Let’s say the following action beat is given:
Character A is fucking character B in the missionary position. Partway through, A grabs B’s hand and holds it above their head.
Depending on where you’re at in the resolution of the emotional stakes, the action can mean entirely different things to both characters. Which would you most like to read?
Full emotional resolution, it’s a romantic gesture
No emotional potential acknowledged, it’s a precursor to bondage
Character B wants it to be a romantic gesture but thinks it's about bondage
Character A intends it romantically but pretends it's about bondage
Sexual and emotional anticipation are not at all two separate things. They’re interwoven and in a lot of stories they culminate at the same time. On the other hand, there are a lot of tropes specific to romance that intentionally misalign sexual and emotional anticipation purposely. Any variation of the “it’s just sex until we catch feelings” storyline does this. Any story that has the leads on a different timeline to realizing their feelings does this. In a lot of romance novels, and in some movies and TV shows, physical attraction and sex happen early on whereas emotional attraction and romance are later.
This may be a reading bias of mine, I love a good “friends who hook up to lovers”, but my impression is that queer stories especially frequently contain this. From the ever beloved gay/bi awakening stories that often fall back on “just an experiment” to “friends to lovers” to “we can keep our feelings out of it”, there’s…a lot. And that does throw up some questions to me, because het romance tends to talk about casual sex between two people who will clearly end up not being casual in a very different way. For example, in M/M fiction there’s a frequent focus on men having high sex drives and it being “normal” between male friends to have some level of sexual contact; there’s also more often a higher level of secrecy and drama surrounding a queer couple than a het couple. Erections also tend to happen with little to no stimulation.
I don’t know that it necessarily says a lot about cultural stances towards the LGBTQ+ community or individual author’s preconceptions, but I think it is definitely worth exploring why so many M/M romance novels especially veer towards the following: a) men having a higher sex drive, b) men maintaining sexual contact with each other while not acknowledging it to be in any way non-heterosexual and c) “coming out” stories as a romantic trope rather than a question of personal identities. Not all of them, of course, and none of these things are bad in and of themselves but it is worth questioning why men (especially men in a traditionally masculine setting like frat romances or sports romances) are portrayed as being less in touch with their feelings, more sex-driven and bad at communication. It seems to me to reinforce some stereotypes, especially when you bring in the way sexual position is often used to gender-roles-reinforce.
So what does the addition of emotional anticipation change?
On the one hand, attraction becomes rooted in more than just the physical. The physicality is still there if the attraction hasn’t been consummated, but the POV character begins to imbue it with emotional meaning. This is often where people start being really attracted to features we connotate with someone’s inner world, like their eyes or hands in the context of hands doing/creating/caring. This is also often where acts of service start cropping up, especially if the emotions behind them are still unstated. Think cooking for someone, or taking care of some mundane practical aspect of life for them.
If this is a story where sex happens before emotional resolution, it also ramps up the sexual aspects because the sex becomes imbued with the potential for meaning. It’s not only that the characters are having sex—they’re emotionally conflicted about it because they want it to mean emotional intimacy, but at this stage of the story it doesn’t. Unless of course they interpret physical actions emotionally.
So you have all this attraction and all these actions steadily ramping up the heat and the emotional weight—what’s the reason it doesn’t culminate? In other words, what’s the plot?
3. Impediment(s)
I would separate this into two distinct categories: internal and external impediments. Most stories have both.
Internal impediments can range from personal insecurity to internalized prejudice. In my opinion, internal impediments are very hard to get right. There’s so much that fits in there: Body image issues. Sexual hangups. Sexuality confusion. Tragic backstory. Anthony Bridgerton’s inability to commit emotionally in case his future wife is unknowingly allergic to bee stings. The usual.
The thing about an internal impediment is that it very often manifests as “the other person can’t possibly want me/want to be in a relationship with me because X” past all reasonable doubt and it can get a little trying. Eventually as a reader you reach a point where you’re frustrated with the couple and unclear as to why they won’t talk already.
The same can be true for external impediments—troublesome families, social context (think historical fiction with a big class divide, homophobia, sports romances…), the good old interrupted kiss.
This is not to say internal and external impediments are mutually exclusive—they can and do mirror each other a lot, like with something like internalized homophobia or a character’s sense of responsibility or duty. Think of Henry in Red, White and Royal Blue, who has internalized a sense of responsibility towards the crown despite being treated terribly by it.
When you’re writing about sex, the big question is, how do you keep it sexy with all this emotional stuff going on? Trauma isn’t sexy (look I know there are books that Go There, for the sake of my sanity I’m just going to say that everyone needs to watch Dan Olson’s videos on 50 Shades of Grey to parse why “I like kink because of my tragic backstory” is troubling). Poor communication skills are also not sexy (fight me). But we need to build anticipation somehow—either for that first sex scene or for the emotional resolution. Because we all know there will be a happy ever after, some romance presses even guarantee it. It just has to feel earned.
In cases where emotional and sexual chemistry resolve simultaneously, like in many movies or TV shows, this issue is somewhat circumvented. Physical attraction can build at the same time as emotional intimacy and your impediments are generally clear hindrances to both. When the dam breaks, it breaks on both fronts. In the romance novel format, you get that frequent mismatch between when sexual chemistry and emotional chemistry resolves, and that can lead to some very interesting places in the ensuing sex scenes. There’s a big difference between writing a sex scene where everyone’s emotions are on the table and one where there are a lot of things going unsaid – see the poll above! It is entirely in the author’s hands to walk the fine line between what is believably romantic, believably sexy and has just enough angst to keep you hooked on the will they/won’t they.
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