What I learned from Romance Novels

Last updated on December 1, 2021

Romance stories! Think Lifetime movies, or paperback novels with the cute covers you see at the grocery store at the checkout line. The things we watch -and read- when we are utterly bored or in need of a hefty dose of cheesiness.

The opposite of page-turners. The dime novels, the novelettes, the potboilers, the penny novels, the penny dreadfuls.

A book that, although it might be compelling enough to keep its audience going, is otherwise of poor quality, or it uses questionable methods to achieve this compulsion, hurting its quality in the process. Some examples of these methods might be:

• Stretching out a romance with endless distractions, like Aunt Bettie showing up to steer the pot.
• Delaying the main plot by adding low-quality filler such as sub-plots or Uncle Ben, the ex-husband of Aunt Bettie.
• Contriving plot twists or crises for beloved characters, who should know better. Just watch Aunt Bettie!
• Using cheap tactics like cliffhangers. Will Bettie and Beg get back together (and why?)

We all have watched them. We all have read at least one of these paperback-miscommunication-disasters. Don’t tell me you haven’t. Just because the guy is now a medieval knight and she is the maid, who just arrived at the castle the day before the knight came to visit, just because they are wearing old costumes, doesn’t make it a historical novel. It’s still the same paperback-miscommunication-disaster- as all the others. Just in disguise.

The storyline is always the same. The main female character has a misunderstanding with some guy she met somewhere. He is good looking of course, often successful, and of mostly wealthy. She on the other hand, has some self-esteem issues and doesn’t seem too smart at first glance. Quite often these female characters seem to need a man by their side, to not fall off the earth, or trip over their own feet.

Why am I writing about these novels you wonder?

I read them in boarding school and back at home hiding in my apple tree. It seems it was the only available media to guide a young girl into adulthood -that and the teenage magazines we weren’t allowed to read, because the nuns hit us over the head with them whenever one of us got caught.

Yes, I read them too. I had to, all the other girls were reading them too.

It took me years to figure out how to read the paperback-miscommunication-disasters the right way. You start at the beginning, you get the names and the places, you let them meet, and then you zap through the back and voila…there is your happily ever after.

The end is never a surprise anyway. The moment we grab one of the novelettes, we already know they are going to fall in love because dah it’s a romance novel, what else would they do? We know she is going to get him, or he her -either as an award or lifelong punishment.

Sadly, this part we will never figure out because it always stops right then when the story would actually get interesting. Don’t we all want to know how it ends after the end? For heaven’s sake, it took them 178 pages to get together. They certainly aren’t very smart, we want to know how the two will deal with life and all the curveball the universe will throw at them.

The thing I hate most about the contemporary romance genre are the misunderstandings. They have driven me crazy, even as a child.

If a businessman was trying to buy out the building of my family’s small business, and then later I find out he’s the anonymous stranger I’ve been talking to online because his friends downloaded a dating app for him when they were all drunk. Guess what I would do?

If a comedy sketch guy who pours the coffee at my workplace during the day, ends up insulting me in one of his sketches, and I just happened to review it because I’m an events reviewer for an internet site. Guess what I would do?

If a local food truck owner is trying to put my competitive food truck out of business because he’s trying to save his brother’s business while I’m trying to save my parent’s business. Guess what I would do?

I would NOT fall in love just based on the fact that I mistook the passion of hating their guts for another type of passion.

I for one would love a romance book where they hate each other with gusto and just move on with their lives. That would make my day. I even would read one.

Like instead of spending every day obsessing about how much you hate the guy at the gym who accidentally tripped you on the treadmill in the first chapter, and then turned out to by the owner of the gym, whose grumpy frown makes you miserable every day cause he sucks at customer service. Why don’t you just give him the finger, switch gyms, and never see him again? Don’t fall in love with the guy, you’re better than that.

And for heaven’s sake don’t buy the paperback-miscommunication-disasters writing about him.

The End!