Romance Tuesday: 2 Things I Find Utterly Unromantic and Why

1. Jealousy

Hello, why is it always supposed to be SO romantic when a hero (especially, though it can happen in the reverse) is jealous? Particularly when he is violently jealous? I suppose the simple answer might be rape culture. Or another simple answer is that it's an easy out for the writer. It's the default.

Why do I hate it? A man who is jealous isn't a man who is strong and confident. And yes, I understand that romance is often about bringing a strong, confident man to his knees in front of a woman, because of his love for her. Nonetheless, I prefer my heroes to remain strong in certain ways, and this is one of them. If a man doesn't trust his woman to remain faithful to him even after she has declared her love for him, I think there is something wrong with him. Deeply wrong. And if he hasn't heard a declaration of love, well, then he can feel jealous all he wants, but he doesn't get to act on it. Because he has no right. The only time I think this works is if the woman has been actually offended and the man is acting because of a real (not an imagined) hurt.

2. Love without Control

Yeah, so if you want to write about REAL ROMANCE, then it has to be the special, everlasting, never-felt-before kind, right, like Romeo and Juliet and Bella and Edward? Only, wait. Romeo and Juliet are idiots. Shakespeare makes it pretty clear what he thinks of a fourteen year old girl who falls in love in one night and then agrees to potentially kill herself for love. Um, hello? These two are not meant to be examples of healthy love. And Edward is actually one of the most controlled heroes in the history of romance, which is one of the reason some people don't like him at all. It's Jacob who tends to be less controlled. Edward is all power controlled tightly.

I don't feel any need for a romance to be high-stakes, eternal love kind of romance. But even if it is, losing control of yourself when in love, so that you can't stop yourself from acting out sexually--this is just gross. Rape culture again. This isn't real. Neither men nor women lose control of themselves when they are in love. Teenagers may feel like it is especially hard to control their hormones with their brains because, well, their brains haven't developed fully and won't until they are in their twenties. But even there, it is POSSIBLE for them to control themselves. They just let passion take over, and is that an admirable trait? No, it is a juvenile trait.

I don't think that losing control is admirable in a hero or a heroine of a romance. If they love each other so much, that love should cause them to have greater control, greater restraint, greater capacity to sacrifice. Otherwise, they are just fourteen year-olds who have no idea what they are doing and are likely to fall in love with someone else with just as much lack of control tomorrow.