Looking for love in literature
Everybody knew I had a boyfriend. He was all over my Instagram and Facebook. He met my family. I spent three days of the week with him for eight months, and a month into our relationship, I read a melodramatic love poem about him to a room full of people at the Monterey Poetry Festival.
I was in love, and everybody knew it. The hiking pictures and oceanside selfies I shared with the world said it all.
I have spent almost my entire life fascinated with romantic love. When I was eight years old, I obsessed over the romance between Aragorn and Arwen in The Lord of the Rings. At ten, I wrote poorly plotted love stories between Harry Potter characters. A middle schooler at the library, I sought out novels in the teen section that had couples on them, and got scolded by my mother. Late at night when I was twelve years old, I watched Pride and Prejudice and fawned over the love between Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth.
So much of my time and energy has been spent dwelling on romantic love, mainly between fictional characters. When I read romance novels, I could live vicariously through two characters who exist wholeheartedly for each other. In my own writing, I could make anyone fall in love with just a turn of phrase.
But for all my obsession with romantic love, I was never in a relationship until last year when I met my ex-boyfriend, freshly 24 years old and having just moved to a new city. This is not to say that I had never been in love before—I had been in love, or thought I was, before I met my ex, but I mostly yearned from afar. I chose to yearn from afar because for a long time, I didn’t think I was the Best Self I wanted to be if I was going to commit to a relationship. Whenever someone wanted me, I turned them down or shut them out. For a long time, I was too concerned with my own woes and sorrows to fathom showing up for someone. For a long time, I couldn’t even show up for myself.
And anyway, all the fulfillment I could have gotten out of a relationship I got from romance novels. I spent my teenage years and early twenties poring over the kind of guilty pleasure reads you can find on Kindle Unlimited (iykyk) (see: my guilty-pleasures bookshelf).
When I started seeing my ex, it was the first time in my life that I wanted someone who wanted me back. It was maybe the most intoxicating experience of my life. I felt like I was living in some kind of utopia where everything made sense. I was writing love poems. I was texting my boyfriend all day. I was being held, kissed, caressed. I was, for the first time since middle school, consuming heterosexual romance in media.
I did think I was a lesbian for a long time. So, for a long time, I was only interested in queer romance. My safe place was queer romance (see: my queer-as-fiction bookshelf) like The Charm Offensive by Alison Cochrun, Maurice by E.M. Forster, The Dove in the Belly by Jim Grimsley, and The Place Between by Kit Oliver.
But when it turned out that I am in fact attracted to men, I picked up books like Normal People and Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney, The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood, and Beach Read by Emily Henry. All of these hyped-up books that had never interested me now read like revelations. A whole new genre of literature I couldn’t access before. I was finding love in all these new places, while experiencing love in real life!
Of course, I couldn’t live in utopia forever. Sometime last summer, about halfway through the relationship, everything started to shift. I had to ask for kind words. I wasn’t always sure where I stood. He was too scared to talk about the future. I knew no one in his life; he knew everyone in mine. He was older, more settled in his ways. He made me feel immature. I was afraid of saying the wrong thing, so I just said nothing at all.
When my relationship started to sour, so too did my relationship with romance in fiction. Last October, I read Bet Me by Jennifer Crusie. It was objectively a delightful romance novel that I would have enjoyed under any other circumstances, but when the characters professed their love for each other, I felt physically ill. When I finished reading it, I knew that I would be unable to enjoy a romance novel for as long as my relationship was on the rocks.
But it wasn’t just romance novels that triggered me. I read Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin last November—not a romantic novel at all! Yet, the couple’s (initial) devotion to each other, so much so that they are planning to have a child together, made me want to throw up. I couldn’t bear to read about something that I couldn’t have: a committed, secure relationship.
Immediately after my breakup in December, I was desperate to channel all of my unhinged energy into something productive. I picked up a book that seemed safe enough—Glossy: Ambition, Beauty, and the Inside Story of Emily Weiss’s Glossier by Marisa Meltzer. The minor mentions of things like marriage, relationships, and children were mildly triggering, but I made it through with zero nausea.
In the aftermath of my breakup, I also decided to publish a poetry collection (see: This Rambling Heart). I decided to do this for a lot of reasons, partly because when I was in a relationship, I grew disconnected from my writing, and I needed to prove to myself that I was still taking this “writing thing” seriously. I’ve been revising a queer horror novel called The Conspiracy Theorist since November 2022, when I finished the first (extremely messy) draft, but a lot of that revision has just been in my head (I’m about halfway through a rewrite and I don’t know when I’ll pick it back up again).
That novel is more of a love story than it is a horror story, and I just couldn’t buy into such an unconditional and undying love between two teenage girls when my own relationship was stressing me out so much.
I haven’t read a romance novel since I read Bet Me in October. I couldn’t bear it. This is so out of ordinary for me, who has been so brain-rotted by romance novels that one of my greatest joys in life used to be binge-reading three or four romance novels in a row.
There’s this funny thing, though—it’s called Time. Did you know that it heals everything? My breakup was three months ago, and for much of those three months, I’ve been steadily avoiding media that heavily features romance.
Recently, though, my friend and I went to go see Lisa Frankenstein, and guess what—I was totally fine! Lisa Frankenstein is a delightful horror-comedy romance, and I loved every minute of it. It may now be my favorite movie ever.
I was insanely relieved to realize that I can enjoy romance again. Imagine having once had a gaping wound, and then one day, you look down and it has scabbed over. It hasn’t even left a proper scar.
This past weekend, I sat down and outlined a horror-romance novel. I haven’t yet settled on the title. I don’t know how long it’s going to be. I don’t know how long it’s going to take me to write it. But as I outlined, I could see and feel the love these characters are going to have for each other on the pages I am going to write. I could feel it, too. I could feel it, and it didn’t make me want to throw up.
If that doesn’t mean I’m healing, I don’t know what does.
