Dear Reader,
Hope you’re well. Has it been hot where you are? Are you staying safe?
Me, I’ve been on something of an unreasonably grumpy kick. For … well, a few years now, but with a particular resurgence in the last couple weeks. There are many things to be reasonably grumpy about, but then there’s just being a surly bastard, and I regret to say that sometimes that’s me. Partly that’s why I’ve been quiet lately – I have to round up all my grumpy thoughts and try to sort them into some kind of better order, like herding cats. Partly, being grumpy has given me sort of a readers’ block, where I keep starting new books and not getting into them, or picking at things that aren’t really a fault, which is unfair to the book.
Usually, I find romance novels to be a good outlet for channeling an overabundance of feelings that I otherwise don’t have any place to put. I suspect that’s true for a lot of readers, and for a lot of different types of stories. Stories are good carrier vehicles for all kinds of mental and emotional load.
Of course there are some common romance novel tropes and themes that don’t resonate with me. I think it’s because I don’t have the right brain chemistry to sip angst like a fine wine or to revel in embarrassing cringe. On the other hand, I can usually get behind the sudden but inevitable betrayal, or impossible relationships.
And I am down for all manner of longing and pining. I can do longing for days. I’ve got an entire psychological wine cellar full of longing, wardrobes and cabinets, rows and stacks and bulging laundry baskets just overflowing with lush, gorgeous longing.
Some of that backlog of longing probably comes from being separated from my spouse. We’ve been separated for … a while. It would make a really good story, but it’s not one I’m telling, and anyway we haven’t figured out yet how it ends. And yeah, I do think there’s some relief in channeling some of my real feelings into fictional pining, but I think that only works because I’m already built around nurturing those feelings. It turns out my stupid heart was pretty well fashioned to stand on a rocky shoreline in a wind-tossed shawl, watching my love disappear out to sea. So dumb.
I’ve always liked stories of characters fighting the long fight for each other. One of my all-time favorite fairy tales is The Wild Swans, which is really about enduring love between siblings, with a love story tacked onto the end for dramatic effect. In the story, the princess’s brothers have been turned into swans by their wicked stepmother, and the princess commits to breaking the spell by gathering nettles which she must beat into fibers to make into cloth and then into shirts for all of them. And she must carry this out under a vow of silence; if she speaks a word before the task is done, her brothers will die. I grew up on an old farm in the country where nettles grow in abundance, so it made perfect sense to me that one would have access to that quantity of nettles, and I know exactly what the shredded fibers of their stalks look like when stomped underfoot, and I absolutely know just how much nettle stings hurt like a motherfucker. I also loved swans when I was little, and I couldn’t tell you whether that love of swans or the story came first.
Thinking about what I like about “The Wild Swans,” it has characters who believe in good and persist in being good, and dedication through pain in commitment to love. And that sounds very romantic. But also, the story has a clear fascination with pain. The nettles are kind of a giveaway, right? Except the thing about that is, fascination with pain is all over the place in stories. One way or another, even if it’s not quite so blatant, that’s actually what most stories are about. And I think that’s partly a matter of chemistry.
Really, you can think about plot in terms of the cascade of hormones and neurotransmitters released in response to stress. Everyone is familiar with “fight or flight,” but that’s a little oversimplified. Depending on the source, these days you might see that expanded to fight, flight, freeze, flop, fawn, fuck, or some subset thereof. This is also a pretty good summary of the types of plot beat that show up in stories, both modern and ancient. The whole theater and aesthetic of ecstatic suffering in religious traditions is all about this.
We all experience pain. In how we each feel what we feel, and what we do with those feelings, individuals vary wildly. We want our pain to have meaning, or we want to find meaning that takes us out of pain, or for some, maybe pain is the relief that takes one out of oneself. One way or another we are each subject to the workings of our own unique cocktail of adrenaline and cortisol, norepinephrine and epinephrine, serotonin and dopamine.
Dopamine is all about wanting. It’s not about fulfillment. When you get the thing you were craving, the magic sparkle of dopamine recedes, and you’re left with the plain actual effects of whatever you just got. Which might be satisfaction and satiety (jackpot!) or might be a damp fizzle that quickly turns to a new craving. For me, ice cream is a really good illustration of this. I’ve learned that it doesn’t matter how much I think I want the extra scoop or the larger size, because within the first three bites, that craving will settle down into being entirely content with a small portion, and eating more than that will make me feel gross and jittery. I may want the idea of two scoops, but my body can only handle the reality of one.
