romanswers, romance delivered

SUBMIT A QUESTION Do you need "a guide to lead you safely through this dangerous, unfamiliar" territory? An "enigmatic loner...wild as the land itself?" (A Heart So Wild, Johanna Lindsey) Tell me your problems, and I'll tell you what romance says. All advice is born from specific novels, and includes suggested reading as a balm for your wounds.

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UPDATE! If you’ve been following me here, check out the new home of romanswers at RT Book Reviews. Instructions for how to submit are at the bottom of my first column. Write me with your worries & woes; I promise to deliver heart-breakingly earnest advice (and suggested reading!)...

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10 - Que Será Será?

Que será será? I met someone who seems to be so right for me, and who makes me so happy. The catch is, he’s half way around the world. But if his current career plans pan out, he’ll probably move here next year. My question is, how can I explore what might be there without going crazy? I am trying to keep it cool, live my life and be present in my life here, think to myself "que será será" - but its a struggle because I don’t want to stifle the spark that started - or more accurately, I can’t forget it - and neither can he.

Dear Qué,

What better medium for the question you ask, than a letter? I'm certain your mind is fully preoccupied with messages right at this moment, missives that were written far away and sent with the impatience of new love. I can hear your yearning in the words you use. In return, I have a question for you about your feelings for this man who is so removed from your world.

What did you speak of, when you were together? Did you discuss intangible interests, dreams, and desires? Or did you talk about practical, immediate things in the realm of taste, smell, touch?

Ours is an exchange that happens once: you have posed me a problem, and I have answered. And I waited ages to answer you, perhaps for my own reasons, perhaps to make a point. Now I ask you another question: do my words carry more weight for their distance from yours? Do you re-imagine what you wrote to match what I have written, making my sentiments and advice seem more meaningful to you? Written communication is a tricky thing, simultaneously showing us our correspondent and ourselves. I must say, I believe this is the reason for the maxim: absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Words are imprecise. They affect us so greatly because they hold multiple modes of meaning: they can perform an action, they can carry meaning assigned by the writer/speaker, they can carry meaning taken by the reader/listener.

Let me introduce a trickster named Beatrix, the main character in Love in the Afternoon, who came to a similar realization. She spends months writing letters to a man she barely remembers, Christopher, a soldier engaged to her friend. It is when her friend becomes bored by letter-writing, when Beatrix can't bear to let someone at war feel alone, that she takes on her friend's name and continues the correspondence. When he finally returns from the front, he spends a long while unable to reconcile the people with whom he reunites with the words he remembers reading. This, of course, has a double-meaning; he is unable to reconcile the very world with which he reunites with the world he remembered while he was away at war. When he finally discovers that Beatrix was the author of the letters he had read, he tells her:

'It nearly drove me mad, looking for the things I loved in her and not finding them. And then beginning to see them in you.'

Christopher's sentiment is true for Beatrix as well; it is only in the physical presence of other people, when she can hear their words and see their bodies and possessions at once, that she truly knows them.

'You are an eagle, aren't you?...You have such striking features, and you exude power even while sitting still. And you like to watch people.'

She speaks those words to Christopher's grandfather. None of these observations relies on language that could be written on a page.

There is another note in this book whose meaning is only discoverable via an absence. Christopher's eldest brother has passed away, and he leaves a letter to his younger brother. Beatrix holds onto it, not sure if she should deliver it, keeping its very existence a secret until a moment of crisis. But rather than reading it himself, Christopher asks her to read it to him. She mediates his brother's words, and the content of the letter becomes a construction consisting of the three of them. Even so, he doesn't acknowledge his late brother's words beyond their signification of his own feelings.

'How I miss him,' he whispered. 'He knew me well.' 'He knew you as you were,' Beatrix said. 'But I think you've changed.'

Even if it isn't letters you are exchanging, even if you are speaking to each other or looking each other in the eye as you speak across oceans and screens, you can only see one facet of each other. You can hear a voice, you can see his eyes, his chair, his room, his shoulders. But you can't see him in the everyday and the unexpected; you can only use your own experiences and sensory awareness of the world to fill in these gaps. It is likely that you are knowing yourself better and better as your conversations continue, but you may not be knowing him. However, I see no problem with embarking on a project of self-discovery – these are periods in everyone's life that feel wonderful. The only advice I have is to differentiate between desires: the desire to learn about your own self, the desire to show that self to him, and the desire to learn about him. Because that last desire, the longing to know him or to know what you could build together, is likely not something you can have until you are in the same spacetime, able to touch each other, able to sense each other in the same world, together.

Love,

Romanswer

Suggested reading: Love in the Afternoon (Lisa Kleypas)

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Jacques Lacan reminds us, that in sex, each individual is to a large extent on their own, if I can put it that way. Naturally, the other’s body has to be mediated, but at the end of the day, the pleasure will be always your pleasure. Sex separates, doesn’t unite. The fact you are naked and pressing against the other is an image, an imaginary representation. What is real is that pleasure takes you a long way away, very far from the other. What is real is narcis­sistic, what binds is imaginary. So there is no such thing as a sexual relationship, concludes Lacan. His proposition shocked people since at the time everybody was talking about nothing else but “sexual relationships”. If there is no sexual relationship in sexuality, love is what fills the absence of a sexual relationship.
 Lacan doesn’t say that love is a disguise for sexual relationships; he says that sexual relationships don’t exist, that love is what comes to replace that non-relationship. That’s much more interesting. This idea leads him to say that in love the other tries to approach “the being of the other”. In love the individual goes beyond himself, beyond the narcissistic. In sex, you are really in a relationship with yourself via the mediation of the other. The other helps you to discover the reality of pleasure. In love, on the contrary the mediation of the other is enough in itself. Such is the nature of the amorous encounter: you go to take on the other, to make him or her exist with you, as he or she is. It is a much more profound conception of love than the entirely banal view that love is no more than an imaginary canvas painted over the reality of sex.

Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love

CAN WE TALK ABOUT THE LATEST BOOK BY courtneymilan.

[dearcoquette]

Breaking Bad has left me feeling a bit over-saturated by men’s crises, so I want to take a month where I exclusively think about things made by women. You’ve got taste, could you recommend me some good books, lectures, films, music?

Off the top of my head, try reading...

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Guest Post: Romance, Sex, and Being Shameless: The Challenge of Writing Romantic Fiction

Romance At Random: a blog site for the romance community, readers, authors, publishers, booksellers about Historical, Contemporary, Paranormal, Young Adult, Reviews, Industry news, Commentary from a reader’s point of view.

Do you write novels that include sex? What kind of reactions do you get when people learn about your ‘salacious’ activities? Gasps? Leers? Cheers? Two professors take a look at common cultural reactions in the U.S.

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9 - Discerning Damsel

Dear Romanswer,

I fear that formative years spent reading historical romances have resulted in impossibly high standards when it comes to potential love interests.  Any romance-novel wisdom to help me become a bit more realistic?  There are only so many tortured, brooding noblemen waiting to be redeemed by love, after all.

Love,

Discerning Damsel

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Dearest, darling Discerning Damsel,

I’ve been mulling your question over for weeks, because, of course, it is a quandary that plagues me, too. The notion of standards is a difficult one: any time we use an ideal by which to measure reality, we create room for disappointment. Then again, we do need some way to remind ourselves of what is important, especially during the times when that judgment can be clouded: times of abuse, anxiety or depression, the times when we can't see the world for the shadow of ourselves, when we compromise our own desires for short term elation. The danger in that at which you have hinted, in creating a rubric for potential partners, comes when that rubric isn't moored to reality.  I recently read a blog post on paranormal romance novels, about what happens when we throw our standards out the window in favor of fate - equivalent to placing control outside the realm of our own agency. The author points out that when characters in these books accept the sovereignty of "destiny," they are unable to argue for their own needs and desires. Instead, they are stuck in a sexual relationship to which they can never consent. The same thing can happen when we import our understanding of the qualities that make  "good partners" or "healthy relationships" from an external source without critically examining whether those qualities are, in fact what we want. The trap is our own, rather than "fate's," but the result is the same. We accept a situation we might not want, just because we believe in arbitrary guidelines about what we should want. I don't mean to imply that it is wrong to give up control, only that you have to decide that giving it up is what is right for you. I think it's important to look at a book that is eminently relatable, so I have chosen a contemporary by one of my favorite authors in the genre: Match Me If You Can, by Susan Elizabeth Philips. MMIYC's heroine is Annabelle Granger, who has inherited her grandmother's match making operation. Her engagement has fallen through after her ex-fiance decides he is a woman trapped in a man's body, and her business is failing: she has one shot to make it a success. So, she convinces a friend to help her secure a contract with the high-profile hero. Heath Champion is a pro football agent (I should note this book is in the middle of SEP's football series) who has a rigorous list of criteria for what he imagines to be his perfect future wife to be.

Over the course of the book, he falls in love with Annabelle. This is notable, because for most of the novel, he is not even measuring her against his list of criteria. Heath makes his list based on an ideal he has believed in for his entire life, and when he finally looks inside himself to see what he actually needs, he finds an entirely different person described. In the beginning of the book, he uses his list to maintain a sense of control over his love life, but by the end he realizes that when he attempts to name love using only references outside of himself, he loses touch with his true desires. Only when he begins to weigh in his own patterns, interests, and yearnings is he able to make the choice to be with the heroine. As a secondary character explains to Heath:

"I think this is the way love feels to people like you and me...we have to be in control, and love takes that away. People like us...we can't tolerate vulnerability."

Revise your standards to reflect what you want, not what you have learned to want; after all, princes are not usually the ones who make us feel like princesses, and vice versa. If you want a prince, act the brute and go claim him; if you want to be a prince, go find your brute! You need someone who complements you, whom you can place within your life - not someone whose good qualities exist only in the realm of someone else's desires (read: romance novel authors/the general public).

Love,

Romanswer

Suggested Reading: Match Me If You Can (Susan Elizabeth Phillips)

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8 - Torn

Dear Romanswer, 

I feel constantly torn between attraction for two very distinct phenotypes. The Brainy ones are (gently put), on the misogynistic, underbuilt, but fascinating end of the spectrum. The Brawny ones are (in a word), vapid. I also don’t see in my future some kind of ideal combination of the two extremes. 

Should I just commit to one type? If so - which one?

With gratitude, 

-------------------

Sweetest Torn,

I'll describe more about the suggested reading later, but I wanted to start with a quote that seemed especially salient:

No science is a match for love.

When I first read your message, I have to admit I was confused. Who are these brainy people who are all constrained by their misogyny and scrawniness? Who are these brawny people equally constrained by categorical idiocy? Surely there are scrawny dolts and brawny sexists, and any number of combinations between. 

But then I re-read it, and I heard a different question echoing through your letter. "Who am I," you ask, "when I am in a relationship?" You want control over the answer to that question, and you have tried to harness it by limiting an unknown and unknowable variable: your potential lover. But in classifying the rest of humanity into two groups, you have purposefully forgotten that no one person entirely fits into either set. The nature of your approach sidesteps the one quantity you can describe: yourself.

You want me to answer your explicit question so that you don't have to measure your own desires and actions against past consequences. You want absolution from the trial of choice. But I can't give you that. Instead, I'll endeavor to help you begin pursuit of your implicit line of inquiry.

As I see it, you have three projects ahead: 1) Knowing and being comfortable with yourself, and how you interact with the world.  2) Allowing others to know you. 3) Looking outside yourself to truly know others. 

