Romance can be a lovely thing, but the way fiction portrays it sometimes you would think that men ride around on white horses and women spend their time tripping on anything and everything, waiting for prince charming. Because of this, I decided to make a quick list of some of my top pet peeves about the romance genre.
DON’T…
- Make either of the couple sparkle with god-like perfection.“Nobody is perfect.” How many times is that phrase said
each day? Yet how many times is the love interest in a story almost completely immaculate? Love interests seem to have descended from the heavens and, like the mythical gods of ancient Greece and Rome, they glow with unearthly beauty that could cause a mortal to combust upon viewing. Even monsters are literally sparkling like disco balls nowadays (I’m looking at you, Twilight)! There are first impressions and there is new love which may add a little shine to the individual viewed through its lens, but there must be a real person with realistic flaws underneath. (F.Y.I. “I’m a sexy vampire and I might kill you” is not a realistic flaw.) - Make the love interest a jerk with a “good heart.” If you don’t think about it too much, the jerk with a good heart theme seems like a nice one (although certainly overused). Here’s a person-usually a guy-who is misunderstood, but by getting to know him, the girl realizes that he’s actually a good guy. Getting around first impressions can be a great and rewarding obstacle for readers/viewers to see a characters get through, but this one can be problematic. If it is truly a misunderstanding or the behavior is not brushed off as normal, that is one thing, but often the jerk with a good heart acts like just a plain old jerk to the heroine and the mean behavior is excused. Although it was one of the more extreme examples I saw of this scenario, I discussed some of the issues with jerk-love interests more thoroughly in my last post, Black Bird: Sexy Teen Romance or Creepily Sadistic.
- Make either of the characters completely reliant on the other. Aha! The old “You complete me” syndrome that
often results in “I can’t live without you!” delusions and damsel-in-distress disease. Loving someone immensely is one thing-in fact, it’s a wonderful thing-but being so dependent on that person to the point where one feels he/she isn’t a whole person without the other is not healthy. (That’s some life advice.) So, the fact that fiction shows this situation as normal or romantic is feeding this unhealthy idea as good. The Twilight series is a perfect example of this. I know! I’ve already used Twilight as an example for something in this post, but it shows this scenario in such an extreme I just can’t pass using it again. In the second book of the series, Edward decides that he’s no good for Bella so, he dumps her and runs off. Bella literally curls up into a fetal position and cries, going into zombie mode for months because her own life doesn’t matter now that Edward is gone. While I trudged through the book (yes, I did read the series), I wanted to say, “Um, excuse me for interrupting you, Bella during this very important time, but didn’t you have a life pre-Edward?” Bella’s response to my question was to become dependent on another guy (Jacob) and do reckless, potentially suicidal stuff. Hmm. Not what I had in mind. This isn’t to say that people aren’t allowed to grieve for lost relationships, but that letting life totally spiral out of control or giving up on life is not the way to do it so, fiction shouldn’t present it like it is.
My final thought to this little rant of mine is if you think none of this bad romantic advice given by fiction matters, I say this: if girls can look at the fictional world of TV/movies with its airbrushed, rail-thin models and develop insecurities, why couldn’t girls look at fiction and develop unrealistic/unhealthy ideas?
Gagging on Sexism 
The Twilight series portrays EXTREMELY unhealthy relationships as ‘romantic’. Abusive, co-dependant and exploitative. That us totally fucked up. And THEN, some commenters some in and get all personally insulted and BULLY the blog owner into… an apology? For stating her opinion on her OWN BLOG? There is nothing she needs to apologize for. It is her blog, her voice, her rules. Get it?
John, you’re a turd and a troll. You DON’T get to tell anyone that their opinion is ‘wrong’. That’s a BS move. Fuck off.
‘Is’ not ‘us’. Yeah.
Eh.. so I suppose im arriving to the party a bit late here. Obviously something happened here, but looking at it all im not quite sure how it turned up this way. From the looks of it most everyone agrees with the first part including myself, but when it comes to the issue of how connected two people should be, (straight, gay, bi, you name it), there is a bit of disagreement. Personally I think it’s perfectly fine to be so madly involved with someone that you would die over them. I think every one has different paths, many of which rely on involvement with their relationship. Should the jeweler who crafts gems unrivaled and most beautiful live past the expiration of his love for craft? And some people feel their calling in love. Human beings have a past in relationships. Survival, to a large part, was set on human bonding and companionship.
There is even an affliction that exists today, simply called ‘Broken Heart Syndrome’ that naturally allows the body to pass from this life with the loss of its mate. This also happens with a number of animals, such as barn owls, cats, wolves, and African grays, who exhibit reckless behavior, often resulting in death, after the passing of a mate. Twilight was written to house an extremely tight relationship within its bounds, and so what better way to portray this than with a very strong bond. It wasn’t written to give any more advice about relationships than The Lord Of The Rings series was written to teach one how to live their life. I, there for, feel that John had a point to make, though perhaps his words were taken the wrong way.
It only appears to me as though he was feeling his own relationship held that element, and that it was insulting to have someone tell him it was ‘unhealthy’. Further more I don’t see why so many other people jumped onto this conversation to shut him down, the blog owners can fend for themselves, there really was no need for all the pushing and shoving and especially not all the vulgarity. Maybe instead of throwing hate into this blog people should work on equality with love and compassion. The blog post was fine being an opinion and all, but seeing all this aftermath is quite irresponsible and makes me question why I should side with what seems to me to be an unjustly matched argument.
Surly we can all take away something from every disagreement, but I don’t see any form of thought going into the words being said here. Just more anger and disagreement, with no healing, no sense of unbiased justice. Feel free to throw your stones at me, but don’t expect a rebuttal. Seeing as how other opinions were treated, I wont be back to spread more anger.