Guest post written by Bed Chemistry author Elizabeth McKenzie
A self-described bantersexual—make her laugh and she’ll be eating out of the palm of your hand—Elizabeth McKenzie has written several screenplays for feature films, with her projects placing in top international screenwriting contests including Screencraft, Final Draft, and the Austin Film Festival. Her newsletter, Delusional, reaches more than 10,000 readers each week. Elizabeth lives in Melbourne, Australia, with her husband, their son, and their dog, who is the goodest girl.
About Bed Chemistry: With a fun and steamy twist on the only-one-bed trope, this debut contemporary romance will delight fans of The Love Hypothesis and The Paradise Problem.
They say you should write about what you know. It’s one of those pieces of advice that sounds both obvious and vague. But like most writing clichés, it tends to make sense only after the fact.
When I started drafting my debut novel, Bed Chemistry, I wasn’t trying to fictionalise my own life or turn past relationships into plot points. I was thinking about structure: act breaks, dialogue, and how romantic tension actually works when you put two people in close quarters and refuse to let them resolve things easily.
Somewhere along the way, I realised I wasn’t inventing as much as I thought.
Once you’re fluent in romance tropes, you start seeing them everywhere. Not as lazy clichés, but as emotional patterns that exist because they’re familiar. Friends to lovers. Forced proximity. Forbidden love. These aren’t just genre conventions. They’re narrative shortcuts for dynamics people fall into all the time.
Looking back, it became clear that from the age of nineteen through to my late thirties, my life had unfolded as a loose anthology of romance tropes. Different people. Different countries. Same emotional architecture. Which meant that writing a trope-forward romantic comedy wasn’t about borrowing from fiction; it was about recognising the patterns that had already shaped my life, long before I ever named them.
So, in the spirit of genre awareness (and mild self-indictment), here are the very real romance tropes that accidentally prepared me to write Bed Chemistry.
Trope #1: Friends to lovers
At the tender age of nineteen, I did what every young Australian does: booked a plane ticket and headed halfway across the world on an extended adventure. After spending the summer gallivanting around Europe, it was time for my semester abroad at a university in London.
It took all of orientation week to find my friendship group. These people would become the centre of my world for an entire semester, which is practically forever when you all live on campus together.
One person in the group was a Portuguese guy with a lip ring. As I started eating crisp sandwiches and beans on toast like they were nutritionally complete meals, I found myself laughing a lot with said Portuguese guy with the lip ring.
Soon, I would see him multiple times a day as he walked past my dorm room on the way to his. He’d stop by my window and we’d talk. And joke. And there would always been an invitation from someone to come smoke a joint.
The thing is, he was always with another girl from our friendship group. She was skinnier than me—and as a true product of 2000s toxic diet culture, naturally, I assumed he was into her.
That didn’t stop me from finding his eyes in every conversation, trying to make him laugh with witty remarks, or bantering my way to get his attention.
As. Friends.
It wasn’t until he invited me to Lisbon for Christmas. With his family. Of course, I told myself this is what friends do. I’m an Australian, 24 hours travel time away from my family.
Of course he invited me as a friend.
And because I’m an Australian 24 hours away from family for Christmas, I’d already made plans to spend Christmas in Canada with other friends.
Still, I was not passing an opportunity to go to Lisbon with my friend.
So, I went. As a friend.
I met the parents. As a friend.
I met his friends. As a friend.
And finally, one midnight bus ride home, we kissed. Not as friends.
Trope no #2: Marriage of convenience
I went to Canada for a white Christmas with international roaming a paid actor. When I got back, we were inseparable.
Cue the “we are a couple” montage. Sleeping in each other’s dorms. Him playing guitar. Me, young and impressionable, actually liking it. We went to Budapest for a weekend. We didn’t have a care in the world.
Except I was wrapping up my semester aboard in a couple of weeks. Destination: Melbourne, Australia. He was planning to stay in London. I was not planning a third act breakup.
We battled out long distance for a few months until I made my way back to London where we had the best time.
We worked in a bar together. We travelled all over Europe together. We lived in an illegal sub-sub-sublet with eight others together. Hey, it was so cheap, we even travelled to Cuba together.
