Every now and again, an imaginative newer author announces online that they’ve read too many romances with a happy-ever-after ending and they want to publish something different, something original, something memorable. They’re publishing something new: a romance that doesn’t have a happy ending.
It usually takes around three microseconds before two things happen:
- Someone points out that the happy ending is obligatory in romance. Without a happy ending, it’s a love story.
- Someone comments how many times this topic has been discussed before, always with the same outcome.
The person who made the original comment may double down on their comment. Perhaps they’ll say it’s time someone shook up the genre. Perhaps they’ll claim that books by a certain other author (often Nicolas Sparks) don’t always have a happy ending.
Never mind Nicolas Sparks, reply the romantic purists.
Nicholas Sparks may have sold more novels than there are stars in the sky (or maybe not. I don’t know how many novels he’s sold or how many stars there are in the sky), but Nicolas Sparks does not write romance novels. He writes contemporary fiction aimed at women, often with a romance element. But they’re not always romance novels.
Why not?
Because Romance Writers of America define a a romance novel as a novel where …
the love story is central to the plot, and the story has an emotionally satisfying ending.
Readers expect this happy-ever-after ending and won’t be happy with any other kind of ending … especially not a story that’s classified as a love story.
As any romance reader will tell you, “love story” is code for “someone dies”.
As readers, we often look down on these love stories as not being true romance.
I’m a long-time romance reader who has engaged in this debate myself, yet I have to acknowledge it’s only telling part of the story.
While the romance might be the start of the story, it truly is only the beginning.
As Christians, we fall in love and marry, vowing “until death us do part”.
Our lives are love stories, not romances.
So here’s a question:
Why are all the books romances?
Why aren’t there any love stories – books or series that show marriages, not just romances?
Some do exist.
Janette Oke got this right with her bestselling Love Comes Softly (the story of Clark and Marty, and their many children) and A Prairie Legacy series (the story of one of Clark and Marty’s grandchildren). The long running story of Clark and Marty’s romance and life lasted through their children and grandchildren, with Oke finally finishing the saga saying she couldn’t write any more because Clark and Marty were old, old enough that they should be dead, yet she couldn’t have them die on the page because readers wouldn’t want that.
I’m not the only reader to agree that was the right choice.
Despite being an avid romance reader (and one who would not think kind thoughts if a book classified as a romance didn’t have a happy ending), I would like to see more novels that focus on life beyond the romance – marriage, raising a family, juggling a career, getting old together.