Luckily, I just finished reading a fabulous historical romance that simultaneously addresses pragmatic matchmaking, the scientific method, self-knowledge, intuition, and love. Julie Anne Long's Like No Other Lover is about an entomologist, Miles Redmond, who returns to Sussex from the field and finds his older brother has disappeared, leaving him as heir to the family fortune. The first scene is set in London, at a ball just after he's back - he has reverse culture shock, and has a visceral flashback:

But Lacao seemed to be relinquishing him only gradually, the way a dream dissolves into wakefulness. And suddenly, as Lord Albermarle stood at his elbow and pressed him for stories of warm-blooded women of easy virtue, it happened: the heat of the ballroom crush became tropical; the fluttering of silk fans in the hands of women became fronds and butterflies; the rustle of silk and muslin and coats became jungle foliage. His two worlds kaleidoscoped into one.

Which was why he reflexively turned when a flash of iridescence caught his eye. His first thought was: Morpho rhetenor Helena.  The extraordinary tropical butterfly with wings of shifting colors: blues, lavenders, greens. 

It proved to be a woman's skirt.

Of course, the woman's skirt turns out to belong to the heroine. The rest of the novel is set at a house party his parents have left him to supervise, and his incorrigible younger sister has brought her scandalous friend (the heroine) home to join them. Cynthia Brightly is as calculating about finding a husband as Miles is about collecting new species of insects. She is smart, beautiful, without family, and poor; she needs a wealthy husband to ward off destitution. 

Like you, Miles has an idea of the type of person he imagines will be best suited to his personality, lifestyle, and goals. In fact, a woman who matches his every parameter is also attending his family's house party, and he spends much of the book wooing her. Across many pages, LNOL pulls apart each character and analyzes what about each one appeals (or does not appeal) to the other. Miles and Cynthia are at first both surprised by their wild attraction, which is ballasted by mutual curiosity, patience, and attentiveness. Julie Anne Long puts a lot of emphasis on the hero and heroine wanting to understand each other.

When Cynthia thinks Miles is going to marry someone else, she doesn't get jealous. Instead, she worries about how lonely he will be:

She thought of Miles married to someone who would never truly know him. Who was incapable of seeing him. She felt the howling loneliness of his future in the pit of her stomach, and her palms felt damp.

And when Miles decides to go after Cynthia in the end, he expresses his wish to be with her as the direct result of her sense of agency:

Despite what he thought he knew about how she felt and what she wanted, he wanted to be chosen.

Relationships are tricky entities. I've written here before about how they are more and different than the sum of their parts. In other words, when you start a relationship, you create something new from yourself, your lover, and both of your desires - desire for each other, but also desire for what you want your relationship to be. Parts of you are softened or made sharper by reflecting parts of your lover, and there is no way to predict what will work. By trying to do so, you limit your understanding of yourself, and you limit your faith in your partner. You have to observe yourself, and figure out what you bring to your connection with others. You have to trust your intuition and emotions, and know what you need. Over time, you can make relationships that are healthy and that are what you want.

I would argue that it's your interaction with the other person, the relationship, that you are classifying as "brainy" or "brawny," not just the individuals involved. The answer then, is to grab hold of what you have the power to shape and influence. Study yourself and your response to your lovers, so you can assess why you find yourself stuck with seemingly only two options. I think you'll find more.

Love,

Romanswer

Suggested reading: Like No Other Lover (Julie Anne Long)

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No One is Sovereign in Love: A Conversation Between Lauren Berlant and Michael Hardt

Heather Davis: What is it about love that makes it a compelling or politically interesting concept?

Michael Hardt: One healthy thing love does, which is probably not...

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9 - PAWS

         Dear Romanswers,

My beloved and I are having a furniture problem. His cat, who is a little terror, shreds through couches in less than a day. Although we have discussed how having a beautiful home is important to me, and how wasteful I feel it is to sacrifice perfectly good armchairs for scratching, my boyfriend is still reluctant to let me clip the cat’s claws. He fears that I might accidentally nick the cat, no matter how careful I am. How do I convince him that the psychic pain of an unloved home is worse than the theoretical pain of a much loved cat?

Love, PAWS (Preventing Animals from Widespread Scratching)

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Darling PAWS,

"I love you" does not always equal "I understand you" or "What you love, I love." Love is not aesthetic taste, nor is it transferrable. You cannot act as a prism, taking in a beam of love and letting it pass through you to illuminate what you wish. It is not qualitatively constant across mediums: love for your sweetheart does not feel the same as love for a favorite dress, for example. 

You and your boyfriend do not have to express your love for each other with each action you make, and you would be wrong if you thought that everything you do should be taken for an act of love. You are living together; you likely have already uttered those three words. But saying, "I love you," releases a torrent of misunderstandings. Before you said it out loud, you must have found a thousand small ways to say it without words. Once you said it, you likely expected your actions to continue to speak for you, especially if they are actions that make you happy. "I cook dinner, I love you;" "I dress for work, I love you;" "I wash this dish, I love you;" "I buy this beautiful sofa, I love you." But speaking can sometimes steal actions of their implicit meaning.

It may seem unlikely, since you've already taken that big step of moving in together, but both you and your lover are struggling to find a way to express how much you care for one another. Romance novels adore pointing out telltale signs of becoming smitten, before the hero/heroine realizes it. The favored way of accomplishing this is exposing one of two vulnerabilities: domesticity and jealousy. You bought a couch for the apartment you share with your beloved. You have exposed yourself as domestic. 

My favorite romance novel that takes the domesticity approach is A Tale of Two Lovers, by Maya Rodale. The plot is complex: The heroine, Juliana, is a gossip columnist whose livelihood is threatened by the scandalous attentions of Lord Roxbury. A string of absurd circumstances ensues, including a midnight visit by a drunken Roxbury that results in her shooting him in the arm. I find the best part of the book to be the description of his home, each room of which has been redecorated hideously by myriad enraged ex-mistresses. Juliana begins to renovate...showing her domestic intent:

"Oh really? You're not falling for him?" Sophie queried. "How many rooms of his house have you tastefully redecorated?"

