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Notes -
No no no, you're forgetting the very vital sub-plot of the Former Love Interest showing back up! The ex-fiancée, the old flame, the childhood sweetheart - the threat who is hot and sexy and successful and a tigress and everything the main female character is not, and the male love interest either diverts his attention to her and it looks like they'll get back together, or the old flame does all she can to break up male love interest and female love interest.
That leads to the satisfying set-up where male love interest shows up, demonstrates his scorn for old flame because she has shown herself to be untrustworthy/only trying to use him for status and wealth/he was only trying to make female love interest jealous, and reaffirms that he has chosen female love interest over hot successful tigress, and then the ripping off clothes with his teeth scene follows 😁
The sub-sub-plot to that one is the distaff version of new/former love interest showing up for the female love interest. A nice guy (and I don't mean that ironically); someone supportive, different to the male love interest in not being dismissive and curt to her, a guy who is handsome and successful and desirable in his own right (but still not quite the equal of the alpha hot guy), someone who genuinely cares about her. Alas, he is destined to be friendzoned because he just doesn't have that spark, but he is understanding and bows out courteously because he realises that she and alpha guy are destined to be together. This is comforting reading for the consumer of such novels, because it demonstrates that the female love interest (who is the vicarious stand-in for the reader) has options, she's not just doomed to be dumped by the hot guy, she don't need him after all she can always get another guy who truly wants her for who she is.
Writing a romance novel, even a formulaic one, is a lot tougher than you think - way back I was part of an online group that tried doing the traditional tropes in an ironic way and we didn't get very far because writing is indeed hard. I'm given to understand there's a lot more sex in modern romance novels because times indeed change, and waiting for the wedding bells ending isn't enough, so the female and male love interests can get it on a lot earlier and indeed more frequently (while still going through the 'will they, won't they/he loves me, he loves me not' travails until the happy ending).
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