romance physics

the funky mechanics of enemies to lovers

I’m back! trying something different. also, the quotes here are unfortunately devoid of page numbers because all of my copies of the books referenced are digital and therefore unreliable or quotes come from video lectures and I am, at my heart, quite lazy. apologies for the inconvenience! hope you have been well (or as well as one can be, given… everything).

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part I: classical physics¹

A few weeks ago I polled people on Instagram for their holy grail enemies-to-lovers romance novels and was surprised to find that the responses didn’t vary all that much. For all that enemies-to-lovers is much beloved online, the consensus seemed to be that there just aren’t very many good ones, at least in true romance novels. Most of the recommendations were for fantasy novels with romance subplots (namely: The Cruel Prince, which rocks, but is not a romance novel, really.)

I was thinking about enemies-to-lovers because I’ve been watching² a lecture by the feminist theorist and physicist Karen Barad called On Touching: The Alterity Within³. The lecture is a kooky one, possibly not one that a faculty member of a physics department would find charming or persuasive. Barad’s work is unruly in its interdisciplinarity. They talk about quantum field theory and electrons and the void and they talk about transness, queerness, and philosophies of selfhood all in the same breath. In particular, I was taken by the opening of the lecture (emphasis my own):

A common explanation for the physics of touching is that one thing it does not involve is . . . well, touching. That is, there is no actual contact involved. You may think you are touching a coffee mug when you are about to raise it to your mouth, but your hand is not actually touching the mug. Sure, you can feel the smooth surface of the mug’s exterior right where your fingers come into contact with it (or seem to), but what you are actually sensing is the electromagnetic repulsion between the electrons of the atoms that make up your fingers and those that make up the mug. Electrons are tiny negatively charged particles that surround the nuclei of atoms, and having the same charges they repel one another, much like powerful little magnets. As you decrease the distance between them the repulsive force increases. Try as you might, you cannot bring two electrons into direct contact with each other. The reason the desk feels solid, or the cat’s coat feels soft, or we can (even) hold coffee cups and one another’s hands, is an effect of electromagnetic repulsion. All we really ever feel is the electromagnetic force, not the other whose touch we seek. Atoms are mostly empty space, and electrons, which lie at the farthest reaches of an atom, hinting at its perimeter, cannot bear direct contact. Electromagnetic repulsion: negatively charged particles communicating at a distance push each other away. That is the tale physics usually tells about touching. Repulsion at the core of attraction. See how far that story gets you with lovers. No wonder the romantic poets had had enough.

So intimacy, contact, touch, interaction, here, is not so much about opposites attracting as it is about repulsion. We feel other objects because electrons are acting on other electrons, holding them just out of reach. Oddly, we feel close to things because we are being held at an infinitesimal distance.

Barad is being coy when they say “repulsion at the core of attraction,” but because I am evidently wearing romance goggles at all times, there’s a note to it that rings true. I’m thinking about how in The Cruel Prince, repulsion is a load-bearing pillar in the relationship between trickster fae prince Cardan Greenbriar and human menace Jude Duarte. The earliest stages of their courtship can really only be described as bullying. The middle stages are best described as a case of Stockholm Syndrome. Even during their eventual marriage in the third book, they can’t quite seem to make up their minds on if they’d rather kiss each other or kill each other.

“In the mortal world, when I thought you were my enemy, I still missed you.”

“My sweet nemesis, how glad I am that you returned.”⁴

The beauty of Jude and Cardan’s relationship is realized in the third book, Queen of Nothing, when Cardan says, “We have lived in our armor for so long, you and I. And now I am not sure if either of us knows how to remove it,” before they have sex. Jude can’t quite tell if it’s a riddle or a sincere concern. Regardless, after sex, Jude comes up with an answer: “I think of his riddle. How do people like us take off our armor? One piece at a time.”⁵

Part of the magic of their romance is that Holly Black never requires them to stop being enemies for their happily ever after to be persuasive. Cardan loves his ruthless, manipulative wife. Jude loves her slippery, crafty husband. A reader can leave the trilogy assured that they will bicker for as long as they love each other, content to be both enemy and lover in the ever-after.

