Shapes

Love Triangle

Love triangles are romantic relationships between three people, which often cause jealousy and other complications. They are the frequent subject of stories and appear in some of the earliest recorded such as Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar and Jacob, Leah, and Rachel in the Bible. They are also important to literature and folklore such as King Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot and Tristan, Iseult, and Marc as well as films such as "The Apartment" (1960), "Casablanca" (1942), "Chasing Amy" (1997), "Doctor Zhivago" (1965), "The English Patient" (1996), "My Best Friend’s Wedding" (1997), "Rushmore" (1998), and "Titanic" (1997).

How It's Used

“The Times's David Kirkpatrick called the cynical trash-only-for-enough-cash offer 'one of the oddest book proposals in memory.' The New York Post said the star wanted $10 million — an advance bigger than Hillary Clinton's, presumably to serve up even grander propaganda about his infamous love triangle.”

“In truth, far more of the material I uncovered in the Peabody sisters' letters had to do with intellectual disputes than with love triangles. Yet the confessional nature of the manuscripts I was working with seemed to bother some people when I talked about them. 'Don't you feel guilty, reading all that private mail and then quoting from it in your book?' my friends would ask.”

"Scandals were bigger and better in those days if we compare the glamorous triangle of Eddie Fisher, Elizabeth Taylor and Debbie Reynolds with the tawdry 2007 equivalent of Anna Nicole Smith, Howard K. Stern and Larry Birkhead.”

“The book's title refers to a writer's idea to have two of the teenage characters kiss, which produced a love-triangle storyline, increased the show's popularity and led to a lavish syndication deal.”

“'An American in Paris,' however, is one of a kind. Having acquired the film rights to George Gershwin’s 1928 music suite, MGM hired Alan Jay Lerner to spin a story around it and several Gershwin songs. He came up with a standard but serviceable love triangle: Kelly, as an expatriate American painter, falls in love with an elusive gamine played by Ms. Caron, unaware that she is the former ward and current fiancée of his friend, a music hall performer played by Georges Guétary.”

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