"Seven," [Juliana] mumbled.

As Roxbury watches her transform his home, he becomes convinced that she loves him. However, not all romances show the intent and effect of redecorating in such a straightforward manner. In Twice Tempted By A Rogue, Tessa Dare gives us Rhys St. Maur, Lord Ashworth. Rhys is a war hero who returns home to fall in love with Meredith Maddox, a widow who owns a small inn near his ancestral seat. For most of the book, Meredith refuses his attentions, because she wants to keep the inn she has worked so hard to make her own (and redecorate). Rhys demands she marry him, over and over again, and he insists that she give up the inn, since he doesn't want her to "have to work."

The salient point here is that Rhys is wildly jealous of the inn's place in Meredith's life.  He brings her to Bath to woo her, and she spends the entire time (...other than the many sexual interludes) scrutinizing the decor in the hotel where they stay. She covers for a smuggler who hides his stores on Rhys's property, because the inn uses the illegal goods. Rhys spends the whole novel trying to occupy the space in her heart that seems to be overflowing with her inn.

Rhys eventually builds a home (by hand, out of stone, wood, hay bales, and plaster) to take the place of the inn. He pays attention to the details he knows she will hold dear. Although he is not a sculptor, he whittles flowers onto the ends of curtain rods. She agrees to sell the inn, and they move to their new home.

You have exposed yourself as domestic; the trickier part to understand is that your sweetheart has exposed himself as jealous, just like Rhys. He is jealous of the furniture, and of the place it holds in your life. He wanted to welcome it with open arms, so he listened to you when you said home aesthetics are important to you. But, he couldn't maintain enthusiasm for something that seemed to be competition. Read your question again: can you see that the cat is his heart, the furniture yours? Talk to him about sharing both, and frame your love of domesticity as love for the life you are building together, instead of as a part of you that is incompatible with him. Assuage his fear of home decor.

You will have to find a way to tell him that the furniture is vital to you, but it is also your gift to him, and you need him to cherish it. You will probably have to find a way to believe that the same is true of his cat. But if you love each other, you can learn to love the way your lives take on a mutual shape and color through compromise and understanding.

Love,

Romanswer

Suggested reading: Twice Tempted by a Rogue (Tessa Dare); A Tale of Two Lovers (Maya Rodale)

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8 - She's-at-home

Dear Romanswer,

I recently moved inland, far from home, to start a new venture in a new career, leaving my beloved on the coast. I feel kind of like a nantucket housewife whose husband has gone off on a whaling voyage, only the opposite. or something. I guess what I’m trying to ask is: is there any romance novel advice on… you know… to extend the whaling metaphor, a “she’s-at-home”? 

Love,

She's-at-home

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Dear She's-at-home,

Before I answer your question, I just have to say that it took me FOREVER to figure out what you meant by "she's-at-home." Folks, a "he's-at-home" is a porcelain dildo that whalers' wives (supposedly) used while their husbands/lovers were away at sea. I googled so many combinations of "she's-at-home," "she's-away," etc.

Sweet boy! (I think you are a boy; you did ask about a "she's-at-home," after all.) The thing is: romance novels do not address this topic. In fact, in many ways they are about the exact opposite of your question. Not only are they about female arousal, but they are often about controlling desire, not openly expressing it. We take the hero's desire for granted, and finding any kind of vulnerability in his need would be akin to finding a chink in the heroine's armor. These books revolve around the idea that the hero has desire only for the heroine, and the heroine is the only quaff with which to quench it. Looking for male masturbation in romance novels is a difficult task.

This is not to say that romance novels give no thought to male characters; usually, they are written with alternating points-of-view. The male POV functions to objectify the female character and give us a peek into desiring ourselves. We read about dusky nipples straining against chemises, tiny waists, generous bosoms, and soft palmfuls of ass. The hero's voice is also about restraint. Heros are constantly trying to stop themselves from savagely pinning the heroine against a wall and "kissing" her senseless.

We see very little about male sexuality and vulnerability in romance, to say nothing of masturbation. When we do get the hero's POV during sex, it is entirely focused on the female experience. It follows that the advice I can give you revolves only around what your lover might want to imagine.

In one of Kresley Cole's latest books, Shadow's Claim, the heroine (sorceress-demon-Princess Bettina), is the prize at the center of a tournament to the death. The hero (vampire-prince Trehan) has forsaken his kingdom to compete to win her. They cannot make love, because Bettina's life would be in danger if Trehan were to lose the competition and Bettina were not a virgin. While this plot-line is archaic, it sets up a situation wherein Trehan and Bettina must restrain themselves, thus allowing for hundreds of pages of foreplay, oral sex, and straining pants. After one particularly intense make-out session, Trehan is undone. He envisions Bettina, and uses mementos of her to bring himself to orgasm:

"Her scent lingered on the furs, tantalizing him. Last night, her hair had fanned out over his bed as he'd rocked his shaft against her sex.

When only the hot, soaked silk of her panties had barred him entrance to her core...

Too much!

He groaned, his shaft straining against the confines of his pants. Once he unfastened them and his length sprang free, he grunted in relief.

He took one of Bettina's gloves and wrapped the cool silk around his aching length, pretending it was her palm gripping him."

The most important thing to glean from the scene quoted above is that Trehan can only experience sexual pleasure - even sexual pleasure that he gives himself - through Bettina. For you, She's-at-home, this is paramount. You can use whatever toys you wish, but try to keep your release connected to your lover; try to associate your pleasure with his/her presence. Imagine your partner to be your path to orgasm, even when you are alone.

There is also something magical and exciting about envisioning a version of your partner that is specific to your own sexual experience. You can give free reign to fantasy. Let your desires loose, then tell your lover about the dream you crafted - it might spark your sex life to fire in new directions. Maybe you should read a few romance novels, to get started!