Four years later, it was time to come home, but we were still in love, so we did the only thing we could do so he could come with me: we got married. At Hackney Town Hall.
We moved to Australia. And lived happily until we realised we were better suited as friends.
So, we went from lovers to friends.
Trope no #3: Brother’s best friend
After my Portuguese guy and I broke up, I went through a rite of passage everyone goes through when ending a long relationship: a summer of slutting around. My mission was to make out with as many people as humanly possible. And one person who I made out with was none other than one of my brother’s best friends.
Word got out quickly. My brother was not happy about it.
Still, who am I if not an independent woman who will not be told BY A MAN who I can and can’t make out with.
And, so, I pursued my first (yes, reader, there were more) brother’s best friend romance.
It was wild. And whirlwind. Since then I’ve learned to recognise a walking red flag. In hindsight and with 20-20 vision thanks to wearing glasses, it was the reason my brother said no in the first place.
When that relationship ended, there was an unspoken rule. Do not hook up with any of my friends again. So, what did I do?
I didn’t just hook up with another of my brother’s friends. I married him. And my brother was his best man.
Trope no #4: Forbidden Love
Let me rewind. When I became single and my brother moved in with Edwin, I would say the attraction was instant. It didn’t take long before I was making up excuses to visit my brother. A new episode of New Girl dropped? WATCH PARTY!
It also didn’t take long before Edwin and I kissed. It was a stolen kiss on the sofa minutes before my brother came home from work. When we heard the door lock scrap open, we jumped apart and put on the performance of a lifetime. Just his sister waiting for him to come home from work, and his housemate, keeping her company. Like a gentleman.
But there was nothing gentlemanly about how those two minutes of smashing face altered my brain chemistry. And one bad brother’s-best-friend romance wasn’t going to stop me. This time, I knew I had to be smarter.
I had to keep this a secret. So, we did.
We made out in a car park. We booked a room in a hotel. We drove out to his parents’ house when they were away. We left parties together early. My brother even asked at one point with a grimace, ‘Did you two kiss?’
Nope, I blatantly lied.
Sure, it’s all sexy fun and games until one night you’re leaving a party early with Edwin for the millionth time and you realise you’re the main character of the Cruel Summer bridge.
I’m drunk in the back of the car, crying like a baby coming home from the bar, Said, ‘I’m fine,’ but it wasn’t true, I don’t want to keep secrets just to keep you.
It was hard. And I was scared, so we kept sneaking around until the secret sessions became a secret relationship.
I knew I needed to come clean.
And I did.
My brother claimed he already knew. Everyone claimed they already knew. Stories emerged of seeing us sneakily hold hands while we were out. Or excessive butt-grabbing in public.
Either way, it was a giant relief to come clean after months of secrets.
But I must admit, at the very beginning, it was kind of hot.
Trope no #5: Forced proximity
A few weeks into this secret love affair, the entire friendship group was attending a music festival in the middle of nowhere.
The accommodation? BYO tent.
Said tent—that my brother was charged with packing—did not have poles. It literally looked like a parachute jacket lying on the floor.
With nowhere to sleep, my brother casually said, ‘You can share with Edwin.’ And I casually replied, ‘Okay.’ And we casually made out in that tent for a solid weekend.
Looking back, what surprises me most isn’t how many romance tropes I managed to live through, but how reliably they showed up. Change the country, the accent or the friend group, and the emotional mechanics stayed the same. Attraction surfaces. Proximity accelerates it. Circumstances make neutrality impossible.
That logic shaped Bed Chemistry. The book isn’t autobiographical, but it’s built on the same idea: unresolved chemistry doesn’t disappear just because time passes, and being forced to share space with someone you once cared about is rarely neutral.
If you’re a romance reader who loves tropes because they feel recognisable rather than predictable, Bed Chemistry might feel familiar in the best way. After all, tropes don’t exist because writers make them up. They exist because we keep falling into them.
Bed Chemistry by Elizabeth McKenzie (Alcove Press) is available now at good bookstores and from Barnes & Noble.
