In real life, I’m not much of a romantic. Not in the grand gesture, powerful confessions of love, first kiss on a secluded beach covered in rose petals under the starry night on a full moon after dinner at a fancy restaurant only reached by helicopter kind of way.
Okay, sure, even fictionalised romance isn’t that cheesy or cliched (hopefully). But in my real world, love is an every day, in little ways, kind of thing. I think that’s true for many people.
The problem with that? In the real world, nothing. In fiction? BORING! Who wants to read about that?
And that’s where the magic of love and romance in books comes into play. Or out to play.
Love in books, movies, shows, all those good storytelling mediums… it’s larger than life. It takes the every day, in little ways kind of love, puts it under a microscope and blows it up to a thousand magnification, takes what normally spreads over years and shortens it to months, plugs it in, turns it up to eleven, and tugs at your heartstrings until you can’t take it anymore, you’re emotionally involved like it or not, and all you want is for the main characters to get their shit together and live happily ever after.
Because those two characters are portrayed as absolutely perfect for each other. Destined to spend the rest of their lives together. It’s inevitable. They’re yin and yang. Two sides of the same coin. Cupcake and icing. Chaos and calm. They have that whole I can read your mind, know the exact right thing to say, do something for you before you even know you needed it done thing.
The unbelievably believable chemistry, even if one is a buttoned-up cop who follows the rules and is grounded in responsibility and the other is a whacky genius with a bizarro talent for finding things and just vibes on a whole other level. The kind of chemistry that would be totally exhilarating and utterly exhausting in real life.
Quick with a quip. Finish each other’s sentences. Off the chart levels of charming snark. An electric pulse so strong between them that even if they can’t feel it at first, other people do. Sure, some can be oil and water, but when combined they stop pasta from sticking together.
Yes, they’ll hit some bumps in the road. They’ll have their dark night of the soul where all seems lost and they’ll never find their way back to each other. But they do. They always do, in the most perfect way, which also ends up solving all their problems.
Unlike in real life, where it’s quite possible that dark night is the door slamming shut on a forever-doomed relationship. Because in real life, we’re an unforgiving, spiteful bunch.
Either it’s dead in the water, or we end up repeating the pattern and never quite reach that blissful, everlasting happily ever after because we’re too stubborn to tell the other person what we really need—
Wow. That took a dark and twisted turn! My bad.
Where was I?
Love. Fictionalised love. Because the book is always better. The imagined. The daydreamed. The romanticised. Because that’s what it is. It’s idealised. Unrealistic. Better than it actually is.
There’s something to be said for real-life love of the every day, in little ways, kind. It’s not something you pick up off the shelf whenever you feel like it, experience it for a bit, and then put it back. Most times it’s small. It’s quiet. It builds in the background of making it through the week, month, year together.
It’s the acts of caring and kindness that are not at all romantic, like unpacking the dishwasher or changing the empty toilet roll or sending that reminder text for the tenth time, trying not to sound too passive aggressive or annoyed about it. It’s real. Everyone wants it. But it’s not fancy like we sometimes think it should be.
And why do we think it should be fancy?
Fictionalised love. Real-life love considered, there’s something also to be said about the romanticisation of love in stories. Of reading, watching, experiencing two people meet, get to know each other, undergo a kind of melding-together-ness, then break apart in a dramatic fashion and yet still fight and struggle their way back to each other, to clear the air and learn what wounds they each have, what needs and wants, and then showing each other through grand romantic gestures that they each fill a hole in the other’s heart, healing each other and meeting each other’s needs and wants all in the neat space of 350 pages, or an hour and a half screen time.
Who says we can’t strive for that kind of love? I reckon we can, in a way. That it’s possible to find the person out there who can see us for our potential and not our brokenness. Because love in fiction is based on real human emotion and behaviour. It has to be, otherwise we wouldn’t relate to it so easily.
A fictional character falling in fictional love acts like a real-life human being, and if they don’t, we as the audience are quick to call bullshit on the whole thing. Because we know what love is, we know how people act, real or fiction. I think it’s the neatness of it all that lets us down. Nothing in real life is ever neat. That’s why books are where we go to escape the chaos and mess.
So I may not be much of a romantic in real life. But I’ll be damned if love in books or on screens doesn’t give me that dopamine hit, butterflies in my chest, head and heart rush that makes me wish I was.
For The Love in Books 
Leave a comment