For most people, an ideal romantic relationship does not start with hating the person you will eventually end up with. On paper, the prospect sounds alarming. Hating the guts of your future spouse sounds like a miserable existence. Falling for a person that was mean to you seems like a gigantic red flag that you would like to be an idiot to miss. And even if you come to an understanding with that person, how could you forget how they acted at the start of your relationship?
However horrible this experience sounds in real life, romance authors have been able to make this experience desirable. Dubbed the “enemies to lovers” trope by fans of romance, this phenomenon of two people despising each other and then ending up together at the end of the story has become a rapid success.
The oldest and maybe most well known use of this trope is Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice where the two lead characters start the novel at odds with each other and end the novel together. People have deemed this to be acceptable in this novel, and some deem the male lead Mr. Darcy to be the most desirable male lead in any romance novel ever.
To explore this trope in further detail, I will be analyzing the newest season of Netflix’s hit show Bridgerton. In this new season, based on the novel The Viscount Who Loved Me by Julia Quinn, the enemies to lovers trope is front and center and in my opinion, it is done perfectly.
For those unfamiliar with the show, it centers around the Bridgerton family, who are incredibly wealthy in regency England. The family patriarch had died many years before, leaving one of this season’s protagonists, Anthony, to be in charge and help raise his seven siblings. At the start of the season he has decided it is time for him to get married, with the stipulation that he will not love his future wife. Our other protagonist, Kate Sharma, is a newcomer to England. She is trying to get her younger sister Edwina married to a rich man so that her family will no longer be struggling. When Kate meets Anthony, she immediately dislikes him and he shares the same opinion. Kate’s sister, Edwina is deemed by the Queen to be the best eligible lady out of all the other girls that are looking for a husband. So despite hating each other, Anthony wants Edwina to be his wife, and has to gain Kate’s approval in order to marry her.
So now you know the circumstances of this story, I will tell you how the show effectively turns these enemies into lovers. From their first meeting, both Kate and Anthony have hated each other, but they have to spend time together. As the season progresses, we see them spend more and more time together, and start to understand each other. They both learn that they are incredibly similar, both taking charge of their families after the deaths of their fathers. We also start to see the aspect that makes this specific relationship interesting and desired by other women. The undeniable fact is that Anthony respects Kate as a person, he puts her on the same level as other men, he respects her so much that he hates her. Most men view women as inferior and when they hate them it’s mainly because they are women and in their eyes are not worth becoming their enemies.
Once this understanding of just how similar they are, and how much respect they have for each other, we watch the transition from enemies to lovers. I don’t want to spoil exactly what happens in the show, but this season uses this trope so effectively I recommend it to anyone who likes this trope, or anyone that wants to watch a good romance.