I had another entry on relationships a while ago. This is a spinoff on it, based on the creative writing articles at http://www.springhole.net/writing/relationships-romance-and-shipping.htm

I fully agree with the writer, and I know I have found these concepts before, in other creative writing books and articles. Some of the rules of writing romance are:

1. The characters need to communicate with each other, not only to gaze silently and sigh. To engage their love interest in meaningful conversation. How are they supposed to bond if they don’t even communicate?

2. The characters need to be aware of each other’s emotional needs and boundaries and one shouldn’t hate a major trait of the other (unless willing to overcome that hate, because this is possible too), because one can't actually love a person without accepting what the person actually is.

3. Don’t rush or take shortcuts in showing the relationship develop – show them in detail. Glossing over important relationship developments doesn’t do the story any favour. It makes it impossible for the readers to believe in the characters’ relationship or friendship, because it doesn’t create that emotional experience.

4. Don’t drop in a romance or crush out of nowhere, without a logical explanation and a gradual approach.

All these are true - however, how many times one has seen the opposite in their stories? How many times one has picked up somebody's request for a lover... just not having them thread enough together in order to develop said relationship? How many times characters are avoiding effective communication and apply to offscreen shortcuts which make the relationship feel flat? And how many times writers (and therefore characters) vanish mid-story, leaving the other character in the air, and trying the best to glue back the shards into something to allow them to go on?

How can a character go on after several such misfortunes, especially if they happen in a short story time? And how believable can be such a progression? Or, by contrary, if seeming unaffected... how it is possible, either? Why don't all the writers keep into consideration the creative writing rules and don't want to keep consistency in their stories?