Love,

Romanswer

Suggested Reading: Shadow's Claim (Kresley Cole)

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6 - Sex in Small Circles

Dear Romanswer,

I’m in a new city in a grad program with 15 people. I don’t know anyone else in LA, so is it OK if I have sex with a couple of fellow grad students?

Love,

Small Circles

——————————-

Darling, Dear Small Circles,

It’s been a long time since you wrote me - I’m sorry for the delay, but I’ve been lost down the rabbit hole of post-apocalyptic romance.

What I’ve learned, sweetheart, is that I cannot answer your question. You asked me if you could sleep with the other members or your small graduate program, and I tried to think of the best way to answer you. It’s true that all romance novels rely on circumstantial isolation (on a ship, on a country estate, in a closed social circle, etc.). But all of these situations, to some degree, are voluntary. The desperation in most of these books can be eased by marriage/sex/etc. In many, the only solution is marriage/sex/etc. It’s the driver of the plot. With all this in mind, I chose something post-apocalyptic, wherein people are few and far between, everyone suffers from a bit of culture shock, and most important (!) desperation is not voluntary, and there are bigger concerns looming than just who is going to be a good lay.

In Maddy Barone’s Sleeping with the Wolf, which I have to admit may not be the best written example of the post-apocalyptic sub-genre, our heroine (Carla) is a rising country music star on tour when her plane crashes. She survives, but she lands in the future(!). In the year 2064, Armageddon has struck, leaving humanity in the neo-dark ages, with none of the technology Carla took for granted before. Also, plagues have wiped out almost all of the women. Naturally, this scenario results in Carla being kidnapped, then given away in a “bride fight.” The bride fight is exactly what you think: dudes battle to the death for ownership of brides. The hero who wins her is a werewolf named Taye. Within a time period of about one week, Carla falls in love with Taye and makes peace with her fated post-apocalyptic, technology-less life.

You, loveliest one, are in a situation similar to Carla’s, which is to say, you and your cohort are all suffering from some version of Stockholm syndrome. Desperation? Isolation? Extreme demands? All there. But a key difference is that Carla has no obvious exit; she can never return to her home time. In contrast, you will emerge from graduate school in a few years. The tone of your relationships right now will inform whether your traumatic bonds continue outside the constraint of your program.

Will you want to keep the friends you make during graduate school? After you graduate, will you need things from your classmates - do you want them to stay loyal to you? If so, tread carefully. Sex is great, but everyone differs in expectations around its meaning. Be clear and honest, and weigh your future desires against your current lust.

I say: be careful! Take advantage of your closeness and forge intimacy! But while you do so, be sure to keep in mind what you will want later, in a freer time. Unlike small communities of post-apocalyptic sexpots, you have the lure of impending release.

Love,

Romanswer

Suggested reading: Sleeping with the Wolf (Maddy Barone)

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7 - Pining

Dear Romanswer,

I've been pining for someone for several years, and I can't get over it.  HOW DO I GET OVER IT OR CONVINCE HIM TO DATE ME?

Love,

Pining

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Sweetest Pining,

Your question is one wrought with years of pain. Frustrated desire has settled down across your heart, shielding you from the possibility of new love. I want to wrest the constraining belt of your obsession from that sweet flesh, and let it free to beat and swell for whomever you choose.

You say you've been pining for "years," and that's important, because to pine is inherently a temporal act. One pines over time, but one also pines for a moment in time that has passed. You may crave a person, but you also crave familiarity of possibility, place, and situation. You may even yearn for the familiarity of yourself as you once were, or as you once dreamed you might come to be. 

Dearest Pining, part of you resides in the unfulfilled desire you feel for your love. It's a part of your consciousness that you may not recognize, a reflection of yourself. When our yearnings are unrequited, when we imagine where they might lead, we weave a fiction within which we can place ourselves. You envisioned a story, with a version of you at its center, and you wrapped it in the warmth of your desire, you stoked it with the idea of your lover.

But you have to unwind that hope from your heart; you have to separate the constructed fiction - the object of your affection - from the idea of yourself. Is the vision of your potential love a portrait true to life? Or is it yet another image of yourself? Sometimes, we project ourselves, or what we hope ourselves to be, onto those around us. We become attached to what we have built up others to be - but that construction is actually an extension of ourselves.

To my mind, you have two options. You could become all the things you most admire about the person you covet. Or, if you feel you are constricting yourself to become someone your desired lover might want, you could do everything you can to grow in the opposite direction. In either case, you will become your own aspiration. 

As for books, I am grateful for your question, because it gives me the opportunity to highlight one of my favorite Regency-era novelists, currently in her prime: Julia Quinn. In Romancing Mister Bridgerton, Quinn follows the story of the heroine, Penelope Featherington (yes, really), who has been hopelessly in love with the hero, Colin Bridgerton, for years. Penelope is a wallflower who, at the age of 28, has become what the ton considers to be an old maid. In Colin, she sees a daring, handsome, gregarious person who always says the right thing and is widely adored. She is best friends with his younger sister, and she has loved him since her childhood. 

During the time she has yearned for Colin, Penelope has also developed a secret life as an anonymous gossip columnist. Over the course of the book, we see the wit, prestige, and dearness attributed to her alter ego - and also to Colin - transfer from the page to herself. She takes on the qualities that she most admires in Colin, and while the two wind up in love at the end of the book, we get the sense that she thoroughly understands and loves herself, as well.

However, they first have to get past quite a few nasty arguments, which are sharpened by the sense that Colin had betrayed both her idea of him and her idea of herself:

"She'd built up the perfect image of him in her mind, and with every word he spat in her face, it was becoming more and more obvious that her dream was quite simply wrong." 

It's only after they are able to talk about her long-standing obsession that they both can admit love for each other. This is important, because it is when she externalizes her feelings of love - they are no longer directed toward a being she imagined, but toward a real person who can return her sentiment.

"I was so worried because you weren't the perfect man of my dreams.

No one is perfect," he said quietly.

