While Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a TV show about monster hunting in a modern-day fantasy setting, it is also a young adult coming-of-age story, and Buffy Summers had several love interests on the show. When Buffy arrived in Sunnydale, it was because she was expelled for burning down her previous high school gym during a vampire-hunting battle. While she immediately met her new friends in the Scooby Gang and started finding allies and villains to battle, she also struck up romantic relationships along the way. As there are similarities to urban fantasy, the romantic relationships are the same as in that genre, with love triangles and the hero dating at least one of the monsters they are hunting.
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From the vampires that Buffy Summers dated to the high school and college students that she hooked up with, here are Buffy Summers’ top love interests on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, ranked.
7) William “Billy” Fordham
William Fordham is a Buffy Summers boyfriend from before she ever showed up in Sunnydale. He was one of Buffy’s childhood friends who showed up in Sunnydale and rekindled his relationship with Buffy. However, there was one big problem here. William had developed terminal brain cancer and was trying to find a way to live, and his plan was to get vampires to help him. He joined a group of vampire worshippers, and since he wanted to become a vampire so he could live, he betrayed Buffy.
Since William knew that Buffy was a Slayer, he went to Sunnydale and offered to trade her life in exchange for his receiving immortality. William debuted in the second season episode, “Lie to Me,” and his goal was to help Spike, and he joined a cult in Sunnydale of teenage vampire worshippers. It was a tough situation for Buffy, who was angry at William for putting so many lives in danger, but also sympathetic to his condition. Spike and Drusilla kept their arrangement and killed William. However, it all ended in a sad moment when Buffy waited for him to rise and immediately staked him, asking Giles if this job would ever get any easier.
6) Owen Thurman
Owen Thurman debuted in the first season episode, “Never Kill a Boy on the First Date.” He was a student at Sunnydale High School whom both Buffy and Cordelia Chase were attracted to. He was a heavy reader and a fan of Emily Dickinson, and Buffy liked him so much that she pretended to know who Dickinson was and acted like she enjoyed reading too. Owen actually accompanied Buffy, Xander, and Willow to a Sunnydale funeral home when Giles was trapped in there, and a newly risen vampire attacked Owen.
However, this is where their relationship finally broke and began to end, and it had nothing to do with Owen’s reluctance. Seeing the vampires and finding his life in danger gave him a thrill, and he said he was excited about feeling alive for the first time in a long time. This bothered Buffy, who understood the danger involved with the vampire population in Sunnydale, so she broke up with him, knowing that his thrill-seeking ways could end up getting him killed.
5) Dracula
If the real-world age gap between teenage Buffy and vampires like Angel and Spike wasn’t disturbing enough, she also caught the eye of Dracula, who also became smitten by the Slayer. Dracula debuted in “Buffy vs. Dracula,” the Season 5 premiere, where Buffy found herself shocked to learn that Dracula was real and that he actually had heard of her and had respect for the Slayer. This happened when Dracula went to Sunnydale to meet the Slayer in person.
He hypnotized Xander to become his servant, hypnotized Joyce to let him in their house, and then hypnotized Buffy so she would allow him to bite her. Dracula even had Buffy start to feed on his blood, and she felt no other option. However, she came to her senses and staked him, before staking him again when he reformed, and then threatened to do it again if he came back. In the comics, Buffy and Dracula met up again more than once, and it was clear that the admiration, respect, and attraction were still there.
4) Scott Hope
Scott Hope debuted in “Faith, Hope & Trick” in the third season, and it was in this season that Buffy began dating him. They were both high school students at Sunnydale in their senior year, and this was who Buffy dated after she killed Angel in the previous season. The two seemed to get along well, and it really helped Buffy to have a romantic relationship separate from her Slayer duties, but that is also what caused them to break up.
Scott ended up breaking up with Buffy because she was always distracted by something else, and he felt their relationship wouldn’t work because she didn’t take it seriously. He did this right before the Homecoming Dance. This was a sad situation for Buffy, and she had shown that she really liked Scott, but hiding her Slayer duties from him meant it would never work. On a side note, Scott later spread the rumors that Buffy and he broke up because she was gay, which was ironic since Scott himself came out as gay in college.
3) Riley Finn
All the previous Buffy romantic relationships were minor compared to the top three. The top three on the seven-season show were all long-standing relationships and ranged from toxic to tragic. However, Riley was neither of those, and his relationship with Buffy was just complicated. Riley and Buffy began dating when she went to college, and he debuted in the fourth Buffy the Vampire Slayerย season premiere, “The Freshman.” They thought they were dating normal people, without knowing each other’s secret lives, until it was too late.
Buffy is a Slayer, and Riley is a member of the U.S. military’s covert agency known as the Initiative, which was set up to capture and experiment on monsters. Since Buffy killed monsters to protect the world, and Riley was part of a group with some dark, hidden motives, they ended up on the opposite side of several battles. While Riley eventually joined Buffy’s Scooby Gang, he always felt insecure around Buffy and eventually left to rejoin a military black-ops unit. The relationship was never going to last, and Riley was the least interesting of Buffy’s love interests.
2) Spike
Spike and Buffy’s relationship goes beyond complicated, and Spike was one of Buffy’s most toxic love interests on the show. That says a lot since she had some people she went on one date with who tried to kill her. In Spike’s case, he was a vampire who showed up in Sunnydale to cause problems, and he was a fantastic antagonist until he ended up cursed with a soul once again. This is when he and Buffy began a strange dating relationship.
There is one big problem. While a lot of people love Spike and Buffy being together, he is also one of the love interests who actually attempted to sexually assault her while she tried to fight him off. However, moving past that, Buffy and Spike became completely different people in the seventh and final season ofย Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and their relationship grew from there. When Spike sacrificed himself to help Buffy save the world, it was a sad moment and one that helped solidify him as one of her best love interests in the end.
1) Angel
The best Buffy Summers love interest on Buffy the Vampire Slayer only lasted for three seasons and then left Sunnydale. Angel was a vampire with a soul who was in Sunnydale to watch and protect Buffy as she learned her role as a Slayer in a town over an active Hellmouth. By the end of the first season, Angel and Buffy were dating, and it was the complicated relationship that all urban fantasies have, with the hero fighting the monster she is hunting.
However, things changed in Season 2 when Buffy lost her virginity to Angel, and this moment of pure happiness and love cost Angel his soul again. He reverted to Angelus and became one of Buffy’s most dangerous enemies until she finally killed him at the end of the season. Angel returned from the dead in the third season with his soul intact, and Buffy helped nurse him back to health before he finally realized he needed to leave so Buffy could finally achieve her destiny.
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