Trauma and Relational Dysfunction in Colleen Hoover's Ugly Love

This article examines Colleen Hoover’s Ugly Love (2014) through Cathy Caruth’s trauma theory, exploring how unresolved psychological trauma shapes emotional behavior and produces dysfunctional relational patterns in the novel’s central characters, Miles Archer and Tate Collins. Using close textual analysis, the study argues that Miles’s self-imposed rules never ask about the past, never expect a future function as recognizable traumatic defense mechanisms rather than deliberate moral failings. The analysis also interrogates the ideological implications of Tate’s emotional persistence and questions whether the novel critiques or inadvertently romanticizes relational suffering. The concept of Ugly love is theorized as a cultural representation of love stripped of idealization messy, painful, and conditional. Findings suggest the novel engages meaningfully with psychological complexity even as it raises ethical questions about normalizing emotional unavailability in romantic relationships.