I know. You're the perfect man of my heart, and that's even better. I'd always thought you infallible, that your life was charmed, that you had no worries or fears or unfulfilled dreams. But that wasn't really fair of me."

So, Pining, you have a lot of work to do! You've got to dissect yourself, and dissect your love for this certain someone - then you've got to put it all back together again, within yourself. Once you've done that, see where you're at. You might find you no longer care for the object of your desire; or, you might find love.

Love,

Romanswer

Suggested reading: Romancing Mister Bridgerton (Julia Quinn)

[romanswers-blog]

5 - Love UFOol

Dear Romanswer,

I am really really attracted to an alien.  I know its probably wrong to engage in interspecies intercourse but I just can’t help myself, you know what I mean?  I haven’t done it yet but I just know I will if given the opportunity.  Is interspecies love wrong?

Love,

UFOol

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Oh Human! Loveliest UFOol!

First I have to thank you for reviving my interest in the first romance novels I ever read: TODAY, WE ARE GOING PARANORMAL.

But before we venture from our earthly plane into the vampiric, I have to tell you that if you're serious about loving another species, you have to be prepared to lose everything - and maybe gain everything - without understanding what the hell is going on. I'll explain.

There is a reason that paranormal romances are the ones that push us the farthest outside of our comfort zones.  All romance novels are about escape. Regency-era historical romances are about safety, escaping within the confines of a complex set of rules. Other historicals (American Westerns, Viking, Medieval) are about escaping responsibility by allowing oneself to be dominated by a strong male lead. Paranormals are instead about escaping oneself with trust so strong it could be called instinct. In the beginning, that trust is placed in something other; in the end, that trust is placed in the new self. They are about survival that leads to death and rebirth; they are desperate. They are about the ultimate escape - you could call it death, you could call it transformation. 

Tread carefully; remember that once you make your choice you likely will not be able to - or want to - alter your path. The human characters in paranormal romances are usually friendless orphans, and for good reason. Much of what they know about themselves is lost when they decide to leave their mortal, ordinary existence for an immortal, magical one. You don't know where your interspecies love will lead, so spend some time with yourself before you jump into a new realm. 

Many humans in paranormal romance are faced with death or unending sorrow before choosing to leave their known world behind; joining the undead, the alien, or the inhuman becomes their only option for survival or happiness. If this is true for you, I suggest you embrace your future, but know you won't be able to return to your past. One way or another, you will be transformed.

A case in point is J.R. Ward's second book in the Black Dagger Brotherhood series, Lover Eternal. Rhage is a cursed vampire warrior fighting to save his species. His curse makes him a shapeshifter who takes the form of a dragon when provoked with too much violence or sexual energy.  This is a brilliant move on the part of J.R. Ward. She gives us the classic complex sensuality of vampire sex and the classic simplistic brutality of shapeshifter sex. 

To give his inner monster an outlet and to achieve some amount of control over it, Rhage has tons of sex. He's afraid of letting his beast hurt his lovers, so he focuses on their pleasure rather than his own (this is, of course, because if his "release" is too intense, the dragon comes out). This practice results in some really amazing technique; don't get me started on the fangs and the cherry stems. Omigod.

Anyway! When Rhage meets his mate/bride/bonded female, Mary Luce, she is about to lose her second battle against leukemia. She has already lost her family, and she has already died twice. Obviously, Mary does not have much more to lose, and her position makes her fearless. She falls for Rhage and his dragon, and they both fall for her. But early in the book, Mary has to choose to change her life for Rhage. She leaves her job, her friends, and her home behind to live nocturnally with him in a mystically protected, ornate palace. She trades in her life for his, and she embraces her new world. But she trusts herself, and she trusts Rhage. And there was nothing left for her in her world, anyway. Just like an alien, Rhage is of a different species, and his world is irrevocably separate from Mary's.

Only you know what your alien is, and if it is worth turning away from everything you know or care about. It probably isn't. After all, you're risking transformation - both of yourself and of your potential partner.

But if you pass your own test, if you burn for it, if you are overcome with desire for only it, if you see a clear path toward what you want, then my advice for you is to make the jump into the space-time continuum and take that alien by the horns/wings/fangs/claws/fur/tentacle!

One more thing to remember: you are also alien to your love - don't forget that your creature will be nervous, too, and try to be honest with your ET and yourself.

Suggested reading: Lover Eternal (J.R. Ward)

Love,

Romanswer

[romanswers-blog]

4 - Phoenix

Dear Romanswer,

I love my job, but I've started to feel burned out and apathetic. How do I rekindle the romance?

Sincerely,

Wannabe Phoenix

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Loveliest Phoenix,

My first advice to you is to drink more. Next, make a list of pros and cons about your job. I think you will end up with a longer list of pros; negativity is an inhibition, and drinking does away with those.

My next advice to you is to fall in love. Once you fall in love, you will also fall in love with your work, because love will make you feel like every part of yourself (even your boring job) is endlessly alluring. Fall in love with everyone who smiles at you. You will feel powerful. Are you already in love? Re-start the slow kindle of romance; bring home flowers, buy a satin rope to tie your beloved's hands, light some candles, try being a top; try being a bottom. If you need, don't fall in love with a person - you can fall in love with a hobby, or even better, a tangent of your career.

Become fascinated with grammar, with web design, with color theory, with fashion, with the history of the cocktail, with statistics, with whatever you'd like. Coddle that little love-flame. Feed it with time and enthusiasm. Soon, you'll be in love with yourself again. The trick is to find a way to recognize the narcissism inherent to romance.

For this endeavor, I recommend carrying a copy of A Groom of One's Own, by Maya Rodale. 

As the heroine proclaims, when she boldly decides to convince the hero of her love, "I have defied all expectations...I will not accept that excuse from a man, least of all a duke. If anyone can do whatever he pleases, it is you. But I shall not argue or debate this with you. If you can't see this...then I cannot make you." See? She feels powerful; she is in love with herself! 

