What Draws Us To Romance?

Maybe you are one of those women who discovered romance early in your life, sweet and bitter like rich, velvety dark chocolate. Lucky girl. If you are like others of us, you stumbled upon it. That first book could have been on a girlfriend’s coffee table or maybe it was one of those that serendipitously appeared by unknown means. Perhaps a book club selection was the vehicle by which this most intimate of genres cascaded into your world. Doesn’t matter. Once your heart has been swept into one of its author’s offerings, there is no turning back.

What makes this medium of lush and lovingly chosen words caress the soul of women? We, all of us, have a corner of our heart that dreams. The impossible is always possible, the improbable, plausible. It is in that secret place of truth, of spiritual essence, of hope and love, of God and eternity, where the stuff of fundamental importance lies. It connects us to our sisters of the past and links us to women yet to be. It is there, as an undercurrent in the rivers of our existence, and some would say, beyond them. Sometimes it’s a languorous babbling song, other times a raging rip tide. You can’t will it to posterity because it is already deeply embedded in a woman’s essential makeup.

The genre of romance opens the door to this place, time and time again, to the sheer joy of rediscovering what we know to be ageless, timeless truth. A man inspired to love a woman is a wonder to behold. He is a force of nature beyond our ability to resist. Whether he is alpha, beta or omega, his enduring immutable energy propels him to love, lead, cherish, protect and stand by his woman physically, emotionally and intellectually. To be artfully reminded of this is a gift of the greatest order. It sees us through the tentative stumblings of adolescence, the demands of education and career, the piles of dirty laundry, the stacks of bills and even the wrinkles and infirmities of old age. This kind of unconditional love does not exist only in fairy tales. The secret corner of our womanly heart knows it. It is the force that has inspired the world’s great poetry, paintings, literature, acts of abandon and, yes, even violence.

If you are one of eternity’s wood sprites of words, gifted with the ability to put pen to paper in an awesome and inspiring way, then you are both blessed and burdened. You, my dears, are the purveyors of this great river’s current. As such you may have found yourself up at night, long past reason and sanity, spilling forth a holy linguistic offering to the ages. We are but a link in a long chain of women. We are the women who inspire and, in doing so, burn our dinners, leave our houses in dishevelment and isolate ourselves from many of the other joys of the world. But it is through these humble words that we expose the greatest and best in man. We bring fresh air and light to that secret place in every woman’s heart. Just don’t let anyone know that by doing this; we have succumbed to the rapture of that very large place in our author’s heart. Hours turn into minutes as we surrender to the throws of possession brought about by our story. And when we are finished, it is with deepest fulfillment that we launch our tales out into the world to bring joy, hope and love back into that forgotten, neglected place of womankind. Our words are there, of course, for men to read, as well. Is it a cruel joke that the male of the species seldom surrenders to the spell? Maybe not. If we had droves of male readers, when would they find the time and energies to behave in all the wondrous ways we attribute to them in our books? What other secrets would we share with them? --- Only that which makes life worth living.

Love.

Write on.

 

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