Love stories for middle and high school are hard to come by. Short stories that deal with romance are rarely appropriate for school. And let’s be honest. If you want happy romantic endings, short stories aren’t the place to find them.
Even so, we’ve sifted through dozens and dozens of stories about love, marriage, romance and relationships. Below we’ve put together the best love stories for middle school and high school.
There are links to each story. And you can check out our lesson plans as well. Click below to preview.
The Chaser by John Collier
Clocking in at just over two pages, this is the go-to love story if you have very little time. Collier’s tale looks simple enough on the surface, but it’s actually a very well-constructed and complex tale.
Collier’s story revolves around a young man in search of the famed love potion to give to the woman of his dreams. The proprietor who has such a product for sale has other items on offer as well.
“Here, for example,” interrupted the old man, reaching for a bottle from the shelf. “Here is a liquid as colorless as water, almost tasteless, quite imperceptible in coffee, wine, or any other beverage. It is also quite imperceptible to any known method of autopsy.”
The young man is appalled and states emphatically that he is only interested in a love potion. The proprietor doesn’t push. He knows his clientele well. The love potion he sells for cheap. It is the death potion that goes for much higher prices.
By the end of the story, the reader begins to understand that there is more going on than just a simple transaction, and that the proprietor is far more crafty — and far more sinister — than he first appears.
This is a great tale about the dangers of obsessive love, and it opens up excellent conversations about the difference between love and lust.
The Lake by Ray Bradbury
This early Bradbury story is included in his masterful collection The October Country. It can also be read here.
Bradbury’s story centers on a young man who, as a boy, lost his best friend (and love of his life) in a terrible drowning accident. The boy grew up, moved away from his hometown, and eventually got married. Then he returns home, bride in tow, shortly after the wedding.
And goes back to the lake.
Which probably wasn’t a great idea. Because what does he find at the lake? The ghost of the girl he once loved and is still obsessed with.
Bradbury’s story is a mere four pages, and yet he manages to stuff a great deal of feeling and complexity into those pages. On the surface it is a wisp of a ghost story, but below are deep channels of anxiety, depression, obsession, and heartbreak.
A great story for discussing first loves, break ups, death, and how to move forward when relationships end.
The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant
What would you do to live the high life?
Maupassant’s tale centers around the glitz and glamor of high society. Mathilde is a young woman who, more than anything, wants more pizzazz in her life. She wants nice dresses. She wants fancy jewelry. She wants to be admired by the wealthy and the connected.
Life hasn’t changed much from 19th Century France, I guess.
Mathilde’s husband encourages her to ask her wealthy friend if she can borrow a diamond necklace. The friend agrees. Mathilde and her husband go out for a night on the town and have a grand old time. Romance is everywhere. But on the trip home, the necklace is lost in a cab, never to be seen again.
Bummer dude.
Mathilde and her husband take out a massive loan, buy a necklace that looks just like the one that was lost, and return the replacement to Mathilde’s friend. Then they spend the next ten years working like dogs to repay the loan, only to find out after all that time that the lost necklace was, in reality, a fake.
Maupassant weaves a powerful story around the concepts of love and materialism, one that resonates even today.
The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry
Ah, the classic. If you’re wanting a love story with a (semi) happy ending, this is the one. Short stories rarely have room for upbeat resolutions, but O. Henry pulls it off in one of the best-known short stories in the English language.
O. Henry was best known for his wonderful twist endings, and there is probably no better twist in his output than the final revelation at the close of Magi. The story revolves around a young couple who desperately want to get the best gifts possible for each other at Christmas. They are poor, and in order to afford those gifts they both give up something precious to themselves.
James sells his pocket watch. Della cuts and sells her long golden hair.
And of course, James buys some fabulous combs for Della, and she buys a snazzy pocket-watch chain for James.
Figures.
This story is a classic for a reason, and while it is widely read at Christmas it can do double duty and be read at Valentine’s as well.
