Everything I Know about Love I Learned from Romance Novels
Page 13
HEAVEN AND EARTH
BY NORA ROBERTS
(Penguin/Berkley Jove, 2001)
Suggested by Megaera
“I don’t want you here.” She shoved at him, and her voice began to hitch. “I don’t want you near me.”
“Why?”
“Because, you moron, I’m in love with you.”
He ran his hands down her arms, taking hers as he leaned over to touch his lips to her forehead.
“Well, you idiot, I’m in love with you, too. Let’s sit down and start there.”
THE DUKE AND I
BY JULIA QUINN
(Avon/HarperCollins, 2000)
Suggested by me
Her giggles exploded into full-throated laughter.
“Didn’t anyone tell you not to laugh at a man when he’s trying to seduce you?”
If she’d had any chance of stopping her laughter before, it was gone now. “Oh, Simon,” she gasped, “I do love you.”
He went utterly still. “What?”
Daphne just smiled and touched his cheek. She understood him so much better now. After facing such rejection as a child, he probably didn’t realize he was worthy of love. And he probably wasn’t certain how to give it in return. But she could wait. She could wait forever for this man.
“You don’t have to say anything,” she whispered. “Just know that I love you.”
The look in Simon’s eyes was somehow both overjoyed and stricken.
CARESSED BY ICE
BY NALINI SINGH
(Berkley/Penguin, 2007)
Suggested by Andrea
She turned to grab a couple of ice packs from the built-in cooler. “Sit.”
“I said—”
“Sit.”
He sprawled into a chair. When she wrapped the ice packs in a small towel and placed them against his ribs, he didn’t protest. “What is it with men and testosterone?” she muttered, standing in the vee formed by his outstretched legs.
“I don’t think you’d like us without it.” He held the ice packs to his side by pinning them with his arm. “There was no need for this.”
She was about to snap a comeback when she realized he’d come to her precisely because she’d fuss over him, no matter what he must’ve told himself to the contrary.
LAST NIGHT’S SCANDAL
BY LORETTA CHASE
(Avon/HarperCollins, 2010)
Suggested by me
“Come,” she repeated, patting the bedclothes. “I want to show you my treasures…”
She opened the box and started taking them out: the packets of letters he’d written to her, the little painted wooden man—the first gift he’d sent her, the bracelet with the blue stones, the piece of alabaster… on and on. Ten years of little treasures he’d sent her. And the handkerchief with his initials she’d stolen a few weeks ago.
She looked up at him, her eyes itching and her throat aching. “I do love you,” she said. “You see?”
He nodded, slowly. “I see,” he said. “Yes, I see.”
Asking for what you want can be very, very difficult.
In 2008, I started a regular advice column on the Smart Bitches website wherein relationship problems would be answered with the wit and wisdom of romance novels. In February 2010, I published the following letter, and am happy to say I have an update from the original correspondent.
Dear Smart Bitch Sarah:
I am a longtime lurker and I am in need of some advice. I have recently met a guy through an online dating site. We IMed every day for three weeks (we also talked on the phone) and then met in person. That meeting lasted the entire day. We continue to talk almost every day and have gone out again. I keep getting mixed signals from him. When we talk he sometimes references wanting a chance with me. But he is continuing to meet people on the dating site. Before we ever went out he told me he was a “friends first and see where that goes” kind of guy.
I am OK with that as that is how I operate. I just think that I would rather he didn’t reference dating me and telling me he is going on a date with someone else in the same conversation. I would be OK just being friends with him, but I have the feeling that if I let this continue I am going to get hurt. Am I just deluding myself? Should I tell him that I can’t continue this way? Should I just go with the flow and stop worrying? My feeling is if he really wanted a chance with me, then he’s got it, and why is he dating other people? If he doesn’t want a chance with me, then why does he keep mentioning it?
Sign me—So very confused
Dear So Very Confused:
In a romance novel, it’s no secret or mystery that the hero will like the heroine and the heroine will like the hero, and at some point between them, lips and assorted other bits will meet. In real life, there’s that pesky lack of omniscience to deal with. It’s so annoying, especially when, as it seems from your letter, you’re not sure what he wants… and you’re not sure what you want, either.
I think there are two problems here. First: his definition of the word “dating” and your definition of the word “dating” may be two very different things. Does “dating” imply exclusivity or not? You seem to think you’d like it to, while his definition seems to be entirely different.
Second, what do you want? It sounds to me like you have a rather fun friendship with this guy, despite his mixed signals of “wanting a chance.” You talk often; you see each other. You’ve told me a lot about what he’s saying and what he’s doing, but what about you?
So answer these questions: What do you want? What does “having a chance” mean? Is his referring to dating other women a question of manners and courtesy, or is it a question of your being unable to voice aloud that you’d like him to stop dating others and focus on you? Or do you want him to come to that conclusion on his own?
