I admit, I do have a guilty pleasure. I love to read romance novels. Sometimes I read the category romance like Harlequin and other times I want the longer stories by authors like Jude Devereaux or Catherine Coulter. I get swept up into the stories and have a really hard time putting the books down. (You can ask my family about that one..they’ll tell you it’s so true.)
Sometimes, though, I wonder: Does it ever happen in real life like it does in the romance novels? Just the love part, I mean. Do people see each other for the first time and feel an overwhelming attraction such as they’ve never felt for anyone else in their life, and never will again? That’s pretty much the norm in those books.
Now, I was attracted to Toph at first sight, but we had months of chatting online to foster an attachment before we met in real life. Was it love? Well, again, we had all of those months of chatting to build feelings for each other. Who’s to say?
The books and my own life experiences always make me wonder about love. Why do some couples stay together for 50+ years and appear quite happy about it and others don’t make it to 5 years before they are unhappy? One presumes that each couple starts out thinking they are in love (possible exception for the marriages that are made for other reasons and have nothing to do with love…I’m not naive enough to think these don’t happen). So what happens to change these feelings or perceptions?
Perhaps I enjoy my romance novels because I want to believe in love and happily ever after endings. Perhaps I enjoy them because I’ve seen couples who lived in love and have had those happily ever after lives. They’ve been translated into real life with all the problems of a real life, but with the benefit of a lifetime of love. Then again, I can’t argue with the words of Queen’s song that “One year of love is better than a lifetime alone.”
