The wrong idea about love

Someone asked me this week, not unkindly, whether I ever worry that romance novels give people the wrong idea about love. Whether all the longing and the almost and the perfectly timed confession set readers up to be let down by the real thing, which arrives without a soundtrack and forgets your anniversary. It is a fair question, asked in good faith, and it deserves better than the defensive answer I wanted to give first.

So here is the honest one.

Yes, my books are unrealistic, in the specific sense that real life does not hold a glance a beat too long on purpose, does not arrange for two people to be trapped by the weather in the one cottage, does not hand anyone the perfect sentence at the perfect moment. Real longing is mostly badly timed and faintly embarrassing and interrupted by somebody needing the bathroom. I know this. I am not writing a manual.

But I do not think a love story is a set of instructions any more than an adventure story is a travel guide. Nobody finishes a novel about a treasure hunt and feels betrayed that their own Tuesday contained no treasure. We understand, without being told, that the adventure is doing something other than promising. A romance is doing something other than promising too. It is not telling you that love will look like this. It is reminding you, for a few hundred pages, what it feels like to want something that much, and to be wanted back, and that the wanting is worth the risk of the reaching.

A romance is not a promise about how love will look. It is a rehearsal of how much it is allowed to matter.

That is the real service, and it is not a small one. Most of us spend our days being sensible, keeping our wants at a manageable size, not reaching first in case the other person does not reach back. A love story gives you a few hours in a world where the wanting is allowed to be enormous, where the reach is worth it, where the pause before the yes is treated as the most important thing in the room, because for the two people in it, it is. Readers do not close the book confused about reality. They close it a little braver about their own.

If anything, the wrong idea about love is the one you absorb from being told, over and over, that wanting things is undignified, that hope is naive, that the cool position is to expect little. My genre stands against all of that, unfashionably and on purpose. It insists that the ache is not silly, that the longing is not weakness, that two people deciding to risk each other is one of the great human dramas and not a guilty pleasure to be read with the cover turned inward.

So no, I do not worry. I think the reader who wants the long look and the unfinished sentence knows exactly what she is doing. She is not mistaking the book for the world. She is asking the book to remind her that the world, on its better days, is capable of this too. And it is. Just later than you would like, and usually while someone needs the bathroom.