It’s hard to write Judes and Cardans. I’ve seen plenty of people complain about how unearned the conflicts can feel between characters in self-described enemies-to-lovers romances, especially outside of the frame of fantasy⁶. I disagree with the idea that viable romantic enemies only exist in the land of fae. It is probably more fair to say that enemies-to-lovers requires skilled authors who don’t fear writing characters who are earnestly mean to each other. It requires authors to write dialogue that walks a knife’s edge: cruel and yearning, sincere and sour all at once. It requires, perhaps more than other romance conceits, that readers suspend disbelief and truly embrace the textures and stakes of fiction without demanding it comply with ‘reality.’

part 2: quantum field theory

In actuality, this somewhat intuitive explanation of how touch works is pretty insufficient. Physicists eventually arrived at the conclusion that classical physics was unable to effectively describe the dynamics at play on the subatomic level. If, for example, electrons actually were little spheres with negative charge that orbited a nucleus and repelled other little spheres with negative charge, matter would be tearing itself apart all the time from the force of repelling itself all the time. In Barad’s words:

all the bits of negative charge distributed on the surface of the sphere repel one another, and since there is no positive (unlike) charge around to mitigate the mutual repulsion each bit feels, the electron’s own electromagnetic self-energy would be too much to bear—it would blow itself apart.

Quantum mechanics emerged as a more complete description of the strange behaviors of subatomic particles that classical physics was ill-equipped to discuss (i.e. quantum entanglement, quantum interference, quantum tunnelling).

Quantum field theory, which is Barad’s area of research, was born out of Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics and Field Theory, to explain things that each theory was not fully describing. A few things of note:

• Atoms are usually described as floating in space, or the “void.” Barad suggests that the void is not, as it may sound, an empty thing. Rather, the void is a vessel for possibilities. It’s a place for something called virtual particles to be/not be in an infinite number of configurations (they are, after all, virtual but ‘real’ in the way that ghosts are ‘real’.⁷)

• Particles are not discrete entities from the void, as described in classical physics, but rather they are entangled with it.

• Electrons are also not really little spheres with negative charges. They probably do not have a substructure (physical form) of their own at all. It is probably more accurate to say that electron particles are observed oscillations or excitations in an electron field. So if the electron field is the head of a drum, an electron is the oscillation that the drumhead makes from its “rest” state when struck. Or if the electron field is a guitar string, electrons are the oscillations the string makes from its taut state when plucked. And there are all kinds of fields! Neutrino fields and Higgs fields and electron fields and on and on. Matter is fields all layered on top of and interacting with each other.

• It’s helpful to think of electrons this way because then we can reconcile the “same-charges repel” piece of this. We aren’t looking at two electrons pushing back on one another. It’s just one big electron field, with many little particle observations, so it cannot repel itself, really.⁸

Conceptually, Quantum Field Theory is uniquely equipped to describe the strange ways that matter comes into and out of being. Electrons are constantly interacting with virtual particles in a big quantum stew. Electrons expel virtual photons and then swallow them back in. Or sometimes, electrons expel a virtual photon, which splits into a virtual electron-positron pair that annihilates itself into becoming a virtual photon again, which is swallowed by the electron again. And on and on and on– there are infinite possibilities here, fueling the frenetic energy of an electron field. The thing to takeaway from this is that Barad refers to this process as self-touching. Electrons are constantly engaged in the process of self-touching, but in doing so encounters an infinite sort of alterity⁹ of self. I like this bit of Feynman that Barad draws on to summarize (bolding is my own, italics are Barad):

Richard Feynman, one of the key authors of quantum field theory, frames the difficulty in explicitly moral terms: “Instead of going directly from one point to another, the electron goes along for a while and suddenly emits a photon; then (horrors!) it absorbs its own photon. Perhaps there’s something ‘immoral’ about that, but the electron does it!” (Feynman 115–16). Hence, the infinity associated with electron’s self-energy, and other related infinities, wind up installed in quantum field theory as intrinsic “perversions.” Apparently, touching oneself, or being touched by oneself—the ambiguity/undecidability/indeterminacy may itself be the key to the trouble—is not simply troubling but a moral violation, the very source of all the trouble.

