JESSE: Think of it like this. Jump ahead ten, twenty years, and you’re married. Only your marriage doesn’t have that same energy that it used to have… You start to think about all those guys you’ve met in your life, and what might have happened if you picked up with one of them. Well, I’m one of those guys. That’s me. So think of this as time travel, from then to now, to find out what you’re missing out on. See, what this really could be is a gigantic favour, to both you and your future husband, to find out that you’re not missing out on anything. I’m just as big a loser as he is—totally unmotivated, totally boring, and you made the right choice and you’re really happy.
CÉLINE: Let me get my bag.
—Before Sunrise (1995), screenplay by Richard Linklater and Kim Krizan
Every romance is a time travel story.
Implicit in every meet-cute, every first date, is the question: does this have a future? And what kind of future? A happily-ever-after? Or a screaming breakup, both of you wishing you could turn back the clock and make it so you’d never met?
To linear beings bound by time, it seems obvious that the future of a relationship follows from its present. But it’s also true that our ideas about the future can influence the present in surprising ways. Even mainstream romance films—like the Before trilogy and, more recently, We Live in Time—recognise the truth of this dual perspective, embracing the non-linear nature of love. And when literal time travel gets added to the mix, the premise becomes rich for speculative exploration.
In my book Love and Other Paradoxes, Esi, a time traveller from the future, accidentally tells Joe about the destined love of his life, Diana. But when Joe meets Diana in the present, his knowledge about where they’re headed quickly sends things off the rails. At the same time, Joe realises he’s falling in love with Esi, who he should never have met in the first place. As Esi and Joe’s budding romance collides with her mission to change the past and his mission to preserve the future, love and time travel become inextricably intertwined.
Here are five more speculative explorations of non-linear love: from being stuck in a time loop (together or apart), to navigating the complexities of dating outside your historical era. I’m going to assume everyone has already read The Time Traveller’s Wife and This Is How You Lose the Time War, so please consider them included by default.
Opposite of Always by Justin A. Reynolds
Jack meets Kate. They fall in love. Six months later, she dies from sickle cell disease. But that’s not the end of the story: her death sends Jack back in time to their first meeting, giving him the chance to find a way to save her.
It’s a familiar trope—a time loop where the man remembers and the woman forgets – but Reynolds quickly spins the story off in a far more interesting direction. Jack doesn’t use what he learns in the loop to manipulate Kate into falling in love with him: their natural, instinctive connection is the one constant through all his retries. Instead, he must figure out how to save Kate without torpedoing his relationships with his friends and family in the process. The result is a deep, grounded coming-of-age story about learning how to invest our time where it matters.
A Quantum Love Story by Mike Chen
When a particle accelerator explodes in near-future San Francisco, time resets to the previous Monday. The world is caught in a loop, but only two people know it’s happening: Carter, a laid-back technician, and Mariana, a neuroscientist with a tendency to over-analyse.
Chen goes even further than Reynolds in flipping the classic time loop script: from early on, Carter and Mariana are in this together. Their contrasting, complementary personalities light up the page, as they set Mulder-and-Scully-like to finding their way out of the time loop and accidentally fall in love in the process. For the characters and for the reader, the real lesson is how to find joy in the small gifts that make up the present: from the outrageous fluffiness of a tiny cat, to the sarcastic comebacks of an AI David Bowie.
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
In near-future London, the titular ministry uses time travel to gather “expats” from across history and attempt to integrate them into modern life. Our unnamed protagonist works as a “bridge”, a kind of live-in counsellor for one of the expats: Arctic explorer (and real-life historical figure) Graham Gore.
Bradley’s debut is simultaneously an escapist romance about shagging a hot Victorian, and a thoughtful post-colonial novel about immigration and assimilation. Jarring as that sounds, the novel’s beautifully observed characters and genuinely funny dialogue work to knit the two halves together. Romance across temporal boundaries, it turns out, is fraught with complications: while the protagonist and Gore are both culturally British, what that means has changed profoundly over the centuries that separate them. The book excels at confronting that clash in perspectives without losing the spark that draws them together.
The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley
The first thing Joe Tournier remembers is stepping off a train. Arriving in his own life like a stranger, he tries to adjust to the facts of his existence: a British slave under the French Empire, he lives in Londres with his wife and baby daughter. But Joe is haunted by memories of another reality—a reality where Londres was London, where he spoke English instead of French—and by the image of a man waiting for him by the sea.
Pulley’s fourth novel, an alternate history where what made it alternate is a key part of the plot, is full of vivid touches: a lighthouse accidentally built on the wrong side of a time portal; an illustration of time travel mechanics via the fate of a group of unfortunate Galapagos tortoises. But at its centre is the romance between Joe and the troubled, volatile Kite, and the question of how two people find each other again when their love story keeps getting overwritten.
Someone in Time, edited by Jonathan Strahan
Why pick one time-travel romance when you can have sixteen? This British Fantasy Award-winning anthology delights in exploring the many ways time travel can complicate or smooth the course of true love: from Zen Cho’s funny, poignant ‘The Past Life Reconstruction Service’, to Nina Allan’s tender, meditative ‘The Lichens’, to Elizabeth Hand’s blistering, kaleidoscopic ‘Kronia’. In this glittering collection of stories, the link between time travel and romance is a yearning for the impossible: to connect with those we can never meet; to undo or redo what we most regret; to bring back that first magic encounter and understand how all of the future was always secretly folded away inside it.
This only scratches the surface of time travel romance past, present, and future—leave your favourites in the comments!
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Love and Other Paradoxes
