Love Dodecahedron

Love Triangles are stressful and often heartbreaking. Add five or ten more people to the mix, and instead they become comedy: Characters A, B, C, and D all love character E, who might love any of them, but can't commit for reasons of honor or basic wishywashiness. There's also character F, who might love E, and whom he might love back, but they get on each other's nerves so it's hard to tell. Meanwhile, G is sweet on C while H and I both love A. Except on alternate Tuesdays, when H's third cousin from Connecticut expresses her intent to marry Character F's dog, who has an odd thing for D...
You get the idea. Multiple, intertwining pairings are known as a Love Dodecahedron (A dodecahedron being a geometric object with twelve faces).
The Seven Basic Plots Christopher Booker uses this concept as his definition of the Comedy genre, only the point is that cleaning up romantic loose ends isn't a shoehorn but the soul of the plot:
*Start with at least 3 ideal relationships;
*Each relationship is stymied because the people involved are:
:#Fixated on the wrong partners and oblivious to the good ones,
:#Failing to communicate, and/or
:#Suppressing their desires due to other factors (e.g., taboos, class distinctions, family pressures, etc.). 
*The Villain (or sometimes the Hero) is the source of the biggest road block, so
*Make him repent (dramatically), and then
*Everyone can cheerfully enter into the relationship they were meant to be in all along. 
The Villain (or Hero) casts a darkness and confusion across all the relationships until he has a change of heart, which frees up the main couple to get together and that, in turn, frees up everyone else.
A Tenchi Solution is a stable Love Dodecahedron, with 1) everyone staying friends, 2) everyone marrying the hero, or 3) the hero abandoning his harem.
Category: Terminology
Category: Shipping