Bad Love

Reading Headstone City by Tom Piccirilli reminded me that even when a book isn’t a love story, a relationship I don’t like will kill my interest.
I’m not talking about changing concepts of What Love Is (as discussed here), but about looking at the hero or heroine’s dream SO and thinking What, Him? Jeez! Among the causes:
•I hate the romantic lead. One of the things I disliked about the Anita Blake books (though not what stopped me reading them) was the vampire Jean-Claude becoming her lover. He’s the kind of alpha-male protagonist I loathe, arrogant, swaggering, nowhere near as charming as Hamilton thinks, invariably has the upper hand and loathsomely smug about it (YMMV, of course). I feel toward Jean-Claude as French peasants felt about aristocrats in 1789.
•I can’t imagine why she/he’s with him/her.
In Olivia Goldsmith’s Bad Boys, the heroine’s boyfriend is, I think, supposed to be a roguishly charming Bad Boy. He’s so devoid of charm, it’s hard to imagine why she puts up with him. We’re told the sex is incredible, but that requires a seriously hot sex scene; Goldsmith isn’t the sort to write those, so she just tells us it was awesome. I remain unconvinced (I don’t normally require graphic details, but when the sex is significant to the character, it needs enough detail to justify it).
In The Manchurian Candidate film, Janet Leigh’s willingness to ditch her fiancee for Frank Sinatra’s troubled soldier is just as implausible, a flaw in an otherwise brilliant film. In The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, I likewise cannot fathom why Liz, a quiet librarian, takes such interest in the drunken, burned-out Alec Leamas——though the book remains awesome despite that (I’ll talk about it more this weekend).
•I’ve seen it all before.
Headstone City starts well with the sees-dead-people protagonist returning to his old Brooklyn neighborhood despite the contract on his head. However it doesn’t go anywhere after that and then, mid-book, the hero meets a hot starlet and they wind up in the sack. It felt like umpty zillion movies where the lead actress’s character gets hot for the much less impressive hero just because he’s the protagonist (this also brings in my why-are-they-together point above). I gave up.
Name of the Wind was a terrific fantasy novel until about three fifths of the way through when we get what seems like an interminable idyll between the protagonist and his dream girl. She struck me as a stock type: Beautiful, upper-class, so far above the hero he can’t dream she’d want him, but then she does! Only her family are on hard times and she’s clearly determined to do whatever it takes (marry rich for instance) to change things, so it’s obvious she’s going to break his heart (I haven’t read the second book, so I may be wrong). If she’d been a minor player, I’d be okay with that, but this was a looooong idyll (the drug dealer who sells the hero his alchemical amphetamines would have been much more interesting).
Annoyingly, this is a subjective enough topic I can’t really draw a lesson from it for my own writing, other than to make the relationship as interesting and believable as possible (no, really?). When I wrote Blood and Steel in my Applied Science series, I already had the logical reasons Dani and Steve were drawn to each other, but I worked hard on the emotional ones, trying to convey the feel of an attraction that would rekindle four years after they met. I think I succeeded. I hope so. Because when fictional love doesn’t work, it is not a many splendored thing.