The heroine was once jilted at the altar, and to support herself after her failed attempt at marriage, she has become a gossip columnist who reports on the weddings of the ton. She loves writing, and she loves her coworkers. Going to weddings, however, consistently brings on panic attacks. She, like you, has fallen out of love with her job. Then, she meets the hero, who happens to be the groom in the most celebrated aristocratic wedding of the decade. They fall in love, and he appears to be unable to free himself of his own boring, honor-bound job - running a dukedom, and marrying a pretty aristocrat. To help them both, she plans a detailed bait-and-switch at the altar, convincing the hero's betrothed to elope with someone else.

"All he had to do now was follow his heart...but then she conceded that it wasn't such an easy thing when one had been ruled by his head for so long - and a very hard head, at that." 

In the end, the hero and heroine are married, and the heroine abandons her wedding column. She follows her heart, and begins to report on fashionable gossip, instead - a subject which always made up a small part of her wedding reports.

This is what you must do, Phoenix. You must look to your heart and draw strength from your love for yourself, even if you're starting with love for only a small part of your life.  You must trick yourself every day until your heart blurs your mind, and you are convinced you see the romance of it all again. Good luck!

Suggested reading: A Groom of One's Own (Maya Rodale)

Love,

Romanswer

[romanswers-blog]

3 - The Sex Shop

Dear Romanswer,

When attempting to visit a sex shop with your romantic engagement of the day,what line of questioning could lead to deciding to visit the shop, as a funny experience or as preparation for later?

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Darling Sex Shop,

Going to the sex shop is a lot like elopement in historical romance novels. If you were a character in a historical romance, what would you do if you really, really wanted to have sex? If you wanted to convince someone that you were serious? If you wanted to convince someone that you weren't serious? If you wanted to convince someone that you trust him/her? If all the sex in your life had become really boring, and you wanted to spice it up?

I'll tell you: you'd go to Gretna Green - a small town on the southern Scottish border that historical romance novels have latched onto as the number one elopement spot for Regency-era British nobility. There were some complicated laws that meant marrying in Scotland was much quicker and easier.  

My advice is to start the conversation by saying or insisting on what you want. There is nothing more attractive than self-assurance, and there is nothing so heady as feeling a little naughty. In all likelihood, you'll find out some interesting things about what your date wants, too. 

Sex shops are fabulous: they can revive our sex lives, immediately reveal our most intimate inclinations, and bring levity into otherwise awkward early dates. They also put our physical desires front and center. If a visit to a sex shop is successful, you'll come away with physical evidence (a toy you both choose) of comfort, compromise, vulnerability, and trust - in other words, the first step on the path to great sex. 

One of the main conceits of the romance genre is that sex with the hero/heroine is something new, different, and mind-blowing. In these fantasies, monogamy becomes a titillating new aspect to making love; the idea of monogamy is a sexy construct that allows for vulnerability and makes fucking feel exciting again. In historical romance novels, the most exciting way to achieve monogamy is to elope. The place to elope is Gretna Green, where a blacksmith will forge you a wedding ring. 

I'm certainly not advocating monogamy, Sex Shop. In fact, after first reading your question, I wanted to take the easy way out. I could have recommended a contemporary-set best seller, like Fifty Shades of Grey, or even a historical with a particularly daring escapade. I could have said, here are all the lascivious, exciting ways to use those toys. I could have said, use the popularity and ubiquity of Fifty Shades of Grey to steer the conversation into the waters you seek.

I think that the best advice the romance genre has to offer on the subject of these toy stores comes from themes surrounding elopement. After all, in these narratives, marriage implies steady, steamy, novel, page-turning sex. In this spirit, for you I recommend The Devil in Winter, by Lisa Kleypas.

Sebastian, Lord St. Vincent, is an impoverished heir to a dukedom. Evangline Jenner is the rich heiress to a wildly successful gambling club/whorehouse. Basically, Evie Jenner shows up on Sebastian's doorstep and propositions him. They run off to Gretna Green as fast as they can and then have insanely awesome and life-altering sex. This is the story you'll always find in a romance novel featuring an elopement: one of the characters is under duress and absolutely insists on marriage. 

Of course, Kleypas writes endless complications and hurdles into this story. In the end, however, it is the wedding ring - forged in Gretna Green - that becomes a symbol for the hero's struggle against allowing himself to be vulnerable, and for the heroine's decision to let him into her heart. You can find your own lusty ring in a sex shop, so go ahead and propose.

Suggested reading: The Devil In Winter (Lisa Kleypas)

Love,

Romanswer

[romanswers-blog]

2 - Infidelity

Dear Romanswer,

Infidelity: relationship breaker or merely a jostle?

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Sweet Infidelity,

You leave so much unsaid. Are you in love with more than one person? Are you in love with someone who is in love with more than one person? Are you in love with one person, but unable to let go of something - or someone - else? Do you believe infidelity is of the body, of the mind, of the heart (of all three)? 

Infidelity is not always a relationship breaker. It is always at least a mere jostle. I say this because infidelity is so often rooted to the hilt in something other than the "other woman." I cannot tell you where or why duplicity starts, but its source is the answer to your question.  People are unfaithful for myriad reasons: family, money, restlessness, anxiety, escape, self-pity, self-hatred, revenge, disrespect, indifference, nostalgia, separation, selfishness, love. Find your reason and find your answer. But do not stay, or attempt to heal, for the sake of anyone's happiness but your own. 

Here is the thing about romance novels: the genre defines itself as always having happy endings. If someone is unfaithful, it is always forgivable, and there is always a clear reason. Some common themes: bait-and-switch, when one person disguises him/herself as another to sneak into the other person's bed...or when one person does not recognize the other as his/her significant other but still tries to seduce him/her; or the character is not the right person for his/her partner; or the hero (it's almost never the heroine) was notoriously unfaithful in the past (i.e. he was a "rake"), but his promiscuity ends when he discovers the heroine's magic hoo-hoo and realizes no other woman could ever satisfy him; or the hero and heroine enter a marriage of convenience, and (almost always before it's consummated) one or the other has an affair before they fall in love with each other; or someone is trying to make someone else jealous; or the book is a paranormal romance, and sex with everyone, all the time, is somehow necessary to save the world.

