–simply. They would believe in happy end so much, a bad ending would break them. Do you know the statistics? Most of the mental patients who experience extreme nervous breakdown are not those gloomy, pessimistic, sulky people, and not even the sensitive ones. But the once-cheerful, once-sweet people who had had a happy childhood and a nice youth, and a lovely life, and at some point their life delivered them the kind of blow they had never expected to receive, had no resistence against, no kind of emotional vaccine. Those who fall from higher points, fall harder.

One thing I think should be clarified…most romance novels don’t portray romance as a heroine being “swept off her feet.” In reality, most romance novels show a couple working their butts off to make something work that doesn’t look like it possibly could. This may be even more clearly shown in some chick lit novels (which is what I write). There is very little feet-sweeping, bed of roses, never-say-a-cross-word-again to the love that most writers I know write about. Most of them write about seemingly impossible relationships and the very hard work the parties must do in order to make that impossible relationship work.

I’m living a HEA myself, married 19 years to my high school sweetheart. It’s not easy sometimes. Sometimes it’s the hardest thing I do, perhaps aside from raising children. But, I know in my heart it is HEA. I have to work to keep it that way, but it does work, and I want my kids to see that…in my relationship, in the relationships of other family members. But they see the real world, too. Can’t avoid it. It’s on television, it’s displayed by their friends, by other family members who don’t always have happy endings. “Reality” is in plenty.

I guess I was just shocked at the woman’s comment because it seemed as though she was saying that our kids shouldn’t hear about the happy endings because it might disillusion them. So, the alternative would be to show them all the bad stuff until they come to believe that that’s all there is.

Not going to happen in my house. I’d rather let my teen daughter read romance novels and see that love takes work, but if two people care enough to work at it, if SHE cares enough to work at it, there is a strong possibility that there will be a Happily Ever After in her future.

Thanks for all the great comments, ladies!! I’m so happy to have struck up a conversation with such passionate responses.

Shannon

It’s just much more complex than that. We all have too many influences in our lives to be able to really pinpoint one thing that colors our entire belief system. That’s my opinion, anyway.

Any personal experience will affect how someone views something, so I can see that a person who has been terribly hurt in a relationship would find it difficult to read romance, just as someone who lost a sister to a murderer would find it difficult to read thrillers about serial killers. There is no Universal Experience, and none of our circumstances invalidates anyone else’s.

Saying people shouldn’t read romances because they are unrealistic might just be a piece of that woman’s whole–that NO popular fiction is realistic and therefore shouldn’t be read. She may feel the same way about all entertainment and think the only media worth reading or viewing deals with bad things (I can’t think of another way to phrase it than “bad things”).

I think like breeds like, and the more optimistic and happy our outlook, the more optimistic and happy our reality. I know that’s simplistic but it has helped me weather my mother’s breast cancer and subsequent health problems, and again 15 years later when she died from it, and even my parents’ divorce when I was 7.

the HEA ending of all romance novels can subconsciously set up an unrealistic expectation about love/marriage for some readers.

I think this is backwards! Romances show how two people can work through their problems and be happy together, and hopefully will be strong enough to weather any future problems together. So at the end of a romance novel, the couple believes they will be together for the rest of their lives, whatever happens. What expectation is being set up that makes divorce more likely to someone who thinks this can really happen? And how can a marriage survive if the people in it have “realistic” expectations of divorce?

If the idea is that romances make marriage look easy, I really can’t see that. Like I said, they’re all about conflict.

I also think divorce statistics are skewed. If you have 100 marriages in a year and 50 divorces, you can’t say 50% of all marriages end in divorce because you’re not counting all the existing marriages at the beginning of that year. I really don’t know how they’re calculated, though, so I could be wrong.

When I was going through a very painful separation and divorce a few years ago, I could not read romance novels, because they seemed like lies to me…I felt that the preordained HEA ending was mocking me. I have read on other romance novel websites similiar posts…it was not until I was through the worst of the process that I could stand to pick up a romance novel once again, but with a different attitude than I once had…a jaded attitude. And that may be one of the reasons I only make about a 1/3 of my reading from the genre, my reading is primarily of historicals, and the romantic relationship/HEA ending is what I focus on the least.

If anything, as the society around us grows ever more toxic, and its toxicity is emphasized by the news and other media, I need to read more ‘happily ever after’ stories for balance. This doesn’t mean that I never read other books but that, again, I’m looking for balance.