Relational Inequalities in Fiction Writing

So today I wanted to talk about relationships.

No, this isn’t just for Romance books. This is about all relationships–your antagonist and his second-in-command, your hero and her best friend, and even the protagonist and the antagonist (chances are, if they’re fighting each other for any length of time, they have a relationship, albeit a bad one).

When people are in relationship, they come in with expectations. Hopes. Goals. They want something from the relationship or they wouldn’t bother having one. They’d just move on. The protagonist could find a new villain to fight by moving to a new city (or find an isolated spot to live where there are no villains–the arctic, anyone?). The villain could kill off the second-in-command. The hero and her best friend could get into a fight, or just stop talking and drift apart.

But one of the biggest, unspoken challenges in a relationship is…