The thing Barad is hung up on as a queer theorist is the idea that matter is constantly touching itself, and in doing so encounters within itself an infinity of possibilities for being. The “self,” then, is a queer, polymorphous entity. Within the “self,” there are strangers to be discovered and emerging in discovery all the time. In their words, “Matter is an enfolding, an involution, it cannot help touching itself, and in this self-touching it comes in contact with the infinite alterity that it is.”

Their writing on the alterity of self evokes Edouard Glissant’s work on opacity, for example, which captures the degree to which the self is unknowable, irreducible, beyond understanding, even to oneself¹⁰. Particularly relevant to our quest through the landscape of enemies-to-lovers is their description of electrons transforming into other subatomic particles as the process of self-touching, which evokes scholars like Maurice Merleau-Ponty who, regard bodies “not only as fleshy and material but also as ‘wordly’, as being in an intimate and living relationship to the world, which is a world made up of other bodies.” In other words, our experience of our bodies is tactile and social, developed because of and in the form of our relationship with other bodies. Where Barad speaks of electrons touch-touching themselves, Merleau-Ponty writes, “I can feel myself touched as well and at the same time as touching.”¹¹ All of this is to say yes we’re talking about Physics, but we are talking about the familiar things, too.

“Please, I beg of you, cut the armchair physics, get back to the romance!” But I am! Even now, I am talking about romance all the time!

Take The Hating Game by Sally Thorne. Josh and Lucy are executive assistants to the CEOs of Bexley Books and Gamin Publishing, who have agreed to become Bexley & Gamin to survive an economic downturn. She is warm and bubbly and oh-so-sweet. He’s stern and prickly and cold. By the time the novel starts, Josh has aided Mr. Bexley in cutting 30% of the workforce of Bexley & Gamin in the process of merging the two companies. Lucy’s best friend at work is counted in that layoff, imploding their friendship and leaving Lucy alone with a brand new nemesis.

The novel opens with the two of them glaring at each other across their shared office space. The setting, here, is the void: “The tenth floor is now a cube of glass, chrome, and black tile. You could pluck your eyebrows using any surface as a mirror—walls, floors, ceiling. Even our desks are made from huge sheets of glass.” The city in which the novel takes place is unnamed. Brief detours are made to a wedding a few hours from the city where they live and to Lucy’s apartment and Josh’s apartment and to a paintball field but, really, this is an office romance.

When people talk about loving enemies-to-lovers, often the first thing they mention is the tension. I love that invisible/visible tether that connects people and makes us feel like something is happening even when nothing is happening. It evokes Barad’s description of the void: “The void is a lively tension, a desiring orientation toward being/becoming… The blank page teeming with the desires of wouldbe traces of every symbol, equation, word, book, library, punctuation mark, vowel, diagram, scribble, inscription, graphic, letter, inkblot, as they yearn toward expression. A jubilation of emptiness.”¹² If the field is the office and if the void is the lively tension upon which it rests, Lucy and Josh are particles entangled within it, bursting into expression in fits and starts.

The setting is a battlefield for Lucy and Josh, who have taken up the project of aggravating each other like they’re being paid to do it. They are at odds all the time because they are together all the time and unable to escape each other (Lucy refers to Josh as her “cellmate,” in the first chapter). The first interaction¹³ Thorne writes is Lucy and Josh playing The Mirror Game, where Josh and Lucy are purposefully mirroring one another to irritate each other, wordlessly dissecting the other person’s exact move. It’s one of a thousand different games they’re constantly embroiled in with each other.

Lucy cannot stand that Josh does not seem to like her. She, who would bend over backwards to accommodate others, has met a person who isn’t swayed by her charm. Worst of all, this is a person who she finds funny and attractive and clever. For Lucy, who is so heartbreakingly lonely and abandoned at the start of the novel, this is confirmation of the fact that she is destined to be alone. I think of her delirious sickbed confession in the middle of the novel all the time: “I’m so scared. It’s all going to end soon, one way or another. I’m hanging on by my fingernails. I have no idea if their¹⁴ investment in me will ever pay off. And I’m so lonely sometimes I could cry. I lost my best friend. I spend all my time with a huge frightening man who wants to kill me, and he’s probably my only friend now, even though he doesn’t want to be. And it breaks my heart.”