Death Constant Beyond Love by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Marquez is known the world over for his romantic and magical novels: Love in the Time of Cholera, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Chronicle of a Death Foretold. But he was also a master of the short story, and many of his short stories deal with love.
The subject matter here is definitely for high school, as the story concerns a middle-aged Caribbean senator who has learned that he is going to die within a year from a medical condition. The senator is a charlatan, putting on badly-staged campaign performances in which he promises miracles he knows he can’t deliver.
In one godforsaken town he visits on his campaign tour, he meets a young woman and falls in love with her instantly. As it happens, he is already acquainted with the girl’s father, who murdered his wife years ago and has been petitioning the senator to help him change his identity so that he can never be prosecuted for the crime.
The father sends his daughter to meet the senator and offers her virginity in exchange for the senator’s help.
Beyond Love is a complicated story dealing with multiple themes. Marquez balances the crudity of his tale well against the senator’s desire less for sex and more for connection, which he finds in the arms of a girl half his age. Having spent his life lying for a living, he wants real love as he approaches death.
The Captain’s Last Love by Wilkie Collins
Of all the stories on this list, this is the one that has a little something for everyone in the classroom. It is a Victorian-era tale of adventure, love, obsession, fate and destruction. Collins is best remembered for originating the detective novel with his books The Moonstone and The Woman in White, but he was a master short story writer as well.
You can check the story out here.
Collins’s story revolves around a merchant ship that comes across a mysterious island in the ocean that isn’t on any of their maps. The island is populated by a small band of natives who are initially friendly and receptive to the sailors. The chief of the tribe offers the captain of the ship only one warning: no one is to go near a smaller second island nearby, for that island is sacred and the gods will be angered.
The only person allowed on that sacred island is a priest, who lives there, and the priest’s daughter.
So, of course, the captain sails by the sacred island, spots the priest’s daughter, falls instantly in love, and rows on over to the island.
Brilliant.
Which sets in motion a Jerry Bruckheimer-level event in which a massive volcano erupts and the sacred island sinks into the ocean. The priest and his daughter are lost in the destruction, and the captain eventually returns home heartbroken and alone.
While the story is certainly dated and suffers from Victorian-era ideas about women and minorities, it does hold up as a captivating tale of obsessive love. More so, Collins weaves a subtle theme about fate and choice into the narrative, leaving the reader with many unsettling questions.
Lamb to the Slaughter by Roald Dahl
Not all love stories end happily. Especially if they’re written by Roald Dahl.
Lamb to the Slaughter is perhaps Dahl’s best known short story, and for good reason. It explores the death of love by way of betrayal, and it does so in a clever and darkly amusing way.
A man comes home and says he wants a divorce. In a blind rage, his wife murders him. That story has been told a thousand times. But what Dahl does with it is unique. It is how the poor wife escapes detection — by literally baking the murder weapon and feeding it to the police — that captivates the reader.
While not a straight up romance story, Dahl’s tale does ask us to consider a number of the complications of modern marriage. Not least is why this common housewife is so undervalued by her husband when she is clearly the most resourceful and intelligent character in the story.
A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner
Another classic. This is perhaps Faulkner’s best known and most widely read work. You can read it here.
Though there is a romance at the heart of this story, this is another tale that deals more with how love goes wrong than how it goes right.
At the heart of the story is the aging Emily, a Southern gal who just wanted to find love but who was kept under lock and key by her father. Eventually she’s too old, and her father dies, and now she’s left alone living in her crumbling old house.
In her middle age, Emily does find love in the arms of a Northern laborer who up and leaves town after the wedding date is set.
Or does he?
If you haven’t read this one, we won’t say any more. This is one of the great twist endings of all time.
A Rose for Emily has rightly become a classic and a classroom staple. It explores not just the darker alleys of love but also questions of class, race, North versus South, and how repressing natural desires leads to unnatural consequences.
