I’m a teenage girl and maybe I’m an anomaly but I’ve never had to choose between two ridiculously handsome guys that are fighting over me. Come to think of it, none of my friends have either. In fact I don’t think I’ve heard of a single real teenager being involved in the trauma that is a love triangle. So why are there so many damn love triangles in YA books?
I may have never had to choose between my own Peeta and Gale or Edward and Jacob, but I’ve certainly had my fair share of friendship triangles. For those of who you who don’t know what that is (which is entirely fair enough – it’s not exactly a technical term) it’s basically the frienship equivalent of a love triangle, that is to say having to make hard choices between friends and the jealousy and friction which can occur in mutiple people friendships.
One of these struggles I can remember most vividly is when I moved to secondary, with many of my friends from my primary and obviously got introduced to a whole new pool of potential friends, one of whom I became close with pretty much immeadiately. We had surnames that began with the same letter, meaning we sat next to each other in pretty much every lesson and had lots of similar interests. This caused conflict between me and my best friend, who felt like she’d been replaced and over time we grew apart. Now we’re acquaintances and we make polite chat regularly but we’re not at all close. Of course, I can only tell my side of the story and how I experienced things and I can’t speak for either of the other girls but this is just one fo the many examples I have in my own life of the challenging dynamics of friendships.
So if this is such a real struggle occuring in teenager’s lives, why is so rarely depicted in young adult novels? Why are we so insistent on focusing on romantic turmoil? Perhaps it’s simply because it makes better reading and forces readers to pick sides, getting them invested in the book. Or maybe it’s due to the fact friendships can be a lot more painful and real for a lot of us.
I’m 18 years old and I’ve never been on a date or been in a relationship. I have had and continue to have countless friends. They are some of the most important people in my life and I don’t know what my life would look like without them. Currently I am more than perfectly happy being single and I see no difference in happiness between my single friends and those who are dating. But when people have difficulties with their friendships, that’s when they really struggle. If this is really the case, why don’t YA books reflect the world teenagers actually live in?
Luckily, not all YA books are lacking meaningful friendships that have their ups and downs, so to end I thought I’d share some of my favourite books with a focus on friendships or that contain friendship triangles.
Beautiful Broken Things by Sara Barnard
Moxie by Jennifer Mathieu
The Spinster Club series by Holly Bourne
The Revenge Playbook by Rachael Allen
alwaysopinionatedgirl 
Another Night of Reading
Great point! I think I tend to like YA that focusses on friendships more than YA that focusses on romantic relationships but I’ve never realized it this concretely.
Jessica @ The Book Bratz
Thanks for writing a post on this — I really enjoyed reading it! I too love books that really focus on friendships — sometimes moreso than I do books that focus on relationships, and that’s coming from a huge romance novel fan!
Haley
I also never experienced a love triangle (either as a teenager or now as an adult). One of my friends did have two boys who liked her at the same time in high school, but she didn’t actually like either of them, and there was never any real “fighting over her” like you see in books. It also didn’t last that long, since they both got over it.
As you said, though, friendship triangles were a lot more prevalent in my experience. I’d never stopped to think about the lack of them in YA, but it’s a very good point. I know that a mess of a situation I was in during eighth grade (that involved four of us, not even just three) bothered me for so long afterwards that, in high school, it became the basis of the first novel that I actually finished writing. (And no one will ever see it because it became far too personal to share with the world, as the characters would be completely recognizable to everyone who knew/knows us.) So much happened during that year that bothered me for years afterward, and I really might have benefited from having more examples of similar situations in books, since I had absolutely no idea how to handle it at the time and ended up taking everything very, very hard.
Aj @ Read All The Things!
We definitely need more YA about friendships. When I was a teenager, friendship drama caused a lot more problems than romance drama. I was also in a friendship triangle. I had two friends who had similar personalities. They were both loud and liked to be the center of attention. They hated each other and always seemed to be competing for attention. It got annoying really fast.
nosestuckinabook
YES!!! I severely hate love triangles bc they’re so unrealistic. I won’t say they never happened bc I can’t speak for the world but it is not a COMMON thing like YA books make it out to be lol. It’s so frustrating. But friendship triangles I 100% know are a thing that I see A LOT. Great post
Jenn @ Bound to Writing
This post is so true about YA not focusing as much on friendships. I didn’t have a great time with friendships in high school which lead to many of us falling out of touch. I did have one friend that would always have to choose between us. There should be more representation about this in YA books.
Marta
Very interesting topic, I haven’t seen many discussions on this subject and I think it’s much needed! ❤ Friendships, in general, aren’t much of a focus in ya books, which is a very tragic thing. I will have to check Moxie soon, I didn’t know it had a focus on friendships as well.
Great post! 😘
boldandfrench
So true! I can’t think oft one except from Harry, Ron and Hermione. Why do YA books always have to be about romance?