Hello 🙂

I love love. I love romance. Give me heart wrenching, tear jerking couples pushing and pulling at each other, not realising they’re made for each other only to recognise it at the last moment to love happily ever after. Give me couples who shouldn’t be together or are enemies who fall in love, along with all the other soppy clichés. I’m a sucker for it. Ahhh ❤

But that’s not to say I enjoy reading romance novels where that becomes the only plotline and everything else redundant. For me, I like to have romance in novels/literature as an added bonus rather than being the main plot. I don’t want characters to be reduced to being love interests, I want their love to add to a story, to enhance it further, to be a driving force. More often than not however, that’s the case. Whether it be women thrown into a narrative, reduced to being nothing more than a one dimensional sexual character, or a male character being written purely to enhance a female’s story – to give her story purpose – because she can’t have a purpose without a man surely(!) I want flawed characters. I want them to fall in love with the person and the not the idea of romance. I know that it might be a little hypocritical to say that given that the first thing I said was I love romance. I mean the whole idea of romance is to sell an idyllic version of it right? To allow us to fulfil our fantasies and escape to a world where everything is easier and simpler, where a boy would come in and sweep you off your feet or a girl would give everything up for you in a heartbeat, you take one look at the movie industry in the 90’s and you can see that, it distorts or perceptions and our ideas of what love and romance should be and more often than not, the reality never lives up to the fantasy.

But. When you think of the best fictional couples, or when I think of my favourites, the ones that instantly spring to mind aren’t the perfect couples where everything goes right. My favourite literary couples are the ones where actually, everything goes pretty wrong. Where they butt heads and clash. Where they have a difference of opinions but compliment each other, making each other whole. Love is imperfect so why shouldn’t the couples be imperfect with it? Love is blind and romance is a fantasy, but what I love about my favourite fictional couples is their resilience, their strength and their fight for one another. Give me Elizabeth Bennett and Mr Darcy with their different stances on pretty much everything. Give me Ron and Hermione who are imperfectly perfect for each other (no matter what JK says!) and give me Oliver and Jennifer who show that romance will never die.

“The very essence of romance is uncertainty.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays.

xo