Josh, whose narration we never get, is harder to read but no less affected: “I touch his pulse. It touches me back.” Josh, who grew up in a house where he tried and tried and tried but was never enough, responds to his circumstances by presenting a tightly managed facade where he doesn’t need anyone at all. He finds his love for Lucy daunting because she might decide, like his father, like his ex-girlfriend, to confirm his worst fears about himself– that he isn’t enough. And to be found insufficient? By a woman he is borderline unreasonably in love with? It’s the kind of heartbreak he can’t fathom.

The thing enemies-to-lovers does so elegantly is force a character to contend with their worst, most unseemly parts early and often. Their core wounds are coaxed out for inspection by a terrifyingly attentive eye (I think so fondly about a line where Lucy, at Josh’s apartment for the first time, thinks to herself “I look lustfully at his filing cabinet. If he wasn’t here I’d read his electricity bills.”) To fight and to fight well is to deeply understand what your opponent guards most closely¹⁵: their control, their pride, their loneliness, their desire¹⁶. To fight well is to strike at parts of your opponent that they may not have known existed within them– the alterity within.

In likeable Lucy, Josh provokes the existence of an angry and impolite stranger. With him alone, Lucy is this raw and unfiltered thing. In cool, self-sufficient Josh, Lucy provokes someone more playful and uninhibited.They wrest vulnerability from each other in ways that verge on threatening. They’re electrons spitting out virtual photons split into virtual electrons and positrons¹⁷. In her words: “Lucy versus Joshua, total annihilation.”

The thing about a subatomic look at enemies to lovers is understanding that these pairs are not oppositional– they are made of the very same stuff¹⁸. They are excitations in the same field, overlapping in ways that appear like enemies at some angles and lovers at others. Lucy makes multiple entreaties to Josh to be friends. She asks, over and over, why he won’t just be friends with her? Josh is ruthless in his distaste for friendship. If he can’t love her, he must be her enemy: “He wants me to hand over everything. He won’t take anything less from me.” It’s revealing– enemies aren’t held at arm’s length, really. They trouble us because they are entirely too close.

part 3: mattering

In The Cruel Prince and The Hating Game, but also, to be sure, in other acclaimed enemies-to-lovers romance like You Deserve Each Other by Sarah Hogle and Private Arrangements by Sherry Thomas, there’s a crucial moment where the enemy kind of does move from enemy to lover. For me, it’s the moment when all the characters arrive at the realization that they aren’t fighting with each other, they’re playing with each other. That means they aren’t pursuing victory or conquest or an end. They’re pursuing endless, infinite, tumultuous play into the ever-after.

In The Cruel Prince, it’s the moment when Jude realizes that Cardan hadn’t exiled her to be cruel, but as a jest that he hoped she would quickly solve. In The Hating Game, it’s when Lucy realizes that Josh is shy and when Josh realizes early in the novel that Lucy hasn’t understood the terms of their play. In You Deserve Each Other it’s when Naomi gets Nicholas to tell his mom to fuck off and when Naomi stops believing that they’re on opposite sides. In Private Arrangements, it’s when Camden throws down the gauntlet and gives her the divorce she wants. It’s when Gigi chases Camden across an ocean and seizes him back.

I’ve read my favorite enemies-to-lovers romances about four billion times. A byproduct of that is being able to flip to any one page and reorient myself to exactly where I am. I’ve read The Hating Game backwards, actually, and it has still compelled me. I can move through “beginning,” “middle,” and “end” like I’m shuffling cards in a deck and, in the process, I often feel like I’m reading all of the book at once. No one is enemy or lover anymore. Only some uncanny superposition of both states.

The terms of engagement have shifted. Characters go from being defined by their repulsion from the Other to being defined by their capitulation to the possibility of being made endlessly vulnerable and open and different and strange by entanglement with an/other.

I keep coming back to something Barad says at the end of the lecture: “In an important sense, in a breathtakingly intimate sense, touching, sensing, is what matter does, or rather, what matter is: matter is condensations of response-ability.” It’s romance fundamentals, really. In a breathtakingly intimate sense, touching, sensing is what good enemies-to-lovers romance does. It’s what it is. It’s what keeps us on the edge of our seats, brimming with possibility. Hard not to love that.

