The Hopeless and Romantic
London’s heat has faded to a humid greyness, and I lie sprawled on my bed, listening to Maude Latour’s Save Me and thinking about romance novel protagonists and the voids where their personalities should be. The first romance novel I read where I thought “wow, I would actually fall in love with this character” was Sorry, Bro by Taleen Voskuni. It’s one of my favourite novels, and this is due in part to the fact that Erebuni is a brilliant love interest. She is witchy and political and mature, and she is written as a full person rather than a cardboard cutout.
I have read a lot of romance novels in recent years, because they’re easily digestible after a long day of engaging with academic articles. But I fell out of love with them lately. I started seeing the toxic traits of male love interests in straight romance novels, and was turned off by the genre as a result. I still read every novel Ali Hazelwood writes because I love her characters and world-building, but even her love interests have started giving me the ick.
“But Eliza,” you might ask, “why don’t you read lesbian romance novels if male characters are the problem?” First of all, I do. But I’m realising my problem might be with the romance genre, full stop. I love love stories, but if the characters aren’t interesting, it falls flat. I love Sorry, Bro because the characters are interesting and well-developed, and because I recognised my own taste in women in Nareh’s love for Erebuni. I read Sorry, Bro and thought: if I had read books like this when I was younger, I might have realised I was into women sooner.
My friend and I have a tradition where we send each other queer books as birthday presents every year. This year she sent me Kiss Her Once for Me by Alison Cochrun. I haven’t done a tonne of non-academic reading this year, so it’s taken me nearly four months to read it, but I’ve almost finished now. It took me a while to get into it, but now that I’ve read most of the novel, I really like it. It’s fun, and reading it makes long tube journeys pass by in the blink of an eye. I’ve been thinking a lot about love lately, and how it’s presented in fiction. Where I often read romance novels and wonder why the protagonist would fall for the love interest, I’m reading Kiss Her Once for Me and asking that question in reverse.
The protagonist is burnt-out, anxious, insecure, and self-identifies as a failure. Her only friend lives in a different time zone, she hates her job, she is incapable of setting boundaries, her creative work is suffering because her life is so uninspiring, and she is obsessed with the past. She also really likes Taylor Swift’s evermore. So basically she is me for my final three years in Glasgow – which hits a bit too close to home. I’m reading this novel, thinking “why would anyone fall in love with someone like that?”, then realising part of my visceral reaction comes from how much I see my lowest points in this character. She’s even 5’10; she’s just like me for real.
Romance novel heroines are meant to be blank slates, self-insert characters for readers to project their fantasies onto. I realised lately that the reason I like Ali Hazelwood’s novels has little to do with the romance itself, and especially not the male love interests. I like Ali Hazelwood’s novels because they’re usually set in academic institutions, and they’re about friendships and careers as well as romantic love. Sometimes, when I am PhD-studenting very hard, there’s a little voice in my head whispering “wow, this is very Ali Hazelwood protagonist of you”. Minus the romance, clearly. So it seems that my main fantasy is living in a world where people get decent funding for their academic research. A girl can dream!
I don’t write romance novels, I write fantasy. But there are usually romantic subplots, and, just like their author, they keep getting gayer. When I write female love interests, it usually starts with my protagonist being like “wow, this woman is deeply off-putting and definitely hates me, why am I obsessed with her?” and then realising that the weird tension they feel around this woman is not, in fact, due to said woman hating her.
I am a hopeless romantic, but I’ve kept that side of myself locked away for a long time. So much of what we learn about love and romance is tied to patriarchal and heterosexual gender roles, and, for women, it is often a narrative of self-sacrifice. Pour and pour and pour into someone else until they reach self-actualisation, be their surrogate mother, chop and change yourself until you fit the perfect mould.
When I imagine falling in love with a woman, I think about seeing the world through her eyes. I want to know her world so I can understand her, rather than viewing her as a code to be cracked. Perhaps that is the key difference between the way I tried to understand men and the way I know how to understand women.
I know that when I do fall in love with a woman, I want to do it right. I don’t want to jump into dating six weeks into being single, because I know I have so much to unlearn about love and relationships and myself. I don’t want to be a blank slate, a romance novel protagonist whose only purpose is to love and be loved. I want to be the fullest version of myself. I think about the kind of women I’m drawn to – weird and off-putting, sure, but also intelligent and competent and kind, women who are fully themselves, characters in their own right with all their curiosities and quirks. That potential exists in me as well, I’m just really bad at showing it. I am learning to be unapologetic. I am learning to say what I think, learning to trust in my voice and stand by all my convictions.
The thing about love of all kinds is that it takes time to grow. You can see someone across a crowded room and know deep down that they will become an important person in your life, but you cannot fall in love at first sight. Love can only come from knowing someone, from seeing them exactly as they are, seeing their best days and worst days and choosing them anyway. Love is a choice we make over and over, and it can only reveal itself with time. This is a key thing that romance novels get wrong.
When I think of my great loves, I think of my friendships. I read Kiss Her Once for Me, and my main takeaway about love is that my friend knows me very well to have chosen this book for me. There are so many little details where I know she must have read the book and thought of me, and that makes me feel loved.
Friendship, for me, feels like another Maude Latour song: Infinite Roses. I listen to it on repeat most days. It’s a song about grief, and the friends who show up for us on our worst days and heal us through their presence, bring us back to life. It might be my favourite song at the moment, because it reminds me that I am loved. I hear the line “when my heart would break, you would know what to do” and my mind is flooded with memories from my own life, all the times my friends have been there for me and loved me exactly as I needed to be loved.
Last night I was sorting through the mountain of clothes lying on the floor of my wardrobe, and I came across a dress I forgot I owned. I bought it in Estonia in 2019, and it was my favourite dress until I could no longer fit into it. It’s two sizes too small, but it was once three. I can just about fit into it now. I put the dress on and looked at myself in the mirror, and I was 21 again. I imagined talking to that version of myself, told her all my stories. I looked down at my phone, and both my WhatsApp notifications were from friends I met this year, and I thought about the passage of time and how beautiful it is that you never know when your heart will expand to make room for more people.
I look at my newer friendships, where I’m still figuring out how we fit together, and I’m so grateful for the time we have ahead. It’s a relief to know I’m going to be around the same people for the next few years of my life, because I can’t show up as my best self every single day right now. Being around people helps me be better, helps me feel whole again. My sadness seeps away as I listen to my friend talk about her interests for an hour. I listen to her voice and watch the way her face lights up as she talks, and the hollow feeling fades away. My frustration fades as I sit on a park bench and send a friend a 20-minute voice note, articulating my hopes and fears and all the big question marks that hover above my head. I realise that I start every single voice note to her with “it’s so nice to hear your voice”.
I am not a good blank slate; I could never be a self-insert character for a reader to project their fantasies onto. I am far too particular, too specifically Eliza. Sometimes people see these parts of me, the oddities that cannot be swept away for the sake of the narrative, and that’s how I know I’m loved. My friend tells me she has never met a British person like me because I am so affectionate, and I feel seen. Another friend says my most unhinged thoughts out loud, and I feel understood. Sometimes my needs are met by sitting in silence, listening to another person talk and absorbing all the warmth of their energy. Love comes in so many forms, and it’s not a cookie-cutter shape that we can copy and paste with each person. Love reveals itself slowly, romantic or otherwise. In real life, love and time go hand-in-hand. It’s not easy to capture in a 350-page novel, but the kind of love I look for doesn’t fit a romance novel template. I’ll save my fantasies for hopes of getting full PhD funding. That would be very Ali Hazelwood protagonist of me.