What I learned this week:  For the month of February I am sharing a few of the things the I love.  This week, I am starting by sharing the importance of love stories.  I love reading a good happy love story.  I am not one that is into too much spice.  The books that I am going to recommend are clean and have a good ending and message.  “Love is good for you. It’s good for you to read about, and to pay attention to, and to savor—and to *do* . . . on all levels, and in all ways.”  This was a statement shared in an email sent out by Katherine Center, one of my new favorite authors who writes love stories.  I like this and believe it myself.  I don't like to watch or read things that are scary or depressing.  I definitely don't like to watch, read or listen to something that doesn't have a happy ending.  It just puts me in such a bad mood.  

It can sometimes feel embarassing to admit that I love to read romance novels.  Because I don't like reading the super spicey, steamy ones with the bare chested man on the front.  I do like a good story where a mand and a woman become friends and learn about each other and then begin to fall in love.  In this episode I share how Katherine Center made a plea for the importance of love stories in the author's note at the end of two of her books.  Hello Stranger and The Rom Commers.  

Here is what she wrote (or said if you were listening to the book)“Hopeful stories have cultural values. What I know is true and what the world keeps on insisting.  Romance novels are no worse than any other novels.  Maybe they're better. Maybe love is more valuable than we think.  Maybe stories that help us see our  best possibilities are exactly what this bedraggled world needs. Because love stories let us witness infinite ways that characters master prosocial behaviors."  [Prosocial definition:  behaviors are ones that benefit another person, group or society as a whole.] "Love stories can be built out of infinite plots and almost anything, ghosts, pirates, murder, movie stars, firefighters - but one inevitable truth about them no matter what - the behaviors that drive the story toward the happily ever after are pro social ones.  Our lovers might now be good at love when they start, but if they want that happy ending the [darn] well better figure it out.  And so over the course of the story they master the many arts of listening and connecting, nurturing and caretaking and trusting, and appreciating and savoring and sharing and empathising. They have to overcome their prejudices, learn to apologize, forgive each other and sacrifice.  When we read love stories we get to see kindness in action and human compassion and connection made visible. And people choosing to be the best versions of themselves in face of it all.  Love stories show us people getting better at love in real time.  The same cannot be said at say - serial killer stories.  It is not nothing to witness acts of goodness, in fact,  in create an expansive uplifted physical feeling in our bodies, that psychologist Jonathon Height calls moral elevation.  It impacts us and changes us.  This is documented.  Witnessing other people doing good makes us want to do better ourselves. And don’t forget we learn by watching.  Researcher Helen Fisher has studied love scientifically most noticeable doing brain scans of people in love as they look at photographs of the people their in love with.  And she concluded that romantic love is not an emotion it is a human drive, like hunger or thirst.  It is not something that Hallmark made up to sell Valentine’s cards, not a construct of the patriarchy, it is a deeply embedded essential component of the human experience. If we didn’t insist that romantic love was more ridiculous than zombies would we be better at it?"

"If you have been shamed away from reading love stories - hello friend, come over to the fun side.  The ridicule is wrong.  In this way the world has been so very wrong about so very many things."  

"Let’s immerse ourselves in hope and joy and goodness and read and read and read.”  

I love this - that we learn prosocial behaviors from these books.  People getting better at love.  And truly isn't that what we really need.

When my husband and I were first married we read a lot together.  I had been getting into romantic comedy books and we read a few together.  He noticed a pattern right away that well I just didn't.  He mentioned that there is always some conflict right near the end that the couple needs to work out.  I have never noticed that before but now everytime I read a love story I notice it.  I am thinking to myself,  what is it going to be and how are the characters going to get out of this?   Sometimes the romance genre gets belittled because it says they are predictable.  But I love how she points out that that predictability is good for us.  

I love how she puts it, (and this is from the author's note from her book, Hello Stranger) "Romance novels, rom coms, non tragic love stories - they all run on a blissful sense that we’re moving toward something better.  Percentage wise, the majority of clues writers drop in romance novels don’t give you things to dread.  They give you things to look forward to.”

“This, right here- more than anything else - is why people love them.  Then banger, the kissing, the tropes, even the spice … that’s all just extra.”

“It’s the structure - that “predictable” structure - that does it.  Anticipating that you’re heading toward a happy ending lets you relax and look forward to better things ahead.  And there’s a name for what you’re feeling when you do that.”

“Hope”

“Structurally, thematically, psychologically - love stories create hope and then use it as fuel.  Two people meet - and then over a course of three hundred pages, the move from alone to together.  From closed to open.  From judgy to understanding.  From cruel to compassionate.  From needy to fulfilled.  From ignored to seen.  From misunderstood to appreciated.  From lost to found.  Predictably.”

“That is not a mistake.  That’s a guarantee of the genre: things will get better. And you, the reader, get to be there for it.” 

So here are the books that I have loved over the last little while that I am sharing with you.  They are all great books, enjoyable characters and some even have some great twists.  

Katherine Center - The Bodyguard

Sophie Kinsella - Burnout - (Tiny bit of a spicy scene)

Courtney Walsh - The Happy Life of Isadora Bently 

Julie Wright - Glass Slippers, Ever after and me. 

Amber Gilchrist - Rules of Engagement