1. I’m going to do the thing that I hate in writing and attempt to anticipate critique in footnotes: this is a deeply sloppy account of quantum physics from someone who has absolutely no business teaching anyone quantum physics. Karen Barad, the theorist whose work I draw on, spent half their academic career in physics departments and the other half in humanities. The lecture I pull from was presented to a humanities crowd at a conference on touch. Accordingly, they’re taking a deeply poetic, experimental, interdisciplinary approach to examining quantum field theory, queer theory, and philosophy. The lecture cites Richard Feynman and Jacques Derrida and Donna Haraway. I, however, am coming to this from neither a physics nor humanities background, really. I like Haraway but find her challenging, can be found muddling through Derrida when absolutely forced to, and am absolutely clueless on Feynman. I am riffing on a thing that I found to be interesting and, at the very least, analogically relevant to the stuff I am good at: understanding romance novels. Pinch of salt, caveat, blah blah blah. Correct me in the comments, I promise I can take it and would love to learn more.

2. I say this because I have watched it like three times altogether and it is less of an "I watched and understood that," situation and more of an "I am sort of perpetually in a state of watching and understanding" situation.

3. The lecture is linked below, but also available basically as a transcription here:

Barad, K. (2012). On touching—The inhuman that therefore I am. differences, 23(3), 206-223.

4. this is pillowtalk for these two sick freaks (affectionate). very much "My dear lady disdain" from Much Ado About Nothing, another excellent enemies-to-lovers romance.

5. Perhaps not coincidentally, there's a nearly identical line in The Hating Game, where Lucy thinks to herself, “The only way I can get him to drop his guard is to drop mine.”

6. Something to the effect of “the only enemies I have in the real world are Republicans” circles the romance discourse drain weekly which… all I have to say is that some of you are not Real Haters

7. monster theory everywhere, if you look close enough

8. I went sort of bonkers trying to teach myself the basics of quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. A small sampling of the things I drew on:

• richard feynman’s lectures, specifically volume 3, chapters 1-3: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/III_01.html

• this simple video and this long but very informative video and this shorter but also informative video and this simple video (my favorite of the bunch). Also, more specifically on field theories, this video (which has a surprisingly straightforward explanation of spin?).

• these little blog posts from a physics hobbyist: https://www.physicssayswhat.com/2019/06/05/qft-how-many-fields-are-there/
  https://www.physicssayswhat.com/2017/03/13/reality-is-fields/

• this podcast featuring physicist Sean Carroll (do not listen to the rest of the podcasts, the host is, as far as I can tell, a bad dude, but Sean Carroll is a known and respected physicist and science educator).

• loved this definition of superposition (with visuals/simulations of the double slit experiment that I found very handy!)

9. big word that means “otherness”

10. for more on this, see the substack I posted on consent in romance a few months ago

11. this is from the intro to an edited volume— would recommend, I quite enjoyed the intro: Ahmed, S., & Stacey, J. (Eds.). (2001). Thinking through the skin (p. 5). London: Routledge.
I’ve also written a little about this in the heteropessimism essay when referencing talia bettcher, etc.

this was also good: https://flatjournal.com/work/touching-touched/

12. this is from another of Barad’s works: Barad, K. M. (2012). What is the measure of nothingness?: infinity, virtuality, justice. Hatje Cantz.

13. I meant this in the narrative way, but if the physics way lands for you, I wouldn’t be mad about it

14. she’s referring to her parents; not a thing I had room to talk about, but Lucy's homesickness and her relationship with her mother are things I find incredibly interesting about this book (and go very undiscussed when this book comes up!!). saving it for a future substack

15. Look, we’ve got a bootleg Sun Tzu over here

16. I’ve also talked about this in the context of Shiv and Tom's fight on the balcony in the last season of succession, over on TikTok

17. In Barad's words, these are particles of the same mass and opposite charge as electrons. Also, they move backwards in time (do not ask me to explain that I do not understand it)

18. one day I will be able to write about romance without thinking about cathy and heathcliff. today is not that day