Do you read fiction? Do you read romance novels? Do you like fantasy novels with very detailed love scenes that could never make it into an R-rated movie?
I do.
They are my drug of choice for escapism. Give me brooding vampires and thousand-year-old faeries and young ingenues that don't quite realize how powerful, or beautiful, they really are. Give me star-crossed lovers who have to battle immense armies just to be together.
LOVE IT!
But, like any drug, it can be abused. It can make you alienate yourself from your real life. It can make real life seem too hard, complicated, dull, overwhelming, etc.
And in the case of romance novels, I think it can hurt our relationships with ourselves and those around us, our partners specifically.
Remember in the 90s when we started getting mad at Disney because all the princesses needed a man to save them, and we started seeing that Disney movies had been grooming little girls to look at men as their potential prince charming, versus the very real flawed and complicated humans they are?
Well, I think that the same thing can happen with romance novels. Even though the heroine is usually a very strong woman who is thinking or acting outside of her social norms, which I think we all appreciate. She is putting others needs before her own, a funny, brave, smart, sexy, saintly, but modest, woman who doesn't quite know how powerful she actually is. Yeah, that pretty much sums it up, because we all want to be that. Well, I don't want to speak for you, but I want people to see ME that way.
I picture myself in these novels, and I want to relate to the character and put myself in her shoes.
Yeah, I think that's normal, and I don't think that is harmful.
But here is where it can go awry, and where I have definitely been caught up too much in the novel and then very disappointed with my very real life, the love interest.
Note, I'm going to use the pronoun he/him here - but only for ease of typing not because I don't believe in any variety of love affairs that could be dreamed up.
He's perfect. Perfectly imperfect. His imperfections are usually the things that make him much more desirable. He knows exactly what to say and what to do and how to take care of this very relatable main character. He is exactly what we'd want. He never needs to be told to do anything, he is surprising in all the perfect ways. Even when he does something 'wrong' and our leading lady gets mad at him, we (as the reader) understand where he is coming from and we are rooting for him the whole time.
Now how is this problematic? It's just fantasy, right?
I think it's like anything we overconsume, exposure therapy if you will. When you are constantly looking at these idealized lives on the page, situations that, even if they are in mythical worlds, you could easily place yourself in, you start to compare how the characters would act in your real life to how the real people in your life actually act. And it's usually pretty incongruent. Did that make sense?
So when your partner doesn't woo you or touch you or pay attention to you, you start to feel like Cinderella and that partner is not acting much like the prince, he's more like the wicked stepmother.
When this happens we start to look outside of our real lives for things we don't have. We start to notice all the shitty things we are surrounded by and how everything sucks, why can't things just be like in the book!
Then we need more.
The addiction grows, we start to hate our lives more and more and then we need to read more and more, real life can get in the way of reading these books, and everything becomes super annoying and exhausting, why won't anyone just leave me alone and let me read!
Then the series ends.
Our friends and imaginary lovers are gone. We feel empty. We look around and we're left with the very imperfect life we had before. And all the laundry and messes we ignored. Yuck.
You might be thinking, 'They're just romance novels, it's really not that big of a deal'.
And I really hope it isn't for you. Because we all do need some form of escapism and a place to fantasize and take a little mind vacation.
But we need to take the things we learn and enjoy in these books into the real world. We also need to notice if we are feeling shitty about our lives and not liking how we are being seen and appreciated in our homes then we need to communicate it, or keep the imagination going, double down on it.
So either tell your partner/family that things aren't living up to your ideal romance novel life and they'll just look at you and not really know what to do with that information.
OR
Continue to imagine yourself as the heroine in your own story. That you are the heir to the crown who was taken from their home and forced to work and live in the way that you are working and living. But at least you have (insert the people in your life here) . Even, and especially, if they aren't perfect, imagine they are under a spell, demons attack your house at 7 pm and run around like maniacs demanding snacks and refusing bedtime, maybe your partner becomes a type of werewolf and at midnight snores so loud you have to punch them. but don't forget to give them a good back story about how you appreciate them for the very real people that they are. When the spell breaks in the morning, and the wolf turns back to a man he __________. When the demons finally wear themselves out and are quiet, their cherub faces glow in the moonlight. You know, something like that.
