Hello Stranger

by Katherine Center

don’t we all, deep down, carry an inextinguishable longing for our parents to be proud of us? Even long after we’ve given up? In the

Romance novels, rom-coms, nontragic love stories—they all run on a blissful sense that we’re moving toward something better.

Love stories don’t have happy endings because their authors didn’t know any better. They have happy endings because those endings let readers access a rare and precious kind of emotional bliss that you can only get from having something that matters to look forward to.