Ugly Love

Two timelines, one closed heart

Ugly Love is a romance novel by Colleen Hoover, published in 2014. It was one of the books that built her large following, and it found a second wave of readers years later on social media. It is a story about a sexual arrangement that turns into love, and about a man who has not let himself feel anything for six years.

The book alternates between two narrators and two timelines. Tate Collins tells the present-day story in ordinary prose. Miles Archer tells a story set six years earlier, when he was eighteen. His chapters are written in short, broken lines, almost like verse. The style signals that something in his past broke him, and the reader learns what it was slowly.

Tate moves to San Francisco

Tate is 23. She moves from San Diego to San Francisco to work on a nursing degree and to work shifts at a hospital. To save money, she moves into the high-rise apartment of her older brother, Corbin, an airline pilot who is often away on trips. Corbin is protective of her, sometimes too protective.

On her first night, Tate finds a man passed out drunk in the hallway outside the apartment. He is Miles Archer, Corbin's neighbor and fellow pilot. He is barely conscious and mumbles the name "Rachel." Tate has no idea who Rachel is. She helps him inside and is unsettled by how attractive she finds this stranger.

The building also gives Tate her first real friend in the city: Cap, an eighty-year-old elevator attendant. Cap is blunt, funny and wise. He has seen everyone in the building come and go, and he becomes the person Tate goes to for advice. His conversations with her are some of the warmest scenes in the book.

The arrangement

Miles and Tate keep running into each other. He is quiet, private and polite, and he never mentions a girlfriend. The tension between them grows. After an evening when they finally kiss, Miles makes his position clear. He wants a physical relationship with no emotional commitment.

He sets two rules:

• Tate must never ask about his past.
• Tate must never expect a future.

Tate agrees. She tells herself she is too busy with school and work for a real relationship anyway. The arrangement is sexual, frequent and, at first, easy. The book is frank about sex and returns to it often.

The arrangement does not stay easy. Tate starts to want more. She wants to know who Rachel is, why Miles drinks, why he keeps her at a distance after they sleep together. Each time she gets close, he pulls back. When she sees signs that he cares for her, like jealousy over a male classmate, she hopes his walls are coming down. When she tells him she has feelings for him, he reminds her of the rules.

This is the "ugly love" of the title. Tate keeps going back to a relationship that hurts her because she hopes it will change. Miles keeps taking what she offers while refusing to give anything back that would make him vulnerable. Both know it is not healthy. Neither can stop.

Keeping the secret

The affair also has to stay hidden. Corbin is Miles's friend and Tate's protective older brother, and both of them expect he will not approve. Tate and Miles keep it from him. The secrecy adds to the strain. Tate cannot talk about the relationship with her family, and she cannot ask Miles about the one thing she most wants to know.

Cap becomes the only person she can talk to. He listens and then tells her plainly what he sees: a young woman giving a great deal to a man who gives very little back. He does not tell her what to do, but he asks the questions she avoids. Tate's talks with Cap are the moments when she sees her situation most clearly.

Miles, for his part, is not cold in the way a villain would be. He is kind to Tate in small ways, protective when she is upset and clearly affected by her. That is what makes the arrangement so hard to leave. Tate can see that he cares. She cannot understand why he will not let himself admit it. Hoover keeps the reader in the same position, close enough to Miles to see his pain but locked out of its cause.

Miles at eighteen

Miles's chapters tell a different story. Six years earlier, he was a high school senior. His mother had died, and he believed his father had been seeing another woman while she was sick. A new girl arrives at his school: Rachel. Miles falls for her at once, and hard. His chapters about her are full of the total, consuming love of a first relationship.

These chapters are the opposite of the present day. The young Miles feels everything. The adult Miles feels nothing, or makes sure no one sees it. The gap between the two is the mystery the book asks the reader to solve: what happened to turn one into the other?

As the past story moves forward, it becomes clear that something terrible is coming. Hoover lets the two timelines converge slowly, so that the reader understands the present-day Miles just as Tate is ready to give up on him.

Characters

• Tate Collins: the present-day narrator. A nursing student who is direct and stubborn and knows she is falling for a man who has told her not to.
• Miles Archer: the past-day narrator. An airline pilot who is careful and controlled in the present and was open and reckless at eighteen.
• Rachel: the girl Miles loved in high school. The adult Miles never speaks of her.
• Corbin Collins: Tate's older brother, also a pilot. He is close to Miles and protective of Tate.
• Cap: the elderly elevator attendant who becomes Tate's friend and adviser.
• Ian: a friend of Miles who knows his history and wants him to face it.

Themes

Grief that will not speak. Miles has buried a loss so deep that he cannot talk about it. His rules are not cruelty for its own sake. They are a way to keep his grief locked away. Hoover shows how unspoken grief damages every relationship that comes after it.

Love that hurts. Tate's love for Miles is real, and it costs her. The book does not pretend the arrangement is good for her. It shows a woman choosing pain because she hopes it will turn into something else.

First love and its loss. Miles's teenage chapters show how a first love can feel like a whole world. Losing it can feel like losing the world too.

Honesty. The relationship cannot change until Miles tells the truth. The book argues that intimacy without honesty is only physical.

Friendship and wisdom. Cap is the novel's moral center. He gives Tate the plain advice she does not want to hear, and he shows that kindness from an unexpected person can matter a great deal.