Romantic Tragedy: a classic tale

Some days are truly terrible. I like to describe them as the worst days possible without a strike of tragedy. These days come by often enough. I get my period unprepared and have to wash my jeans in a public restroom, and my coffee spills all over the floor, and none of the card readers on campus are working and I don’t have cash. It’s also 90 degrees out so I didn’t bring a sweater but somehow all of the classrooms are freezing. I’m cold and hungry and tired and feel entitled to better, so I reach for something to calm myself down. When I get home, I pull a romance off the shelf. I breathe slowly as I take in the salacious tale, and my heart rate begins to slow. 

The genre came to me in an unconventional way. At first, I reached for romance to find humor. My mother and I watch low budget Christmas movies every December, and I read romance the same way. I would take out a romance on Libby and listen to it as a hate read. These books were consumed avidly, and entirely in secret. I felt ashamed of the habit, and in many ways above it. The only books I read in public were markedly cerebral. I wasn’t supposed to like romance. I was supposed to be better than that. 

I was a teen at this time. My mother didn’t agree with my stance on the genre. “Romance is a feminist genre,” she argued, “It’s for women, by women.”

While I couldn’t refute my mother’s ideas out of hand, I also couldn’t justify them with the romance I was reading. Sure, they were written by women, but the women in them didn’t at all portray feminist ideals. They were bumbling idiots, wooed by men who were smarter than them, who then either literally or metaphorically saved their lives. And besides, what was the point of a romance novel? As a blossoming writer, I had a lot of ideas about books I hadn’t written, and very few ideas about the books I would write. Romance, I reasoned, was artistically pointless. The plots were predictable, based on formula. And also, they were filled with sex, something that at my young age I found unappealing but also strangely fascinating. 

I decided that I liked books with romance as a subplot. In other genres, like mystery or action or fantasy, the romance was usually my favorite part. But I seemed to like that there was relatively little of it. In my mind, the romance should be proportional to the rest of the plot. 

In hindsight, the solution was simple; since I didn’t like romance, I could have just stopped reading it. That was not what I did Instead, I played a mind game with myself. Since I’ve always enjoyed horribly made movies, I figured I could enjoy romance the same way.

There was a problem with this reasoning; there are only so many times you can read a book before you have to admit you like it. For me, it was about four times cover to cover. Looking back, it’s obvious that I liked romance, but this was very hard to accept. Among my group of nerd friends, girls and boys alike, who all liked Dungeons and Dragons and Marvel and first shooter games, a passionate love of romance would not have been accepted. Part of my reticence to admit I liked the genre was surely due to internalized sexism. If I had proclaimed my love of romance as they proclaimed their love of dragons, I would have been laughed out of the room. And why? What made romance books so very different from the genre fiction they liked? Simply put, romance is for girls and comic books are for boys. 

This meant that my mother had, as usual, been right. Romance was, at least in some ways, a feminist genre. And I liked it. I decided that having a romance novel on the backburner, in privacy, was a luxury I could allow myself. Who was it hurting?

But I still felt weird about it. Some of the reasons I had objected to romance had been superfluous, but others had real substance. A lot of the female love-interests really were bumbling idiots. I couldn’t always stomach the casual sexism of the male protagonists, the vaguely non-consensual sex scenes. It was hard to reason these things as outputs of a feminist genre. But if this was the kind of thing women enjoyed reading, who was I to judge? The question still plagued me; does the sexism in these fantasies have any effect on the real world?

That’s the kind of question I want to answer with Pure Honey. I want to look at this issue with a lens that is non judgemental of romance and its readers and comes from someone who appreciates and enjoys the genre. This is somewhat inverse to the scientific process- instead of waiting until I have my data, I am diving in headfirst without a clear hypothesis. We’ll see how it goes! Don’t let the non-scientificness of the process fool you thought- we are going to get really nerdy. Not only will I read romance novels, I will read the scientific literature, I will read the theories, and I will look at the hard data. Buckle up!

One thing that excites me about this project is getting feedback from my readers. I want to know what you think of romance, what books I should review, and what topics I should write about! Feel free to let me know in the comments, or email me directly at honeyblogxoxo@gmail.com. 

Signing off, 

Pure