Reading Romance Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

The usual saying goes a little differently: “Distance makes the heart grow fonder” or its opposing sentiment, “Familiarity breeds contempt” but writers are always on the lookout for a different way of seeing the everyday.

To make our work fresh and unique, we scour our brains for ways of saying what ultimately is the same truth — the truth that has been told by our predecessors from the first instance that one human spoke to another member of the cave-dwelling group about an experience they would all need to understand to survive.

In tales of romance, the element of survival may not seem quite as drastic as how to wrangle with a saber-tooth tiger or avoid eating those poisonous berries that look so delicious. But the human heart — technically a mere symbol of the miasma of emotions we cope with every day — can cause the most dire of consequences to arise from what some consider trivial events.

Falling in love, for many of us, is one of the moments in our lives that carries with it all the elements of human drama: comedic and tragic. Romantic love is not for the faint of heart nor is it in any way limited by circumstance. Each couple experiencing the wonder of finding the one-in-six-billion person who is their perfect match can testify to the miraculous phenomenon — that overwhelming elation of supreme good fortune. The ultimate “I can’t believe this has happened to me” moment.

Along with that elation comes the doubt — “This can’t be happening to me - I don’t deserve this - This can’t be love” — when you wish you’d never met this person.

Although Romance, as a genre, is often denigrated as “fluff,” “trivial,” “inconsequential,” most of this criticism comes from a misplaced sense of intellectual superiority. When I entered the Creative Writing Program at my university, I did so with the objective of writing “important” novels. I took classes in every aspect of writing the meaningful short story to the construction of the meaningful novel.

Try as I did, I wrote …“and they lived happily ever after.” The optimistic ending is in my nature, probably a result of my childhood spent in reading the classic fairy tales of world literature but more probably related to my “cup half full,” “walking on sunshine” point of view.

“Important” novels are those that drag the reader into a downward spiral of misery and hardship. “Frivolous” books lift readers up, provide “the air beneath their wings.”

I know which I’d rather write and read. Life is hard, why make it harder?