Romance is about relationships.  No matter the genre, if you write Romance, you’re writing about relationships.  The obvious focus is the relationship between your hero and heroine.  But there are many other relationships in our stories.  And one of the most complicated, sometimes more complicated than the one between a man and a woman, is the relationship between female friends. 

In my WIP, my heroine’s best friend plays an important role.  As the relationship between the hero and heroine grows closer, the heroine and her best friend grow further apart.  It starts with the heroine not completely confiding something to the best friend, and of course, the best friend knows right away she’s holding back.  We always know.  It eventual spirals into the best friend saying horrible things to the heroine and then seemingly doing the worst thing imaginable.  Lets just say, without the best friend, I wouldn’t have a black moment.

Then there’s the relationship between family members.  Friendship is complicated, but we all know you can walk away from a friendship and the result is you’re no longer friends.  You can walk away from family all you want, you’re still family.  There’s an invisible connection that cannot be severed.  It can be frayed down to a single thread, but it’s almost never broken.

This is the one area of a story where I believe real life experience comes into play.  If you’ve reached the age of six, you’ve experienced both friendship and family ties.  In most cases anyway.  I admit the best friend in my story is based partially on a real person.  And the problems with the friendship are based in reality.  In another story I have planned, there’s a difficult relationship between two very different brothers.  All kinds of reality will go into that one.

Do you spend a lot of time on these kinds of relationships in your stories? Or do you stick solely to the hero and heroine and not think much about the secondary relationships?   Is there an author you think does these kinds of relationships well?  I instantly think of the amazing groups of female friends and the sisters that Eloisa James creates.