Life Meets Romance Novels

In the 1980’s, my great-aunt was member of a Harlequin-of-the-month book club.  She passed the books  to my mother who then gave them to teen-aged me.  I devoured them.  They were my palate cleanser between school-required summer reading books like Vanity Fair and Great Expectations.  They were my respite when forced to study for an impossible history class taught by a bitter man or to wrestle with geometry.  But since books are not read in a vacuum, I couldn’t help but to compare the stories with my own life.  When in high school, I was occupied with trying to understand boys, figuring out whether to have sex and contemplating how I looked wearing Elizabeth Arden opalescent lip gloss.  Harlequin books had a take on all of that.   In the 1980’s, when sex education was non-existent for me, Harlequin morality was a big influence.  Bottom-line lesson I learned from Harlequin books:  don’t put out until you find someone who sets you aflame with his mere touch.  But equally as impressive upon me was what I was learning in Catholic catechism:  when you kiss a boy, you will feel nothing, but he is on fire and it’s on you to tamp that down.   I did not have the emotional tools to make sense of that, so I stumbled through and around a number of boys. I stopped reading romance novels during my 20’s because they just didn’t relate to life as I was living it.  I was in law school and when I graduated,  I worked late nights and early mornings learning how to be a litigator.  Romance was not missing from my life, though.  I met my husband John and learned for the first time how a friendship and sex can be an intoxicating mix.  I didn’t need a Harlequin romance because I was living one.  After a few years, we had a child and then six years later had another one.  Working full time and being parents consumed both of us.  The only books I read were picture books and I loved them.

We were hit hard when the recession hit in 2007-2008.  John’s business dried up and he frantically set about trying to rebuild it.  I was now working in a courthouse and I picked up another job teaching a writing class to help with expenses.  As someone who grew up comfortably middle class, I had to learn how to buy weekly groceries for a family of four with only $60.   One morning, after John had to choose to pay the mortgage instead of the car loan, a tow truck pulled up to our driveway to repossess our car.  I ran out of the house and threw myself in front of it , sputtering about trespass and demanding that the tow truck guy get off my property.  The tow truck guy and I were engaged in a showdown when John came out to extract me from the car.   John came up with some money to get it back that night.  I don’t know how or where he got it and I didn’t ask.  The next day, a neighbor asked me about the car since he saw that it was towed away for what he assumed to be repairs.  I mumbled something about how we were glad it was fixed so quickly,  all the while feeling awash in shame.  I stopped asking John about his business because I couldn’t absorb his direness while at the same time handling my own.  I knew that he probably felt isolated, but I was barely keeping it together for myself.  The stress settled between us and pushed us farther away from each other.  We never argued because we both knew we were doing the best we could; we just became very business-like in our dealings.  At work, I sat in courtrooms listening to cases brought by credit card companies against people who couldn’t pay their credit card debt.  Their stories of medical tragedies, divorces, and addiction made my stomach clench, particularly since I knew that the line between me and them was becoming very thin.  John was so absorbed in his business that he forgot my birthday, which hurt a lot.  My collection of romance novels collected dust on my bookshelf.  They mocked me, and I’d glance at them and think, “how nice for you, romance heroine, that a greek tycoon fell madly in love with you, paid your debts and bought you clothes and jewelry.  Some of us aren’t so lucky.”  I was angry at them.  I was angry at John.  I was stuck.

Gradually we inched out of financial crisis, but our relationship remained stilted.  One night John said to me, “I love you and I miss you.  You have to tell me how you are feeling.  I promise that I’ll listen to you”.  My first reaction was to be coy because the missed birthday still stung.  I knew, though, that his approach was sincere and he deserved a sincere and honest response.  So, I told him everything.  And I cried.  And I felt a little better.  He talked, too.  I didn’t like hearing how he alone he felt when I stopped asking him about his business, but I made myself look at it from his point of view rather than being defensive.  After that night we started to move back towards each other.  A few months later, I woke up too early in the morning to begin the day and picked up an old favorite romance novel.  I jumped to the best bits and felt wistful, wishing that I could have that feeling again when emotional and physical intimacy was new and heady.  I looked over at a sleeping John and thought, “actually, I could have that.  All I have to do is ask for it – he’s a sure thing.”  And so I did.  We began to flirt via text messages.  We went out on dates.   I began to read romance again and felt affinity with the heroines because we both had something fun and exciting going on.  They inspired me to go after the relationship I wanted.

For the past number of years, romance novels have been a mind cleanser and an escape from the work I do in the courthouse.  The stories of the people who come through the court system can be compelling and maddening.  I don’t see happy endings there and I read at night to flush out the stories of pain and crime.  I like to end the day with something positive, and romance novels, with a guaranteed happily-ever-after, always deliver.    However, these days my ability to dispense with reality in the name of romance has limits.  I find myself becoming impatient with some of the heroines because I can see that the real ending of the story is that her cute bad-boy hero will quickly turn into an unsupportive ex-husband.  By now, I’ve seen it happen too many times to ignore the signs.

My relationship with romance novels has never been intentional.  They’ve waited for me when I rejected them outright or when I picked up trendy best sellers.   They offer comfort when the rest of the world makes demands.  They don’t ask anything of me and don’t make me suffer the pain of characters I love befalling some tragedy or death.  Romance novels just want me to be happy.   How could I not want that in my life?