🧈 Butter Breakdown: Wait! When did the fake dating plan fall apart?!
Why you might be glossing over one of the most important sections of your Fake Dating Romance blurb.
Quick reminders:
🧈 Submit your own blurb for a possible breakdown HERE.
🧈 And grab The Butter Blurb Master Class–now wide on Amazon, Apple, Kobo, B&N, Google Play, and my 7FF Store for $9.99: Amazon | B&N | iBooks | Kobo | Google Play | My 7FF Store
So many thanks to the author of this week’s featured blurb. I personally adore fake relationships and will never get tired of this trope.
Today’s Lesson: Fake Dating is a trope with a specific Plan Goes Awry Universal Fantasy running underneath. So when blurbs forget to feature the reasons that plan falls apart, it’s hard for us to remember to one-click on the story.
Here’s the original blurb:
When it girl Aria catches her fiancé, Chase—the golden boy of New York’s elite—cheating on her, her picture-perfect life shatters. Heartbroken and humiliated, she’s ready to swear off men forever...
Until Chase’s sworn enemy Ethan swoops in with an outrageous idea: fake-date and take Chase down together.
What starts as a revenge plot quickly turns into something Aria didn’t see coming. The more time she spends with Ethan, the harder it becomes to tell what’s real and what’s just part of the plan.
Is this surprising connection just a rebound? Or could it be the real deal?
Butter Pass Breakdown
🔥 Opening reaction: This blurb has a great setup. Getting with your ex’s sworn enemy? Let’s go! A few more details, and readers will be hooked.
Butter Code:
🟨 Yellow Highlight = BUTTER!!
🔵 Blue Highlight = Potential to be Butter
🔵 Blue Words = Opportunities
🟢 Green Words = Suggested word choice or added clarity
🌸 Pink Words = Consider deleting
Universal Fantasy(s) at Play
(The fantasies this blurb is selling.)
✨Mr. Way Better Than Your Ex
✨Heartbreak Rewarded With True Love
✨Itchy Sweater Replaced (See this post I did on Itchy Sweaters for more)
There’s also an entire Itchy Sweater section in The Universal Fantasy™ List: ROMANCE book’s THE OFFICE: Patron Saint of Workplace Romance section.
Butter Comp(s)
(Stories that prove fake dating fantasies sell.)
🧈 The mega-popular Off Campus series (based on The Deal by Elle Kennedy)
🧈 The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood (which is coming out as a movie in September 2026)
🧈 The Better Brother by Kai Lesy: Great Butter Beginning! She sleeps with a stranger to get over her ex, and the stranger turns out to be the older brother her ex can’t stand. So, of course, they decide to go to the ex’s wedding as fake dates. So much yum.
🧈 Shania Twain + Frédéric Thiébaud: In my head canon, this decades-long re(bound)lationship started out as a fake dating situation to get back at their cheating exes, and I refuse to be convinced otherwise.
What’s Already Working (Butter! 🧈)
✔ Enemy of Ex Setup: There is just something so juicy about the MC’s Mr. Right not just being better than the ex, but being someone who also can’t stand him. Revenge and romance, served on the same plate.
✔ Wish Fulfilled: Mr. Right Coming Along When You’re Just Done With Dating. As someone whose future husband asked her out a few weeks after she took a 90-day break from dating, this one hits close to home. There’s something about getting what you want or need right after you shout “I give up!”–whether it be money, love, or opportunity. This UF algebra works across genres and situations. Just replace the Mr. Right and Dating with the x and y of your choice.
REMEMBER: If Your Story Fulfills a Common Wish, That’s a Universal Fantasy Setup—Baked and SERVED!
CONSIDER:
🔵 Setting them up for failure: We adore watching two people avow that they’re not going to fall in love while fake relationshipping–then falling in love despite their best intentions. But this beloved turn works best when it’s properly set up with at least a line about how they don’t want a real relationship, and even better with obstacles in place–like an NSA sex agreement* to guarantee nobody catches feelings.
*Morgan Freeman Narrator Voice: They caught feelings. In fact, that NSA agreement made them catch feelings even faster.
🔵 Making sure we see the complications to them not falling in love: I read a lot of blurbs, and I’d say not giving us a line or two about the switch from agreement partners to possibly real lifelong partners is the number-one issue with fake dating blurbs.
Ideally, readers fall in love with the idea of our book couple falling in love. In order to do so, we need something to attach to.… A spark of unexpected romantic tension that we want to follow, some idea of why these people are attracted to each other, a specific turn that makes the potential of them becoming a real couple.
This doesn’t have to be a huge paragraph, just enough to give us a taste of what’s to come for this couple if we give the book a one-click.
Give us that one turn, and readers stop reading about a plan and start rooting for it to fall apart.
Blurb to read for inspiration:
The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood
I love that we know…
💗Why Olive is doing this.
💗Why Olive’s feelings for Adam the Ass begin to change (SURPRISE: 💗The asshole is actually supportive–a quality the common working woman would want in a partner).
💗Why Olive is attracted to Adam: Hello, abs!
Bonus Butter: In The Butter Blurb Master Class, we talk a lot about not wasting blurb space on generic words to describe your hero, like “hot” or “sexy” (Newsflash: Almost every guy in Romancelandia is hot and sexy).
Landing this guy’s sexiness as a word pun–“unyielding support and even more unyielding… six-pack abs”–is a great example of purple cowing* your hero’s bare-minimum requirement.
Universal Fantasy List: ROMANCE Definition
*Purple Cow [verb]: When you do something with popular Butter or Ice Cream that makes it really stand apart from all the other times it’s been done. This is a sales belief concept borrowed from Seth Godin’s book of the same name and used as a verb for this list.
Final Thoughts:
Here’s the good news: This is the most common gap I see in fake dating blurbs, and it’s also the easiest to close. You don’t need a new plot. You just need to show us the moment the plan starts cracking.
Because nobody one-clicks a fake dating book to watch the main couple’s plan succeed.
We’re here to watch it gloriously fall apart.
Want to breakdown and glow-up your own blurbs + get a 25% off coupon for all of my courses? The full system I use is in The Butter Blurb Master Class, now available everywhere: Amazon | B&N | iBooks | Kobo | Google Play | My 7FF Store
So much love—and Butter!
TT