the safety of romance books

This!!!

I saw a Helen Hoang quote this week that was so good it gave me chills and made me think:

“When readers trust that everything is going to be O.K. in the end, they open their hearts to experience a wider range of emotion, because they’re not protecting themselves from pain. This is something special to the genre.”

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!

I find myself defending romance novels (often just in my head in response to things I see online), and while there are tons of reasons why I love them, I’ve never thought of it this way: reading romance allows for greater bravery on the part of the reader because there is a safety net of a happy ending.

Wow.

You know that the book’s journey is going to make you twist and turn. You understand that the book may pulverize your heart. But at the end, the promise to the reader is that your heart will be put back together, and it will be stronger than before. You’ll learn something. Experience something. Grow in the process.

Romance books allow for the safety to feel icky emotions that we (I) usually suppress. While some may argue it’s emotional manipulation, that’s missing the point. The point of a romance novel is to feel the emotions. The point is to experience pain, heartbreak, pleasure, elation, and ultimately falling in love.

This is powerful stuff, friends.