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YouTube video by Julia Serano

Mood: Intellectually combative but wishing I could have a masculine man hold my face. I was listening to a literary podcast the other day—a mistake, usually, as they tend to discuss books that don't have an audiobook version written by people who wouldn't look at me on the street—and the host let out a long, beleaguered sigh. "I just can’t do Romance," he said, his voice dripping with that specific, curdled disdain reserved for things women and queer people enjoy. "It’s so… prescriptive. You know exactly what’s going to happen. Where is the tension? Where is the realism? It’s just a fairy tale for people who can’t handle the complexity of the real world." I paused the track. I felt the familiar heat of annoyance rise up the back of my neck, a prickling sensation like a wool sweater in July. This criticism—that Romance is "unrealistic" or "formulaic" because it guarantees a Happily Ever After (HEA)—is the laziest intellectual take in the modern canon. It is also, fundamentally, a defense of the status quo. Of course Romance isn't "realism." Have you looked at reality lately? Realism is a landlord keeping your deposit because he knows you can’t afford a lawyer. Realism is working a sixty-hour week and still having to choose between the good insulin and the rent. Realism is a world where kindness is often treated as a weakness to be exploited, and where the "bad guy"—the billionaire, the abuser, the system—usually wins, gets a tax break, and dies peacefully in his sleep while still hoarding money even after death. "Realism" is just a polite word for the unmitigated chaos of capitalism. I don't need a paperback for realism. I can get that by answering my door or picking up my phone or inviting a stranger into my space, wherein they take what they want from my body and then just leave. When critics mock the Happily Ever After, they are mocking the concept of justice. They are suggesting that ambiguity is the only mark of intelligence, and that suffering is the only valid currency of art. They want the landing gear to fail because they think a crash is more "complex" than a safe landing. I reject that. For me, and for millions of other marginalized readers, the Romance novel is not a flight from reality. It is a simulation of a just world. It is a restorative justice hearing where the verdict is finally, for once, in our favor. Think about the economics of a Romance novel. In the real world, "Care"—the act of listening, holding, supporting, remembering, and loving—is an inefficiency. It is labor that goes unpaid and unnoticed. If you spend an hour comforting a coworker, the market calls that "time theft." If you spend years supporting a partner who refuses to communicate and never hugs you or tells you, "you look nice today,", society calls that "standing by your man." But in a Romance novel? Care is the gold standard. In these books, emotional labor is the primary driver of the plot. The narrative arc is obsessed with it. The characters are forced to communicate. They are forced to apologize. They are forced to demonstrate, through action, that they are worthy of the space they take up in someone else’s life. And the HEA? The HEA is the paycheck. It is the moment the universe balances the ledger. It says: _You put in the work. You were vulnerable. You were brave. You survived the trauma. And therefore, you are owed joy._ This is why the genre feels so radical to me. It is the only place in literature where the "System" (the plot) actively punishes greed and selfishness, and actively rewards vulnerability and interdependence. When I read a Happily Ever After, I am not escaping. I am calibrating my proprioception. You know that feeling when you miss a step in the dark? That lurch in your stomach, the sudden vertigo when the floor isn't where your body expected it to be? That is what living as a disabled, queer, poor person feels like most days. The world is constantly pulling the rug out. You are always braced. Your muscles are always tense, waiting for the fall. The HEA is the feeling of your foot finding solid ground. It is a physical sensation of balance being restored. It is the click of a lock tumbling into place. It is a resolved chord at the end of a chaotic symphony. It allows my body to exhale. It allows me to experience, for three hundred pages, a reality where the "other shoe" never drops. Or, if it does drop, it turns out to be a glass slipper that fits perfectly. This isn't just comforting; it's training. If we constantly consume media that tells us suffering is inevitable and justice is a myth, we will start to believe it. We will accept the scraps we are thrown. But if we immerse ourselves in stories where joy is non-negotiable—where the queer kid gets the guy, where the disabled woman gets to be the hero, where the billionaire grovels and redistributes his wealth (okay, that last one is fantasy, but let me have it)—we start to develop a taste for it. We start to ask: _Why shouldn't I have this?_ Why shouldn't my labor be valued? Why shouldn't my boundaries be respected? Why shouldn't I be held with reverence? Romance teaches us that we are not broken things waiting to be discarded. It teaches us that we are protagonists. It frames accommodation not as a burden, but as an act of devotion. It frames consent not as a legal contract, but as a love language. So, to the podcast host who thinks the HEA is "prescriptive": You’re damn right it is. A prescription is medicine. I read Romance because I am sick of a world that does not know how to communicate and then ignores the answer. I need the medicine of a narrative that insists people are triumphs and details how we are allowed agency. I need the restorative justice of a book that looks at scars and says, _"These do not disqualify you from love. They are the map of how you survived to reach it."_ The Happily Ever After isn't a fairy tale. It’s a blueprint. And I’m going to keep studying it until we figure out how to build it out here, on the gritty, uneven pavement of the real world. If you enjoyed this rant, you might enjoy Beach Read by Emily Henry

this was all for you ♡

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