Why I Despise The Word Relatability

The Spring Shower And The Flattened Page

The weather has been entirely uncooperative this week. I am currently watching a sudden, unpredictable shower batter the cherry blossoms outside my office window. The wind carries a cool breeze through the cracked glass, dragging in the sharp, bruised scent of blooming greenery and wet asphalt. It is messy, volatile, and entirely indifferent to whether or not I find it pleasant to look at. The pale pink petals stick to the wet pavement like bruised skin, a physical reminder that spring is not merely a pastel backdrop, but a violent biological imperative.

I was thinking about this indifference while reviewing a manuscript earlier this morning. The author had left a marginal note for me beside a crucial turning point in the second act: “I’m worried she’s not relatable enough here. Should I soften her reaction?”

I stared at the comment for a long time, listening to the rain lash the glass. The protagonist in question was a woman navigating a deep, terrifying attraction to her closest friend. In the previous draft, her reaction to an accidental brush of hands had been physical—a sudden, defensive flinching away, born of the sheer panic that her desire might be perceived. It was an ugly, jagged moment of self-preservation. It felt entirely true to the physical reality of a woman guarding a secret that could ruin her life. It possessed what I call Friction-Forward Interiority: the willingness to let a character’s internal reality dictate their physical response, regardless of how ungracious it appears to the observer.

In the revised draft, however, the author had changed it. Instead of flinching, the protagonist knocked over her coffee cup, stammered a charming apology, and blushed.

She had been softened. She had been made palatable. In the pursuit of making the protagonist “relatable,” the author had stripped away the dangerous pressure of the moment and replaced it with a harmless, easily digested performance of clumsiness.

This is the insidious trap of relatability discourse in modern publishing. It is a Trojan horse that disguises sales anxiety as craft advice. And when it comes to writing women who love women, this demand for palatability actively destroys the very pulse of the work.

The Audition For Reader Friendship

When we talk about writing for the market, the conversation inevitably drifts toward the concept of the reader’s comfort. We are taught, implicitly and explicitly, that a protagonist must audition for the reader’s friendship. If the reader cannot see themselves in the character, or at least imagine sharing a pint with them at the local pub, the book will supposedly fail.

But relatability is often just a prettier word for compliance. I call this the Palatability Tax: the aesthetic and emotional toll exacted upon a manuscript when an author trades the jagged truth of a character’s interiority for the frictionless comfort of a mainstream audience.

When you ask if a character is relatable, you are rarely asking if their psychological interiority is true. You are asking if their behaviour is socially acceptable to a hypothetical, voyeuristic gaze. You are asking if their neuroses are cute rather than destructive. You are asking if their yearning is safe.

Desire between women is not inherently safe. It carries its own unique gravity, its own historical and emotional weight. When a woman realizes she wants another woman, that realization often requires a deep reorientation of her entire world. It is not a gentle pivot. It involves the sudden, terrifying fracturing of compulsory heterosexuality, bringing with it fear, possessiveness, grief, and an intense, hyper-focused physical awareness. It is the sudden realization that the air in the room has been replaced by water, and she must learn to breathe it.

To flatten that queer character complexity into a quirky, stumbling rom-com heroine who just happens to blush at the right moments is to do a disservice to the craft. It sands down the rough edges of human interiority until there is nothing left for the reader to catch their hands on. The character becomes a smooth, frictionless commodity, designed to be consumed without requiring the reader to confront anything challenging.

The Physical Mechanics Of Avoidance

Let us look at how this pressure distorts the actual words on the page, stripping the physical mechanics of avoidance of their necessary weight.

Imagine a scene where your protagonist is forced to share a cramped kitchen with the woman she desires but cannot have. If you are writing under the heavy thumb of market pressure, you might be tempted to make the protagonist endearing. You might have her drop a spoon, or babble nervously about the weather, or stare adoringly at the other woman’s smile. You provide the reader with a comfortable window into a harmless crush.

But what does that desire actually feel like in the body?

It does not feel like dropping a spoon. It feels like the sudden, suffocating awareness of the exact distance between your hip and the edge of the counter. It feels like locking your jaw so tightly your teeth ache, because if you relax your face, your expression might give you away. It feels like staring with unnatural intensity at the blue flame of the gas stove, refusing to look at the other woman’s hands as she chops vegetables. You memorize the rhythmic thwack of the knife against the wooden block, the sharp, acidic scent of bruised onions, because looking at her hands makes you think about the pressure of her fingers against your skin. It is the deliberate, agonizing calculation of physical space: ensuring your shoulder does not brush hers when you reach for the salt, because that incidental contact would feel like a live wire against a damp palm.

The authentic version of this scene is rooted in tension, avoidance, and the physical reality of a body trying to contain something too large for it. The protagonist might be brusque. She might be silent. She might even be unkind in her desperation to maintain distance.

Is she relatable in that moment? Perhaps not to a reader looking for a breezy escape. But she is real. Her desire has a pulse. Her actions are dictated by the specific, unbearable pressure of the scene, not by an algorithm’s demand for a lovable heroine.

Refusing The Sanitized Gaze

The push for relatability asks us to internalize an external, often voyeuristic gaze. It demands that we package sapphic romance for those who have never experienced the specific, quiet terror of loving another woman in a world that routinely misunderstands it. This demand for easy comprehension is the enemy of intimacy.

When we yield to that demand, we lose the very texture that makes our stories matter. We lose the sharp intake of breath. We lose the clumsy, unglamorous reality of two women trying to figure out how their bodies fit together in the dark—the bumping of teeth, the sudden shift in weight, the terrifying vulnerability of being truly seen. We lose the deep, hard-won intimacy that can only exist when two deeply flawed, entirely unrelatable people choose to bridge the gap between them.

Do not write characters who ask for permission to be loved by the reader. Write characters who demand to be witnessed exactly as they are. Let them be defensive. Let them be ungracious in their grief. Let them want too much, too intensely, with a hunger that makes the reader slightly uncomfortable. Let their desire be an architectural force within the narrative, reshaping the rooms they walk into and the air they breathe.

The next time you find yourself softening a character’s reaction, or rounding off a sharp edge because you fear they are becoming difficult to like, pause. Stop asking if the reader will want to be their friend. Instead, look at the literal floorboards of the scene. Look at the temperature of the room, the grip of their hands, the rhythm of their breathing. Ask yourself if their reaction is physically true to the moment.

If it is true, leave it. Let the blossoms get battered by the wind. The mess is where the life is.

The Monroe Minute

We cannot entirely escape the realities of the publishing industry, but we can refuse to let its tamest demands dictate our prose. If you want the broader strategy behind that refusal, read my deep-dive feature on strategic opacity and the niche trap.

Direct exercise: Open one scene where your protagonist interacts with the woman she desires. Circle a gesture or line you wrote to make her seem nicer, softer, or easier to forgive. Delete it. Replace it with one physical response her body would actually make under pressure: a locked jaw, a hand withdrawn too quickly, a sentence clipped short before it becomes confession.