Author’s Note
One year, for my birthday, I got a historical romance novel as a gift.
After years of studying creative writing and Serious Fiction in school, I had never really read romance before. But I pushed past the decidedly nonliterary cover and opened it up to the first chapter to “take a look” at it.
Three hours later, I was in the car—driving to the bookstore to get another one.
I felt like a person who’d spent her entire life eating boneless, skinless chicken breast … and I had just discovered chocolate cake.
That book was delicious. It was blissful. It was life changing.
It redefined reading for me. And fun.
It was the biggest writing epiphany of my life.
I mean, I knew I loved love stories. I’d been raised on Nora Ephron, after all. But those were movies. Movies were entertainment. Books, in my head at least, were work—not play.
After that first gateway romance novel, I spent the next several years reading historical romances in a blissful haze.
Did I say “reading” them? Sorry—I meant “devouring” them.
I put duct tape over the chesty man-candy on the covers—but I kept reading. In the bubble bath. At stoplights. While stirring spaghetti sauce on the stove.
There you have it: I fell in love with romance novels.
For a long time, if you’d asked me why that was, I’d have shrugged and said, “Because they’re fun?” But now, after much overthinking it, I’ve figured out—at least in part—why they’re fun.
It’s because love stories really are unlike any other kind of story.
All stories have an emotional engine that drives them. Mysteries run on curiosity. Thrillers run on heart-thumping adrenaline. Horror stories run on fear.
And the fuel for those emotional engines is anticipation. We piece the clues together and predict what’s going to happen, and we feel emotions—sometimes very strong ones—about what we’re predicting.
Stories use different scenarios in different ways to create that anticipation, but most novels use a fair bit of what’s called negatively valenced anticipation. A sense of worry. A concern that things might get worse. You know: You’re reading along, picking up the breadcrumbs of foreshadowing the writer’s dropped for you, and you’re like, “Oh god. That kid’s going to get arrested.” Or, “Ugh. That man’s going to have a heart attack.” Or, “Bet you a thousand dollars he’s cheating on his wife.”
But guess what kind of anticipation romance novels use?
Positively valenced.
Romance novels, rom-coms, nontragic love stories—they all run on a blissful sense that we’re moving toward something better. Percentage-wise, the majority of clues writers drop in romance novels don’t give you things to dread. They give you things to look forward to.
This, right here—more than anything else—is why people love them. The banter, the kissing, the tropes, even the spice … that’s all just extra.
It’s the structure—that “predictable” structure—that does it. Anticipating that you’re heading toward a happy ending lets you relax and look forward to better things ahead. And there’s a name for what you’re feeling when you do that.
Hope.
Sometimes I see people grasping for a better word than predictable to describe a romance. They’ll say, “It was predictable—but in a good way.”
I see what they’re going for. But I’m not sure it needs pointing out that over the course of a love story … people fell in love. I mean: Of course they did! I don’t think it’s possible to write a love story where the leads getting together at the end is a surprise. And even if it were, why would you want to? The anticipation—the blissful, delicious, oxytocin-laden, yearning-infused, building sense of anticipation—is the point. It’s the cocktail of emotions we all came there to feel.
I propose we stop using the hopelessly negative word predictable to talk about love stories and start using anticipation.
As in: “This love story really created a fantastic feeling of anticipation.”
Structurally, thematically, psychologically—love stories create hope and then use it as fuel. Two people meet—and then, over the course of three hundred pages, they move from alone to together. From closed to open. From judgy to understanding. From cruel to compassionate. From needy to fulfilled. From ignored to seen. From misunderstood to appreciated. From lost to found. Predictably.
That’s not a mistake. That’s a guarantee of the genre: Things will get better. And you, the reader, get to be there for it.
It’s a gift the love story gives you.
But no type of story gets more eye rolls than love stories. “They’re so unrealistic,” people say, as they start another zombie apocalypse movie.
What is that? Is it self-protection? Self-loathing? Fear of vulnerability? Is it pretending we don’t care so we aren’t disappointed? Is it some sad, unexamined misogyny that we as a culture really, really need to work on?
I think love stories are deeply misunderstood—in part, at least, because they don’t work like other stories.
Love stories don’t have happy endings because their authors didn’t know any better. They have happy endings because those endings let readers access a rare and precious kind of emotional bliss that you can only get from having something that matters to look forward to.
Yes, misery is important.
But joy is just as important. The ways we take care of each other matter just as much as the ways we let each other down. Light matters just as much as darkness. Play matters as much as work, and kindness matters as much as cruelty, and hope matters as much as despair.
More so, even.
Because tragedy is a given, but joy is a choice.
Romantic fiction thrived during the pandemic, and there were lots of theories about why. People thought we were lonely. We needed escape. We wanted some laughs.
All true.
But I think, more than that, it’s because love is a form of hope.
We all sense it deep down, I suspect—past the snark and the tough-guy exteriors. Love is healing. It’s nourishing. It’s unapologetically optimistic. It’s the thing that leads us back to the light.
So I write stories about how love does that—about people healing from hard things, and trying to connect, and working like hell to become the best versions of themselves, despite it all. About the genuine emotional courage it takes to love other people, and about the joy that courage can offer us. I hope this story made you laugh. And swoon. I hope it kept you up way too late reading and gave you that blissed-out, longing-laden, tipsy feeling that all the best love stories create. I hope it gave you something to think about, and maybe a new perspective. But what I know for sure is that reading love stories is good for you. That believing in love is believing in hope. And doing that—choosing in this cynical world to be a person who does that—really is doing something that matters.