Top 5 fake dating romances that actually work

Given that I have spent a frankly unreasonable amount of time thinking about The Love Hypothesis recently, it would be ridiculous not to start here.

Olive needs her best friend, Anh, to believe she’s moved on from Jeremy. So when Anh unexpectedly appears while Olive is supposedly on a date, Olive panics and kisses the nearest available man.

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately in the long run), that man is Adam Carlsen.

What I think The Love Hypothesis gets right is that the initial setup is absurd, but Olive’s emotional logic makes sense. She loves Anh. She wants Anh to be happy. And once Anh believes Olive is dating someone, maintaining the lie feels easier than admitting that Olive manufactured the entire relationship to convince her best friend that she is free to pursue someone Olive genuinely doesn’t want to be with.

Adam also has his own reasons to participate (multiple reasons actually — not just what he tells Olive), which means the arrangement isn’t entirely being dragged along by Olive’s original lie.

More importantly, fake dating changes the way they interact. In that, suddenly, they are interacting.

The scheduled dates, public affection and increasingly blurred boundaries give Olive and Adam opportunities to know each other outside the roles they’ve assigned one another. Adam stops being the terrifying professor everyone warns Olive about. Olive stops being simply the PhD student who kissed him without warning. She does continue being the girl he’s been pining over for three years. It’s just that he can now pine closer to her.

The fake relationship creates space for a real one.

And yes, I still have significant feelings about that opening kiss, as anyone who has read my recent The Love Hypothesis book vs movie comparison already knows.

But the fake dating machinery itself? That works.

Luc needs a respectable boyfriend. Oliver needs a date. Neither particularly wants the other.

Perfect. 10/10. No notes.

The arrangement in Boyfriend Material works because Luc and Oliver both have something practical to gain from it. Luc’s public image is causing problems for his job, and Oliver is exactly the kind of respectable boyfriend who can help rehabilitate it.

It’s transactional from the beginning.

Except pretending to date means they actually have to spend time together.

And that’s where this one gets me.

The fake relationship gradually forces both Luc and Oliver to confront things they’d rather avoid. They’re not simply performing affection for an audience while remaining exactly the same people underneath. The arrangement starts exposing vulnerabilities, insecurities and assumptions they’ve made about each other.

I talked about this in my Editor’s Lens post because I think it’s one of the strongest things fake dating can do: the fake relationship changes the characters.

Eventually, the problem isn’t convincing everyone else that they’re together. It’s convincing themselves that what has developed between them is still pretend.

Also, Past Meeghan’s review described this as the adorable romance we all needed during the shit show that was 2020, and frankly, Past Meeghan was correct.

This might be one of my absolute favourites… and now that I’m thinking about it, I may need to write a whole essay on this book to movie adaptation.

Lara Jean and Peter are one of the quintessential fake dating couples for me because their relationship understands something fundamental about this trope: pretending can sometimes feel safer than being honest.

Their arrangement begins with both of them wanting something from the performance. Lara Jean needs to convince Josh that she isn’t interested in him after her secret love letters escape into the world. Peter wants to make Gen jealous.

Fake dating gives them rules. Rules are safe. Real feelings are significantly less cooperative.

What makes this romance work is watching those boundaries gradually become meaningless. And I really do mean meaningless. The relationship starts as something they’re performing for everyone else, but increasingly, their private interactions become the most genuine part of it. So when they start breaking their agreed list of rules, neither of them seems particularly concerned about it.

And Lara Jean changes because of that.

She becomes more willing to be vulnerable and more confident about expressing what she actually wants rather than keeping all of her romantic feelings safely contained in letters nobody was ever supposed to read.

The relationship begins as performance. Eventually, it’s one of the places where Lara Jean doesn’t have to perform at all.

And THAT is exactly what I want fake dating to do.

The Deal is slightly different because Garrett and Hannah’s arrangement isn’t initially just “let’s pretend we’re dating”.

Hannah has a crush on a cool, aloof guy who barely seems to notice her. Garrett, understanding what I can only describe as Boy Logic™, suggests that if the guy Hannah likes sees Hannah as desirable to another cool guy, he might realise he wants her too.

So Garrett agrees to play Hannah’s fake boyfriend.

In return, Hannah tutors Garrett because he desperately needs to pass an exam. Again: romance-novel logic.

I accept the ridiculous terms and conditions. (I do not accept the ridiculous Boy Logic™.)

But the reason this works for me is that the fake dating isn’t the whole relationship. It’s what gets them spending actual time together, and from there the arrangement changes.

Hannah trusts Garrett enough to tell him about her past trauma, and their deal eventually expands into intimacy coaching because she wants to “get over” what happened before she sleeps with the guy she actually likes.

Sadly for Hannah, that’s not how trauma works.

Luckily for Garrett (and, eventually, Hannah too), what they are building together already contains trust, friendship and genuine intimacy. They’re not instantly in love because the trope demands it, and they’re not only spending time together when someone else is watching. They talk. They learn about each other. Their assumptions shift.

By the time everyone around them assumes they’re together anyway, there’s already a relationship underneath the performance capable of supporting the romance.

That’s the difference between fake dating that works and fake dating that’s simply using forced proximity as a shortcut.

The pretending might put two people together, but it still has to give me a reason to believe they would choose to stay there.

For an entire school year, Bryson Keller has agreed to date whoever asks him out first each Monday. Each person gets one week and that is it. And then Kai asks.

Which makes this one a slightly unusual version of fake dating because Bryson is, technically, fake dating everyone. But Kai’s week with him becomes something entirely different. And this is where the trope gives the story something more than romantic hijinks.

Kai isn’t out.

Dating Bryson within the rules of the challenge gives him a strange little protected space in which he can experience something he isn’t yet ready to claim publicly. There’s an agreed endpoint. There are rules. The relationship is temporary.

Except, of course, feelings are highly disrespectful of administrative arrangements. Which also, same.

What I loved about this book when I originally read it was how authentic the characters felt. The romance is adorable, but the fake dating structure also gives Kai somewhere to explore vulnerability, identity and what he actually wants. My original review compared the whole book to hot chocolate, a plushie and a blanket fort covered in fairy lights, and to this day it’s a book that I think of very fondly.

The relationship may have begun because of a dare. What develops inside it doesn’t feel fake at all.