If he’d like to have a chance with you and he says so repeatedly, you need to spell out what has to happen for him to have the opportunity to be your boyfriend. If you’d rather be dating-as-maybe-friends, that clearly means, in his world, he will date other women and meet other women. If that bothers you, you need to speak up.
If you don’t really want an exclusive relationship, then ask him to keep the details to himself. You can set the terms of conversation. If he sees you as a friend, then he feels comfortable telling you about other women he’s seeing. But if he sees you as someone with whom he’d like a more meaningful relationship, telling you about other dates seems a strange thing to do.
If you want to stop worrying and wondering altogether, you need to figure some things out for yourself. First, ask yourself if you want an exclusive relationship with him. If you don’t, then let him do his thing and you do yours, and ask him not to dish about other chicks he’s dating as it bothers you a bit. If you do want that relationship, then speak up and tell him what you want.
He may keep mentioning the idea of being with you to gauge your reaction. He may be mentioning it because “having a chance” with you means getting you in bed. Who the hell knows? The only things under your control are your actions and reactions.
So: make your signals clear, and see how he responds. Decide if he is the one you want to take your chance on, and then offer him that chance he’s been talking about—and explain the terms you’re comfortable with. If he is what you want, go for it. A little miscommunication never hurt anyone, except when it adds two hundred pages of conflict when a simple conversation would have solved it.
Being the heroine of your own happy ending does require that you ask for what you want instead of waiting for it to come to you. Sometimes, figuring out what you want before you act on it is the harder of the two.
Lo and behold, a few months later, I emailed So Very Confused to ask whether she was still friends with this person, and things had changed. Her response: “I am actually dating the guy now. Amazing how a little of just asking the other person what’s up will answer questions! Getting the guts to do so is another story…”
I asked her for her advice to an
yone else in a similar situation, and she wrote:
I guess for me it was a matter of [needing] a yes or a no answer. I couldn’t stand the not knowing any longer. I wrote to you in February but I didn’t point-blank tell him how I felt until the end of May (I tried the “Let’s go with the flow” method first). And I told him exactly how I felt and what I wanted. And he turned me down. Told me no.
And you know what? I survived. Yes, I was upset that first day but I had my answer. The twist to the story is that we continued to be friends (the friendship was that awesome—I still wanted to talk to him). Then about a month later he [came] to me and [said he’d] changed his mind. The last month of friendship [had] made him want to at least try a relationship. And we have been together ever since. The rule of open, honest, let-it-all-hang-out communication stands. And it works for us.
That is my story. I hit my breaking point and just went for it, nerves and all. It didn’t go down how I wanted it to…but in the end it worked out. I will also say that after I was turned down I didn’t just sit at home and wallow. I went out and did stuff (a road trip, kayaking, hiking, etc.) and I think that hearing about my many adventures also cleared his vision to just how cool I was. (Modest too ;-) )
I’m not sure I can contain my own giddypants at Confused’s happy ending. In order to be the hero of your own life, you have to decide what you want first. You are a person worth being with, and you should first and foremost be happy with yourself and have the confidence to say what it is you want.
And, as Confused points out, as scary as it is, you have to ask for what you want, or you’ll never get it—you cannot expect anyone, male or female, friend or significant other, to read your mind and anticipate exactly what you want. You must speak up for yourself.
There’s a terrible vulnerability in admitting how you feel and asking someone to admit their feelings in return. Most people are instinctively resistant to being vulnerable—including emotionally—but the payoff is almost always worth the risk. Even if that payoff comes later, as Confused demonstrates, when the person you’ve revealed yourself to has realized what a treasure you are.
If you’re more than passingly familiar with romance novels, though, you’re probably raising a brow since part of the romance fantasy is often that the guy can anticipate the heroine’s every desire—and in some novels knows what’s best for the heroine before she does. In other books, the heroine decides she knows best and figures out how to bring the hero around to her thinking.
Ultimately, in just about each and every case, the characters figure out what they want and decide to go after it. This step in an active direction usually means revealing everything the person feels, and what that person wants. It’s risky, but the payoff is worth the terror. Just ask Confused, who is, right now, happy she took the risk.
We Know That Happily-Ever-After Takes Work
Here is the number one lesson from romance novels. Ready? You’ve read this far, you might as well get the payoff now!
As I wrote earlier, happily-ever-after isn’t sometime in the future. It exists right now, and starts with you. More importantly, courtship, the process of charming someone and demonstrating in word, thought, and action how much you care about them, does not end with the declaration of love or the commitment between you.
