Writing Romance: The Breakup
If there’s more than one of these, you’ve done something terribly wrong. In my case, most breakups happened when one side died. This was how most all relationships in sixth year ended. So I’m going to skip over those and focus instead on two relationships where it didn’t end with someone dying: Sally-Anne Perks and Viktor Krum, and Harry Potter and Ellie Langley.
Background: Both couples got together after the Yule Ball in fourth year. Sally-Anne, being friends with everyone at Hogwarts (including the visiting students), got to know Viktor Krum while finding out who was friends with whom for the second task. After encouragement from her former prefect, Alexandra “Alex” Nertlyn, she accepted his invitation to the Yule Ball. At the time, she had a crush on Harry, but after finding Ellie, a mute girl from Hufflepuff, pining for the only boy she knew that knew sign language well enough to understand her, Sally-Anne pushed her toward Harry, who could read lips (note: the fact that a mute girl was able to mouth words well enough to be understood, which is hard to do in general, was a mistake on my part).
Sally-Anne and Viktor stayed together through fourth year and into fifth year, until Viktor had an accident that warranted the removal of his eyes. Believing his Quidditch career over, he told Sally-Anne never to speak to him again, pushing her away so she wouldn’t be “wasted on him”. She later remarks to her parents that she likes helping people, and she didn’t want to be with someone too chivalrous to ever accept her help.
This was a valid reason for breaking up. They were two different people, with different plans for their respective futures. Viktor was noble and chivalrous, but expected that he’d be the one earning money, while his wife stayed home taking care of the kids. Sally-Anne was proactive and liked helping people, while Viktor refused to show weakness around her. These traits were shown throughout their time together (even if not always well), so while it hit Sally-Anne hard, it wasn’t entirely out of nowhere.
Harry and Ellie broke up due in part to Ellie’s insecurities. She’d lived her life as a burden to everyone around her, already thrown aside by her friend Max for another girl. When she found out Sally-Anne at one point had feelings for Harry, and that Harry had at one point had feelings for Cho Chang, she refused to be second place again. She pushed him away before he broke her heart, despite the fact that he had no intention of doing so.
There are a few takeaways from both of these. The first is define your characters well. The reasons for breaking up should be believable, and not involve “because the plot says so”. Establish that the two of them are too different to be together, or that there’s some major issue they can’t look beyond. The second is that while both of these breakups came out of nowhere, that’s because they were both set off by something that happened out of nowhere. Sometimes bad things happen, and things simply go horribly wrong. Even so, make the breakups believable. If the characters have become unhappy with one another, one will eventually end things.
Like everything else, breakups should be realistic. They will be emotional moments, as they are in real life. If the phrase “if only they’d talk to one another, they’d be alright” fits the situation, there should be a good reason they’re not talking. Breakups happen for all kinds of reasons, so if they break up, the reasons should fit the characters.
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