Hello Stranger

by Katherine Center

And then I’d always, always thank her for being my mother, and for being such a source of love and joy that I could still feel it all these years later, so long after she was gone. That was no small feat on her part. But it was also a choice on my part.

That’s the dark underbelly of hope that nobody ever talks about. How it can skew your perspective. How it can keep you in long past when any reasonable person would’ve been out.

Sometimes when I’m watching a movie and there’s a simple Big Misunderstanding between two people—he thinks she’s a space alien or something—I want to shout, “Just talk to each other!” But of course nothing in real life is ever simple like that. Every real human interaction is made up of a million tiny moving pieces. Not a simple one-note situation: a symphony of cues to read and decipher and evaluate and pay attention to. It’s a wonder we ever get anything straight at all.

I thought about my dad’s doctor voice—how he made it a little deeper and a little louder when he talked to patients so he could assume the role of wise purveyor of knowledge. Maybe that was part of the professional medical persona—sounding like you were in charge.

Sometimes we really are the best versions of ourselves. I see that about us. And I’m determined to keep seeing that about us. Because that really might be the truest thing I’ll ever know: The more good things you look for, the more you find.

There you have it: I fell in love with romance novels. For a long time, if you’d asked me why that was, I’d have shrugged and said, “Because they’re fun?” But now, after much overthinking it, I’ve figured out—at least in part—why they’re fun. It’s because love stories really are unlike any other kind of story. All stories have an emotional engine that drives them. Mysteries run on curiosity. Thrillers run on heart-thumping adrenaline. Horror stories run on fear. And the fuel for those emotional engines is anticipation. We piece the clues together and predict what’s going to happen, and we feel emotions—sometimes very strong ones—about what we’re predicting.

Romance novels, rom-coms, nontragic love stories—they all run on a blissful sense that we’re moving toward something better. Percentage-wise, the majority of clues writers drop in romance novels don’t give you things to dread. They give you things to look forward to. This, right here—more than anything else—is why people love them. The banter, the kissing, the tropes, even the spice … that’s all just extra. It’s the structure—that “predictable” structure—that does it. Anticipating that you’re heading toward a happy ending lets you relax and look forward to better things ahead. And there’s a name for what you’re feeling when you do that. Hope.