WHY I WRITE ROMANCE
You’ve likely read stories of someone standing at the edge of a twenty-story building ready to heave off. At the sight of a trained specialist trying to dissuade the individual, the crowd goes wild. The air is suddenly filled with the electric mantra, “jump, jump, jump!”
Why would people cry out such a terrible thing to a broken human being? It is ecstasy gone awry.
Say the word ecstasy aloud in a crowded room and people are likely to respond with x rated thoughts. But the feeling of ecstasy is as natural and vital a human function as is breathing. However, suppress the expression of ecstasy in healthy, creative endeavors, and it will eventually break out in dysfunctional ways.
Essential ecstasy can be found in a world inhabited by story tellers, artists, songwriters and dreamers. These people bring to us a life felt through all our senses. The ecstasy Michelangelo experienced as he created the Pietà may seem to be an entirely different sensation than the ecstasy of a crowd yelling, “jump,” but in fact, it is the same emotion—one is expressed through the sensuous world, the other breaks out from the darkness into the spiritless world of depraved emotions.
Living a creative, sensuous life filled with healthy emotions and one’s world is enhanced by keen awareness. Here is a world that fairly explodes in a rich profusion of beauty, of intense arousal where even the simplest touch of a finger drawn lazily across the bare skin of a slumbering lover’s back causes that lover to awaken with senses keenly intensified. Colors seem more radiant—the eyes seem bluer, the skin creamier as the sun filtering through the drapes dances off the other lover’s body. The couple leaves their bed filled with an inner joy that gladdens the heart. This joyfulness, carried throughout the day, has the capacity to wash away negative onslaughts like a gentle summer rain.
Is it “normal” for us to lead joyful lives on a daily basis by intentionally seeking the feelings of ecstasy? Or is that all nonsense existing only in romance novels? Could all this sensation be too much? While society gives us permission to think—in fact, it rewards us for thinking, complete with diplomas on our walls for practiced thinking—it often doesn’t take seriously our feeling nature. Such emotion doesn’t seem to carry much weight in the world at large.
However, it is an undisputed fact among clinical psychologists that if a healthy, ecstatic impulse is not lived out, then it retreats inside of us and tends to develop ugly, anti-human qualities. What should have been a natural human impulse transmutes into an animalistic urge that eventually breaks out in dysfunctional ways and spills out into society (remember the Oklahoma City bombing).
Thinking is what brings clarity and objectivity to a person or a society. But only feeling can bring a sense of value and worth to a person. Such is the chief function of feeling. Without feeling there is no value judgment—there simply cannot be. Our self-esteem comes not from what we think of ourselves, but from how we “feel” about ourselves. Feeling is the sublime part of a man and woman. Feeling brings warmth, gentleness, relatedness and perception to a relationship. Feeling is the sublime art of having a value structure and a sense of meaning and belonging. It is the part that draws love to us.
We’ve paid a high price for the cold, precise, scientific world we live in where romance is considered a dalliance and romance novels are often scorned as simply unrealistic (yet murder stories are considered fun, thrilling reading—think about that for a moment). We’ve ended up with nations comprised of wounded beings where men and women suffer their offenses quite differently. For the most part, men drink or overwork. Women eat and overwork. Men war and abuse. Women retreat and isolate. Countries that are scientifically-oriented are more likely to break out in ecstatic disorientation if the people in it do not fill their lives with ecstasy through their feeling natures, such as poetry, music, creativity and romance.
Did I use the word ROMANCE? Another silly word in a highly intellectual society, isn’t it?
Or is it?
Romance was the first step of the evolution of the spirit of man to truly understand the energy of divine love. Did you know that the first romantic notions of love in western society came from the twelfth century? It was in France that a new religious movement put a female in as a sacred godhead. As a way to counteract this movement, the church put Mary back into Catholicism, gifting her with the many powers of the ancient pagan goddesses. The new religious movement was suppressed, and forced to go underground. Thus romanticism sprang from this underground observance of the goddess. Eventually, it resurfaced in the courts of kings and queens, where evidence of it could be found in the chivalric reverence for women. The chivalrous knights would often be in love with their queen or princesses, but this romantic love was never consummated sexually because it was considered the myth of love.
I often make the statement that romance novels should be required reading for both sexes as part of our essential education so that men can learn how to please and satisfy a woman. Hey, aren’t we women who write the stories directly telling men how we want to be treated (I know, I know, most of our heroes have great abs and killer looks, but give us what we require and in our mind’s eyes, we’ll see you that way)?
What healthy person doesn’t want to experience love? It is the grand intangible. Love is such a wonderful, necessary part of our beings. Without it we would wither and die. Romance, ecstasy and ultimately, love, are such powerful human drives that they have kindled wars, created works of art, consoled the dying, driven kings mad and bankrupted nations. Love is the most important aspect of our existence, yet we spend our lives searching for it when a simple act of vulnerability toward our feeling nature will cause it to spring forward and attach to us like metal to a magnet.
Love is the vital, pulse-beating passion within us. It is derived from our important feeling nature that lends us creativity and a sense of joy. It is through our feelings that we experience our purpose and the special, ecstatic moments in our lives. It is through our feelings that our lives are given meaning and worth. It is through our romancing one another in healthy, ecstatic ways that helps us touch the intangible face of God.
And that is why I write romance. If you are a writer of romance, can you tell my why you do, as well? I’m always so interested to know.
Kathleen Bittner Roth writes historical romance. The Seduction of Sarah Marks, the first of five of books will release in June. You can reach her at www.kathleenbittnerroth.com or on Facebook and Twitter.
