Basic Trope: Two characters decide to keep their relationship a secret.
- Straight: Alice and Bob fall madly in love, but decide to hide their love to prevent hurting someone's feelings.
- Exaggerated:
- In order to perfect the ruse, Alice and Bob never so much as spoken to each other in the presence of others.
- Alice and Bob erase their existence to cover their relationship.
- Downplayed:
- Alice and Bob decide not to chance their relationship status online, but act like a couple in person.
- Alice and Bob decide to tell at least their best friends about their relationship, but ONLY them.
- Justified:
- Alice and Bob are both married to other people, and don't want to ruin their marriages.
- Alice and Bob are a lesbian couple in a conservative religious community which considers homosexuality a sin.
- Alice and/or Bob's parents would not approve of the relationship.
- Alice and Bob are serving in a military with strict rules against fraternization.
- Alice and Bob are of different races, and live in a society against interracial relationships.
- Inverted: Alice and Bob are pretending to be in a relationship, but aren't.
- Subverted: Alice and Bob sneak around for a while, and then decide to go public, telling everyone they're in a relationship.
- Double Subverted: Alice and Bob were never lovers — they were sneaking around to discuss their plans to get married so Bob could stay in the country, and also to hide Alice's real secret lover: Claire.
- Parodied:
- Alice and Bob think their relationship is secret, but all their friends and family know about it and discuss it at length when they are not around.
- Alice and Bob's relationship is so secret, even they don't know about it.
- Zig-Zagged: Alice and Bob claim to be just friends, but their extreme closeness leads everyone to believe they are in a relationship. When they are confronted, they deny it and claim that they really are just friends. However, they later reveal that they were in a relationship the entire time, only for them to break up promptly and publicly. Then the break-up is revealed to be a sham and it becomes doubtful as to whether they were ever in a relationship in the first place.
- Averted: Alice and Bob's relationship is known by everyone.
- Enforced:
- Rule of Drama, "because good relationships are booooooooring!"
- Originally Alice and Bob were having an affair, but the bowdlerised version removes all references to their spouses.
- Lampshaded: "Anyone notice that Alice and Bob both seem to go to the bathroom at the same time?"
- Invoked: Alice and Bob have no particular reason to keep their relationship secret — they just saw it on a TV show and thought it looked exciting.
- Exploited: Alice and Bob are on opposite sides of a pre-existing conflict and they use their relationship to get information on the other side.
- Defied: Bob suggests this, but Alice rejects the idea because it would be needlessly stressful and she wants their friends to know about them.
- Discussed: "Alice and Bob are having a secret rendezvous again. The obvious explanation is that they're planning my upcoming birthday, but what if they're having a secret romantic tryst...?"
- Conversed: "Oh no, not another secret relationship, we've had enough of those!"
- Deconstructed: Keeping their relationship a secret takes its toll on Alice, who decides she can't keep living a lie and breaks it off with Bob.
- Reconstructed: Bob makes a passionate plea to Alice in which he explains how much he loves her but also how much greater their love is when the entire world cannot judge them. She takes him back.
- Played for Laughs: Alice and Bob are caught in several lies about their relationship that they must bend over backwards to explain in highly amusing circumstances.
- Played for Drama: Claire eventually discovers Alice's and Bob's secret relationship, which creates a rift between the friends and tension all-around.
Back to Secret Relationship.