You might find more examples of infidelity in contemporary romance novels (browse through Harlequin's Blaze series), but in my opinion these plots are hit or miss (see Reckless Pleasures by Tori Carrington).

Because you say infidelity rather than polyamory, I will assume you mean cheating; that is, kissing and not telling. However, if you want to improve your mood about sharing partners, I recommend some good paranormal romance. Especially with vampires or werewolves. Vampires are for jealousy, violence, and role-playing. Werewolves are for intense, transformational sex with multiple members of the pack. My old standby is a series of books by Laurell K. Hamilton that came out in the 00s. The first is called Guilty Pleasures.

Like I told Romanceless, Eloisa James deals beautifully with problems that arise within existing relationships; her This Duchess of Mine begins with the hero cheating on the heroine, and the entire first half is not romantic at all, instead it is settled and bleak. For classic stories of reformed rakes, see Johanna Lindsey's Love Only Once, Gentle Rogue, and Tender Rebel. In all of these, the hero sleeps around, meets the heroine, decries marriage, gets married (often by force), falls in love, and impregnates the heroine for an all-around happy ending. I also love Lisa Kleypas' A Wallflower Christmas, where a special side plot follows Lord and Lady Westcliff as Lady W becomes convinced that Lord W is developing feelings for a beautiful widow.

Suggested reading: Guilty Pleasures (Laurell K. Hamilton), or any Anita Blake book; Reckless Pleasures (Tori Carrington), for contemporary woes; This Duchess of Mine (Eloisa James), for healing a wound of infidelity; Love Only Once/Gentle Rogue/Tender Rebel (Johanna Lindsey), for reformed rakes; A Wallflower Christmas (Lisa Kleypas), with special emphasis on Lord & Lady Westcliff.

Love,

Romanswer

[romanswers-blog]

1 - Romanceless

Dear Romanswer, I have just (finally) gotten out of a really really long term relationship.  It was the major romantic relationship of my life—we lost our virginities to each other, had a long distance relationship, lived together, moved across the country together, went through an abortion, got a dog, broke up and got back together many times, etc.  I have had intermittent relationships with other people, but feel as though I have experienced love in all its nuances and stages already.  Rather than pursuing another relationship, I might just be done with the relationship thing altogether.  Is this possible?  Can someone just be done with romance? Love, Romanceless

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Darling Romanceless,

You can be done with the relationship thing altogether. It is possible. But, you sound young and tired and wary. Your troubles are all inside, made huge and beloved by the boundary of your and your ex-lover’s bodies and minds. I call your sadness beloved, because it seems well worn from the years it has been your lodestone.

Try to keep the easiness of your sorrow from drowning you in its eiderdown.

I hardly need to say it: you must know that you have only experienced love in its limited iterations, as it could exist within the framework of who you and your ex-lover were during the time you were together, and the time you were in love. Of course you know yourself better; you have lived with yourself longer. But, you don’t know love better.

For a moment, I am going to dip into my paltry knowledge of astrology. A relationship’s chart is distinct from the chart of its components. When you join with another person, you experience something unique, and you cannot relive the same combination of emotions and aspects again with another person. Love is not a static feeling, and it is not an object. It is not knowable by observation or by habit.

Waiting, patience, and aging are not the same as acquiescence, abstention, and ending. Temperance is never the answer in matters of the heart.

Love is clever. It disguises itself as one thing and emerges as another. Romance novels center on the impossibility we all face when we find new love – we cannot recognize it for what it is. Some characters are externally disguised with unlikely clothes and professions, but most are disguised to themselves, disguised with the belief that they know themselves and that they can predict their reaction to the rest of the world. Annoyance, attraction, friendliness, hatred, indifference; any of these can transform into love.

But, I won’t try to delve too deeply into what I can guess are your thoughts. You wrote me because you want comfort.

In A Duke of Her Own by Eloisa James, the heroine has been thrown over by the man she’s loved since childhood. He marries another woman. His wife dies, and he comes back to the heroine, determined to reignite his old passion with his new grief. The heroine has been holding him in her heart for years, and she has to walk away. In fact, she walks away from her ex-lover and from the hero of the book before she can recalibrate to herself and illuminate her love for the hero. Here is a sample:

“She felt as empty as a vase without flowers or water. She had no emotion, not anger, grief, or even longing.”

The characters in A Duke of Her Own struggle with their own definitions of love. The hero has had many children out of wedlock, and he believes passionate love is separate from maternal love, which is the love he is convinced he and his family need. Eventually, he finds that for him, these emotions are the same, but that he also loves the heroine only for herself. He proclaims:

“The kind of love I feel has nothing to do with the children I have, or the children we might have together.”

Other books, especially books by James, pick up the theme of former lovers overshadowing a hero or heroine’s ability to find and recognize love in the present. In Pleasure for Pleasure, the hero is mired in feelings he remembers having for a woman who did not love him back. In the same book, the hero’s sister is a widow who resists the legitimacy of love between herself and a younger suitor. Finally, in A Wild Pursuit, the hero disguises himself as a gardener and infiltrates the heroine’s estate. They began their affair before the death of the heroine’s husband, and she first has to fall in love with her dead husband, release him, and grieve for him, before she can see the love she has felt all along for the hero.

Suggested reading: A Duke of Her Own (Eloisa James); Pleasure for Pleasure (Eloisa James), with special emphasis on Griselda & Darlington - who are not the main characters - and on the Earl of Mayne, who is indeed the hero; A Wild Pursuit (Eloisa James), with special emphasis on the relationship between Esme and Sebastian.

Love,

Romanswer