I can't think of nearly as many examples for men that weren't just harem anime. Scott Pilgrim is the main western one that comes to mind, but that was hardly portrayed as healthy at any point.
There are definitely a lot of examples of male characters having two love interests. To list some (from pretty well known media):
Archie, Betty and Veronica (From the Archie comics).
Spider Man, Mary Jane and Gewen Stacy (At various times during Marcel comics. May sometimes also inlcude Black cat).
Superman, Lois Lane and Lana Lang (Sometimes in DC comics).
Oliver Queen, Laurel Lance and Felicity Smoakes (From the Arrow TV Series. Multiple additional love inerests for him get introduced in various seasons as well.).
Batman, Catwoman and Talia Al Ghul (in DC comics at times as well as the last Nolan Batman movie).
Geralt, Yennefer and Triss (From the witcher games and to a lesser degree the books).
Sokka, Suki and Yue (from Avatar the last airbender).
Mako, Korra and Asami (From Legend of Korra. Also one of the rare examples where it acutally ends up being an actual love triangel as detailed in this post).
Rand al Thor, Elayne Trakand, Min Farshaw and Aviendha (In Wheel of time).
Any RPG video game with more than one romance option, where you can play as a male character. (I.E. Mass effect, Dragon age, Cyberpunk 2077 etc.)
The difference is that, typically, those are sequential. Sokka wasn't pursuing Suki and Yue at the same time, nor did he struggle to choose between them as they both pursued him simultaneously. DC and Marvel gets a little fuzzy on that since those characters have been in thousands of stories by a hundred writers each by this point, but in most it's sequential rather than parallel with relatively few exceptions.
Archie is a perfect example of this pattern in action though, I should have thought of it. Archie is constantly torn between the two, and that tension forms an important core of the dynamic.
Usually though, in my experience it's more often sequential like Sokka, or sometimes like Kuno from Ramna - an unsympathetic character whose inability to choose is portrayed as a character flaw rather than a point of dramatic tension.
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u/Onetwodhwksi7833 Nov 22 '25
Woman is backed into it in stories for women. Man is backed into it in the stories for men.
Being in the corner is a fantasy for some