Greetings

The book that started it all

Hello and welcome to the home of romantical skeptics and skeptical romantics! 

First off, I need to get something out there - I love romance novels, I do, but I must confess that I begin each and every one with a feeling of disbelief and incredulity. I mean, I believe in great relationships and emotional attachment and love, obviously, or I may as well be dead inside. But even though I don’t doubt the existence of True Love, I find myself picking up each book with an unspoken challenge to its writer – ok sister, convince me.  Make me believe the Happily Ever After and why these two clowns should get to have it.

An early fave

If my approach sounds obnoxious and disrespectful to those valiant scribes who labor ceaselessly to bring us stories of love – it’s only because I care so dang much. I want to believe, Skeptics! I want the Him & her to have their HEA and to go sailing off into the sunset or at least fog up their sex toy-rigged penthouse making sweet, sweet love atop a piano. A believable HEA is all I pray for when I read these things. Most of the time though, I come away feeling like I just watched an episode of Friends – something of familiar and obvious, kind of enjoyable but ultimately, rather forgettable. Other times I read something so monumentally idiotic that I want to fall to my knees and scream like a 14^th century washer woman who’s just lost her child to the Black Death. Am I too invested? Possibly. This is what I am trying to tell you. It is literally my greatest weakness (one that I frequently mention in job interviews) – I care too much.

Good example of hot pink 

But. Once in a very great while I will chance upon a story so sweet, so incredibly precious that my faith is restored; birds sing once more and the blackness in my heart turns for a moment to a vibrant pink*, and it pulses with new life. This is what I live for, dearest Skeptics, and why I risk bitter heartbreak every time I read a new romance novel. Because when the magic does happen…well, it is effing glorious.

*Not a pretty rose shade but the serious, hot pink that marketers love to use to represent girl-power. You know the one – they use it on everything – tampon boxes, chick lit novel covers, barbie's lipstick. Hot pink, it would appear, has been re-appropriated to represent some sort of post-post-modern female empowerment thing. Not saying I hate it. But it’s just painful to look after a while.