The Fake-Dating Rom-Com That Actually Made Me Laugh Out Loud

An engagement built entirely on spite

Naomi and Nicholas are engaged. They hate each other. Not in a sexy enemies-to-lovers way, at least not yet, but in a real, exhausted, “I resent every cell in your body” way, because they got engaged for the worst reason two adults can get engaged: to make their families stop nagging them about being single. It escalated past the point either of them could gracefully back out, and now they’re stuck living together, each one secretly trying to sabotage the wedding so the other one calls it off first. Naomi is doing things like cooking deliberately terrible meals and being aggressively annoying. Nicholas is doing his own quiet version of psychological warfare back. It’s petty, it’s juvenile, and it is genuinely one of the funniest premises I’ve read in this genre in years.

The setup sounds like it should be a lighthearted farce, and for the first third it mostly is. But Hogle keeps threading in something rawer underneath the bit: Naomi’s crushing anxiety, her stalled career, the way she’s let her whole identity shrink down to “the girl who’s marrying Nicholas.” This isn’t just two hot people bickering. There’s a real ache under the jokes, and that ache is what elevates it past the premise.

Where it earns the laughs, and where it drags

Here’s the thing, the comedy in this book is not exaggerated for effect, it’s actually well constructed. The sabotage scenes land because Hogle understands escalation and comic timing, not just “wacky things happen.” There’s a sequence involving Nicholas’s reaction to Naomi’s terrible cooking that had me putting the book face down on my chest because I needed a second. And Naomi’s internal voice, sardonic, self-deprecating, spiraling in exactly the way anxious people spiral, felt more real to me than most first-person romance narrators manage.

But I have to be honest about the part that doesn’t work as well: the back half sags. Once the sabotage stops being the engine of the plot and the book pivots into “actually falling for each other,” some of that manic energy drains out, and Hogle fills the space with relationship padding that isn’t as sharp as the setup promised. I found myself checking how many pages were left around the two-thirds mark, which is never a great sign. There’s also a version of this reader who will bounce off the whole conceit because deliberately sabotaging your partner’s happiness, even in a fake engagement, even played for laughs, is kind of a rough thing to root for. I get that criticism. I didn’t fully share it, because Hogle telegraphs early that both of them are miserable and scared, not cruel, but I understand why some readers find the premise more uncomfortable than funny.

I read most of this during a genuinely bad week, the kind where I was reheating the same bowl of soup for the third night in a row and needed something that would make me actually laugh instead of just distract me, and it did the job. That counts for something. Maybe more than I initially wanted to admit, because on a purely structural level I can point to the sag, the repetitive bits in the middle, the way a couple of side characters (hello, extremely one-note evil ex) feel like they wandered in from a lesser book. And yet I still finished it in two sittings and grinned through half of it. Sometimes vibes beat structure. I’m still working out how I feel about that as a critical standard.

The funniest rom-coms aren’t the ones where nothing’s at stake, they’re the ones where the joke is a defense mechanism.

About Sarah Hogle

Sarah Hogle writes rom-coms that look breezy from the outside and turn out to have a nervous system. She’s built a small but devoted readership on a specific skill: taking a narrator who is anxious, self-sabotaging, and quietly falling apart, and making her extremely funny about it instead of insufferable. Her books (this one, along with Twice Shy and Just Like Magic) share a DNA of women who use humor as armor and slowly, reluctantly, let someone see under it. She’s not reinventing the rom-com, but she’s one of the better voices working in the “funny on the surface, a little sad underneath” register right now.

If this wrecked you (or made you cackle), read these next

• Twice Shy by Sarah Hogle, for more of her specific brand of anxious-narrator comedy, this time with an inherited house and a ghost.
• The Hating Game by Sally Thorne, if you want the enemies-to-lovers bite without the fake-engagement premise.
• The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren, for another forced-proximity setup that leans hard into the comedy.
• Well Met by Jen DeLuca, if what you actually wanted was more banter and less sabotage.

You can grab a copy here: You Deserve Each Other on Amazon.

For your book club

1. Naomi and Nicholas both sabotage the engagement instead of just ending it. Why do you think they chose the harder, meaner path?
2. Is the sabotage plot actually funny, or does it cross a line for you? Where’s that line?
3. How much of Naomi’s anxiety did you relate to, and did the book handle it with care or just use it for jokes?
4. Did the back half of the book work for you, or did you feel the energy drop once the couple started genuinely falling for each other?
5. Would this story have worked as well with a male narrator instead of Naomi’s voice driving it?