Romance: yay or nay

Says you, a successful woman can run a planet from between her thighs.

I'd say Aaron has a big part of it right. Emotional maturity in the writers, being reasonable, grown up, and having had proper relationships in the past, is so important.

I think the other key importance is that, just like in real life, you can't force a romantic involvement for a character, especially with another player character. The characters have to be right, both as individuals and for each other. I've seen a lot - I don't want to say most, but definitely a lot - that have been entirely forced. The writers decided they wanted to write a romance together (sometimes as an aside to or in place of some romantic engagement they harboured themselves, which often goes wrong) and have just thrown two characters, that made little sense together, together, purely because they decided they wanted to write a romance. Then things quickly escalate to marriage, children, stereotypes and cliche, all of it contrived, unrealistic, and entirely to fast.

In my opinion, deciding to write a romance that way is a bad idea. If you want to explore a romantic aspect of your character, and want to do it well, then these things need to take time, they need to happen for a reason, with the right person and under the right circumstances, there needs to be challenges along the way, and ultimately, they need to be done with a sense of realism. Dav and Tebana are probably the longest standing couple on JvS. Written by myself and Betti (Tebana's writer) since the very early days of 1.0, where their romance built from a basis in friendship, and continuing to this day (albeit with Tebana predominantly NPC'd by me for the past year or two). For me, the joy of Dav and Tebana's relationship was that neither of us planned it or intended it. Neither of us had any intention at all to have our characters in a romantic relationship - quite to the contrary, I actually was more inclined to have Dav completely avoid any kind of romance RP. What happened was that we wrote together more or less every single day, the characters went through hell with one another, their closeness grew quite organically over time, and Betti and I reached the mutual realisation that our characters, if they were real people, probably would have had feelings for each other, based solely on their interactions and the way that relationship had developed IC. We'd never set out to write that, it had never been manoeuvred or planned, it just came very, very naturally out of their repeated interactions and growing closeness.

Most importantly of all, it was also always exclusively IC. There was no OOC blurring of that line. Our characters were in a relationship; we, as writers, were not. We're very good friends, the best of them, but never anything other than that. I think because we weren't interested in each other as writers, and because we'd never set out to make it happen, we could write our characters free from any kind of trappings, any kind of preconceptions or any kind of complexities caused by OOC. Kept it simple, kept it natural, and kept it real.