Who Wins the Love Triangle

In recent years, love triangles have been all the rage. The most popular ones are from The Vampire Diaries, ACOTAR, My Life with the Walter Boys, The Summer I Turned Pretty, Twilight, Never Have I Ever, XO Kitty, and Ginny and Georgia.

Love triangles are popular because they act as an amazing point of conflict that helps drive the plot forward. They turn intimate emotional conflicts into high-stakes public drama.

However, what I want to look at is who really wins and how it happens.

All over social media, there are polls and posts about which of the boys in these triangles are better. Even though The Vampire Diaries is over a decade old, there are still people asking, ‘Are you team Damon or Stefan?’ As new stories pop up, these questions arise again and again.

Many times, people choose the ‘bad brother.’ They choose the one who’s troubled and sad. They choose the man who needs fixing, the one who asks for them and fights for them. (I have a whole other article about this interesting phenomenon that I’ll be posting later.) Sometimes, the showrunners make these decisions because of the viewers’ reactions. They might have had other plans, but the popularity of the couple makes them survive.

Now, sometimes the heroine’s choice is obvious. Other times it needs to be forced.

The character who loses might have done something unforgivable. They might have done something that goes against who they are that makes the heroine think that this man isn’t who she thought he was. Sometimes, the character loses his memory and falls in love with someone else. Or maybe… to make the choice all the more easier, he just dies.

But when we look at these stories closely, we begin to notice a pattern. The losing character is rarely allowed to remain a genuine contender until the very end. Something happens to make him less desirable, less available, or simply less right for the heroine. The man who once seemed like the perfect choice suddenly has flaws that cannot be ignored. The man who was once a terrible choice begins to look like the only one who truly understands her.

And that raises an interesting question. Does the heroine actually choose the person she loves more, or does the story slowly eliminate every other possibility until there is only one person left to choose? After all, a choice is only meaningful when there are real alternatives. If one man is written as increasingly cruel, another is made unavailable, and the final contender is given every opportunity to prove his love, how much of the decision belongs to the heroine, and how much belongs to the writer?

This is where love triangles become particularly interesting. The question is not simply who gets the girl, but what the story has to do to make that ending feel inevitable. Sometimes, the winning character earns his place. Sometimes, the losing character makes mistakes that genuinely change the heroine’s feelings. And sometimes, the narrative seems so determined to bring two people together that it has to bend the characters, their circumstances, and even their established personalities to make it happen.