The Art of Love

Sun Tzu isn’t remembered as a romantic, but his wisdom on war has more than a few lessons for writing love stories.

For me, love has always been harder to write than war. It’s not that I’ve never experienced love—I have. (I know this because I constantly check with my wife just to make sure.) The challenge is the fear of falling into clichés, or worse, writing in a way that alienates entire groups of people. Do I lean too much on appearances? Is the man too flat, too stale, too cruel? Is the woman too helpless, too defensive, too quiet?

Meanwhile, Romantasy books are flying off shelves, and so many authors seem to have this “love thing” figured out. At some point, I know I just have to wrestle with it myself.

In the book I’m working on now, one of my characters is stumbling into a love story, and I feel like I’m stumbling right along with him. The only way I’ve found to make sense of these complicated feelings (both for him and for myself) is to think of love the way I think of war. Both demand struggle, sacrifice, and even a measure of brokenness. But while war is a contest of will, fought to impose yourself on another through force, love is its mirror image: a contest of selflessness, where you give everything you can for someone else, even when they don’t deserve it.

War, by its nature, is a two-player game. Love isn’t always so clear.

So, what can we learn? By breaking down the key elements, both practical and deeply emotional, we can find a few strategies to crack the code.

Before we begin, a disclaimer: this post is about writing romantic arcs and how they relate to war. It’s not a guide to actual relationships or conflict management.

We all know how a good duel is supposed to go. Nobody should win in a landslide—it has to feel earned. Both combatants need moments where they seem to have the upper hand, forcing the reader to lean forward, biting their nails, unsure of how it will play out.

The trouble is, readers usually do know. They see the stack of pages left and can guess which characters are safe—at least until the end. So the real question is: how do we make the journey feel dangerous, unpredictable, and alive?

Romance works the same way. We often know who's going to end up togehter from the moment they lock eyes, but that doesn't stop us from wanting the chase, the uncertainty, the sparks of conflict and reconciliation. Just like a duel, a love story thrives on tension—not in the outcome, but in the struggle to get there.

As one legendary author, Brandon Sanderson said, "Journey before destination."

You need a certain momentary uncertainty, that builds personal stakes. Even when the ending is predictable (the hero wins, the lovers unit), the path must feel uncertain. Heroes can still loose a battle and derail their entire mission, and lovers can cheat and argue their way into breaking up.

In The Lord of the Rings, the Battle of Helm's Deep feel's desperate. I still get a little bit sweaty even when thinking about it. Even though readers know Rohan probably won't fall, or at least that this battle won't literally stop Frodo from delivering the Ring, the tension spiles when the walls are breached, when Aragorn nearly dies, and when all seems lost before Gandalf arrives. Each moment makes us wonder, "How much longer can they hold?" While we assume the heroes will not outright die and fail their mission, we can assume the stakes of the battle. We know what this means, and how much destruction and turmoil it would mean for the battle to be lost.

To connect this point over to romance, in Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth and Darcy's filled exchanges keep readers uncertain. Even though it's obvious they'll end up together, every misunderstand and sharp remark makes us question how it will ever happen. The heartbeat isn't in the end, it's in how the end will ever happen. The goal is to make your reader think things are so broken, they'll never be fixed.

At its core, love and battle share the same truth: they're messy, dangerous, and not half as noble as we sometimes make them out to be. A duel might reveal courage, or it might expose cruelty. Love’s no different. One person’s devotion is another’s heartbreak, and infatuation can drive characters to ruin just as easily as rage. Neither is inherently good. They’re raw, untamed energies that reveal character by how they’re wielded. A battle can be fought in valor or in arrogance; a romance can bloom in generosity or in obsession. Someone falls in love with a person they should or shouldn't have. Those feelings are undeniably real, yet destructive. It's the same force that binds two best friends is the one that rips sacred bonds apart. Rage can be righteous, fueling a knight to stand up and protect others from injustice, but it can also be the reckless edge that turns brotherhood into bloodshed. Both can create, and both can destroy.

To be more specific, these feelings are polar opposites that somehow lead to a similar place when taken to the extreme. While war is about taking, love is about giving. You could define War more clearly as a continuation of policy aimed at forcing your enemy to adopt one's will. There's no inherent moral leaning in the definition of war because your "will" could be something noble like stopping a genocide, or saving the human race. Pure love, on the other hand, is about giving your whole self to another, sacrificing without expecting anything in return. Love is skipping your mandatory business meeting because your wife's car broke down. Love, painfully enough, is being a shoulder to cry on when you know your best friend doesn't love you back.

There is something equally altruistic in prioritizing someone else over ourselves, but it can go dangerous places. Taken to the extreme, self-sacrifice can quickly become a loss of identity. When that "friend" keeps crying on your shoulder, or when your so engrossed in the well-being of your significant other that you lose sight of yourself. That's when selflessness can become an obsession. When co-dependence knocks at the door. In much the same way, total war is destruction. In A Song of Ice and Fire, how many main characters die because they become drunk on battle? Pride comes before the fall, but in epic fantasy that typically takes shape through an overeager charge, a fatal misjudgment of enemy forces, or blindly trusting the wrong allies. All of it ends in death, in losing sight of who you are and who you hoped to be.

And for us as writers, or curious readers, that’s the real opportunity. Don’t just write love as sweetness or battle as bloodshed—write them as catalysts. Treat them as trials that magnify who your characters truly are, for better or worse. In both cases, the stakes aren’t just about who wins the fight or who gets the kiss. The stakes are about what the struggle makes of them.

So, in a practical sense, battle and love both thrive on tension and personal stakes—the push and pull that keeps readers leaning forward. But on a deeper, metaphorical level, they’re also mirrors of the human condition: raw forces that can elevate or corrupt, bind people together or tear them apart. And that’s where their true similarity lies. Neither is simply good or bad. They’re crucibles. Put your characters through them, and you’ll see what they’re really made of.

In the end, that's why storytellers keep returning to love and war. They're the oldest engines of drama we know, the trials every culture tells stories about. To write them well isn't just to write a convincing battle scene or heart wrenching romance—it's to step into the ancient fire and wrestle with what it means to be human.