Courtship becomes part of relationship maintenance, but “maintenance” itself is a horribly unsexy word. Getting your oil changed as part of routine maintenance? Not fun. But getting the oil changed and the car washed on your significant other’s vehicle? Now that’s a very kind and lovely thing to do. That kind of care and thoughtfulness is what sustains the happy until, you’ll pardon the bad and sickly sweet joke, it’s never ending.
“Routine care and maintenance” are among the most unsexy and uninspiring words. Oil changes, annual physicals, and food and water do not always inspire passion or the remote possibility of poetry. While the absence of bad sonnets might be a good thing, the absence of care will wither a relationship faster than an orchid outside in an ice storm.
It’s better to think of the care and feeding of your relationships as “courtship,” only without that pesky insecurity of not knowing if the person feels the same way about you.
A very wise reader of Eloisa James’s wrote to her, “I’ve come to believe that people need to fall in love more than once if they are to stay together.” That is so very true. And while many romances are the depiction of falling in love once and for all, treating your personal romance as a repeated courtship keeps that relationship happy and healthy.
While many romances are the depiction of falling in love once and for all, treating your personal romance as a repeated courtship keeps that relationship happy and healthy.
Is the never-ending courtship present in romance novels? Well, it’s not exactly present in a single novel—but it is present in the entire genre, one happy courtship after another. Most romance novels end with the commitment. But if the details of a happily-ever-after aren’t always written out explicitly in the text, how does the reader know, and more importantly believe, that the happily-ever-after is going to be happy in the ever-after? Because both the hero and heroine have demonstrated that they know how to take care of the other person, and of their relationship.
It is really bothersome when you read a romance and you don’t believe the hero or heroine understands how to make a happy relationship work. With a romance where you don’t have confidence in the hero and heroine and suspect that when things get tough, the hero or heroine couldn’t find their own ass with both hands, much less help one another, it is easy to fear somehow that the happiness isn’t going to last.
There are some people who couldn’t spot and copy decent behavior if they were programmed to do nothing but feed other people’s parking meters. The hero who remains assiduously dedicated to his preference to jump to erroneous conclusions and never seems to realize his own mistakes is not going to reassure a reader of his eternal heroism. The heroine who is a selfish or clueless cloud-living goofball who needs a man to save her every third second because she will without fail investigate that strange noise in the kitchen when the serial killer is on the loose and the kitchen door is open—yeah, not so much with the confidence in that person’s ability to be an adult and care for an adult relationship. Idiocy and self-absorption are not heroic or inspiring.
Reading about couples who can successfully weather just about any horrible thing, from death, murder investigations, and blackmail to the possibility of interplanetary collision brought about by not enough kissing, gives readers confidence and the belief that those two characters can survive anything, and gives room for the possibility that any real problem can be solved too—with enough interplanetary gun battles, of course. Author Toni Blake says that reading romances helps her with her own real-life relationships because, “Reading books that all come with a ‘happily-ever-after’ generally keeps me working toward solutions in my own marriage, and seeing things in a more positive light. Cumulatively, they send the message that nothing is unsolvable.
“In my observation, sadly, in real life, most people don’t overcome truly huge relationship obstacles. But the point of a romance novel is to make you believe that you can, to help you see the possibility. Romance novels show people ultimately sacrificing their pride, putting their hearts at risk, exercising forgiveness, and exhibiting faith in the person they love—not stupidly or blindly, but with the belief that love is of great value and worth fighting for.”
There’s always another obstacle. Either that problem faces both parties, or an internal struggle exists on one side, but there’s always another crapful difficulty to deal with. That’s why happiness as a present and abiding element to a relationship is so important: without it, those obstacles are impossible. If people treated their relationships like an extended courtship, and made it a point to demonstrate that they care about the people they’re with, overwhelming problems may not seem so daunting because there’s someone there to help.
Author Courtney Milan says that another way to keep a relationship healthy is to feed it—but not in the way you might think: “In every romance novel I’ve written to date, there is a point when the hero feeds the heroine. Nothing elaborate (at least not so far)—but so far, my guys have made their women tea (in a novella) or bought oranges and bread (in a book) or brought her tea the morning after (tea is good; have you noticed?), or he’s made her a hot toddy (in another book).
“Sometimes the trick to surviving the mountains of external crap that the world throws at you is to make sure that you share the little stuff.”
“In every romance novel I’ve written to date, there is a point when the hero feeds the heroine…Sometimes the trick to surviving the mountains of external crap that the world throws at you is to make sure that you share the little stuff.”
—COURTNEY MILAN
Debbie Macomber says that communicating affection in romance is not that different from communicating affection in the real world: “In my mind, a hero is basically a decent, honorable man. She makes him a better man, and he plays the same role in her life—making her a better woman. In each case, the relationship brings balance to their lives. They come to rely on and encourage each other to be the best people they can be.