I think this is part of the reason fantasies are not necessarily a reliable guidepost for what we actually want; rather fantasies are a place to put all our wanting. Whereas to know the experience you actually want to live, you sort of have to take a stab at living it. And then maybe some of the things you think you might want won't turn out to be quite what you thought, and maybe some things will fit like a glove. But you don't have to solve the whole thing at once. You can try something and decide you don’t like it. You can try it again and decide that you do. We’re meant to change and grow.
Cortisol and adrenaline are exciting in the immediate term, but they’re meant for small doses. The last few years have been chaotic and stressful for the world, and conversations about burnout are happening all over the place. Chronic stress is a drag on the system. But we can get a charge out of an acute stress response. Acute stress and recovery creates positive adaptation in the body. Work out, then rest and refuel. Watch an intense movie with a friend or partner, then talk about it and process your response. Ride a roller coaster, then go eat mini donuts while walking the midway. Have a fight, then make up.
Positive adaptation to stress presumes recovery. An injury beyond that gets into trauma territory. Healing from trauma is harder, especially if a person doesn’t realize or acknowledge that what they experienced was trauma. It’s like trying to walk off a broken leg.
Romance plots are often heavily character-driven, and coping with or healing past trauma is a common theme. Though that’s not to suggest it’s a unifying theme, as the ways that this shows up and how it’s handled are as varied as human experience itself.
I also threw out a mention before of pain that takes one out of oneself. That could mean the vicarious experience of a story, being taken out of oneself through the thrilling or gut-wrenching twists of a plot to a final breathtaking resolution of love and justice. But we could also talk about that at the level of the body, and the need to scratch a particular sort of itch.
Kink has gotten a little more mainstream, for better and for worse. For better, because I’m all about sex positivity and people feeling open to explore their desires. But we still live in a culture with a lot of sex negativity, which sometimes gets translated in really unhealthy ways in experimenting with kink, or portrayals of kink in stories. Which is a shame, because the bedrock foundation of good kink is clear and honest communication, consent and boundaries, safety, and aftercare, and the vanilla world could learn a thing or two from that.
There’s sort of a potential catch-22 in portraying healthy kinky relationships in romance novels. It’s generally a distinguishing feature of a romance that the plot includes working through conflict in the relationship between the main characters, so in order for the story to be interesting, the characters have to have some looming issues about unresolved feelings or miscommunications between them. But stormy unresolved feelings and failure to communicate openly and honestly are dangerous things to bring into a kinky scene. You need those feelings to build an interesting story; you need to check those feelings, or navigate them very carefully, to avoid creating a bad scene.
For Real by Alexis Hall does this very beautifully. This is a romance between an older submissive man, Laurie, and a young dominant man, Toby, and among Hall’s fans is sort of notoriously the one with the lemon meringue pie (which, to be fair, is a pretty remarkable scene with fairly intense predicament bondage). It’s a story that plays around with the challenges of being young and trying to figure out who you are under the weight of the weird bullshit of the world, or being not-so-young and trying to continue to find meaning in a world that is so full of bullshit. There’s a bit where Toby complains about the insipid stupidity of asking, after reading the poem The Jaguar, “What does Ted Hughes think about zoos?” – I think about that a lot. There’s also a knifepoint scene in the book where Toby convinces Laurie to take him to a sex party, and they almost do something really ill-advised, and then they don’t. And look, I know that’s the most vague description possible, but it’s not really about the specific thing that happens (or doesn’t) in that moment. It’s the way that the story has placed all these threads leading up to that moment, and then suddenly presses down hard so that the entire universe narrows to this pinpoint of suspense, being braced for a bad impact and already wincing, and then instead, it turns sweet, and the pure relief is like a physical sensation of its own.
Alexis Hall is on my mind because he has another book coming out in just over a week, Husband Material, which I’m very excited to get my hands on. (I read a preview of the first few chapters back in February and wrote about it here.) It follows up Boyfriend Material, which is an entirely different sort of emotional roller coaster from For Real, one with no kink and a lot of whimsy, and also the baggage we get saddled with, and what it means to fuck up badly and try again anyway, and how we show up for the people we care about.
I’m on vacation with family this week, going to a place with the express purpose of relaxing. Honestly, I’ve kind of forgotten how this works, but I’m sure my family will remind me.
Love,
Beas
