t decide between two options, so you flip a coin? Suddenly the losing decision sounds like the better choice.
In social psychology, this can often be explained via reactance theory, which essentially states that the moment we feel we’ve lost a freedom to do or have something, the more determined we become to fight back against that feeling of loss. But whatever the cause, there’s no question that the very idea that we “can’t” or “shouldn’t” makes us “want” all the more. And when that “want” is a person, the allure is all the sweeter—and the more fun to read about.
In my own family feud forbidden love story, Heart on a Leash, the main characters are both family rebels. They aren’t interested in their families’ drama, and they certainly don’t expect love to grow from from what’s supposed to be secret, short-term fling. But if everything went as planned, where would the fun be? Not surprisingly, their families are willing to do whatever it takes to break them apart, and the more pressure their families place on my would-be happy couple, the more determined they become to defy them.
While Heart on a Leash is a pretty straightforward forbidden love romance, one of the best parts of the forbidden love trope is that it can take so many forms. After all, there are as many reasons why two people can’t be allowed to be together as there are romantic set-ups. Sometimes, too, that feeling of forbidden love is hiding in plain sight, tucked away beneath other tropes, making us not realize how much of a story’s tension is hanging on the “shouldn’t.”
Here are five of my favorite examples of forbidden love which tackle the trope in very different ways.