Everything I Know About Love I Learned From Romance Novels Read Online Free Page B

few months later he discovers she’s really quite lovely (read: hot), she’s terribly intelligent, and she’s wickedly and lastingly pissed off at him.
    Reading this book, with the mistaken identity and the characters being hoisted by their own petards more than once, was a revelation to my fiction-starved teenage mind. Here were stories, big, rich, detailed, lengthy stories, about passion and excitement and places I’d never been. I was tired of stories about high schools that were populated by people more beautiful, more blonde, more aquamarine-eyed, well-adjusted, and wealthy than I was, and in romances, I found adventure, challenge, and emotional depth I hadn’t experienced in fiction before. In short: Boo Yah!
    Just about every romance reader I’ve ever spoken to can recall the first romance she read, and certainly the romance that hooked her on the genre. As Harlequin sees it, the first romance is a moment of passage, and can be a marker of coming-of-age due to the emotional experience of finding this rich and very well-populated form of narrative written mostly by women, for women, about women.
    And it’s not just “older women” or “women of acertain age.” Romance readers are all ages, so you can chuck that stereotype of women in their graying years, wearing shabby sweatshirts with stained sweatpants, reading fat paperbacks, and surrounded by too many cats. Romance readers are young and old, and may have nothing in common except the books they read and the experience they gain from reading them.
    Just about every romance reader I’ve ever spoken to can recall the first romance she read.
    The Romance Writers of America collects statistics on romance readers every year, and according to their 2009 figures
    Women comprise just over 90 percent of the romance readership.
The majority of the readership in the United States is women ages thirty-one to forty-nine.
Most romance readers are currently in a romantic relationship. (So maybe that theory that romance readers are desperate, single, undersexed neurotics can go away too. Please.)
    Harlequin’s research has revealed what they consider the three main things that we romance readers receive from our fiction-reading. The first is rather obvious: escape and relaxation—but, as Finlay says, those are broad and generic terms. Most people read anything to escape or relax. Romance specifically creates a sense of hope and hopefulness that a romantic situation can and does exist. Perhaps you haven’t experienced it with your parent’s marriage or your friends’ marriages or your own relationships, but there is lasting romance. Romance reading affirms that idea and supports belief in the possibility.
    Second, romance readers find ways to temporarily leave their present situations—though not every reader escapes entirely into the fantasy world. Certainly not every reader believes she is being kissed by a secret prince who is also a billionaire and a well-hung sexually adventurous tiger in the bedroom besides. The value of romance-reading, as Harlequin has found with its reader focus groups, is not so much in what the romance novel offers as an escape destination, but what reading offers as a temporary rest from the present stress and demands of life.
    One woman in a focus group mentioned that her every waking moment was spent caring for her son, who was dying. The only time she had to forget that daily pain was when she was reading a romance, because then she could get away from that imminent unhappy ending.
    It’s not always a tragic situation that brings readers back to romance. Any amount of rest from a present stress could be desired. Another woman said that romances help her make that transition from workday to family evening: “I just need thirty minutes after work of reading Harlequin books and all the stress of the day is gone. All it takes is thirty minutes and then I’m ready to cook dinner.” Escape and fantasy play an important role in every